Grand Unification Theory (Part 2)

All right, so, last time, I took care of subspace, and the rainbow of other fancy-shmancy spaces.

Hmm, what now?

Oh, I know, let's break down transporters, and transwarp.
That might be handy to have on hand...

All right, as soon as I heard the term "transwarp", in "Search For Spock", for the first time, I immediately imagined it as somehow a mix of transporting, and warp.
To my way of thinking, it's simply what the name conjures up.

Well, after all these years, I think I've got enough clues together to point to that it probably is.

Okay, first, for fun, let's see if we can't make a transporter-drive ship out of junk laying around in Trek episodes and movies....

We will need....

1. A part that can make a transporter beam itself.
2. A frikking huge transporter.
3. Something that makes transporting go faster than warp to make this feat worth it.


Well, for #1, we need look no further than "Star Trek: Nemesis".

Shitty flick overall, but, it introduces Data's emergency  rescue transporter.
A little badge sized thing that pops out of his arm, can stick to another person like a comm-badge, and beams Picard away from danger whilst the transporters aboard Enterprise-E are down, so, it's clearly self-contained, and beams itself.

Of course..."how in the hell could something beam itself?", you may ask.

I mean, once it starts taking itself apart, then it no longer exists for it to put itself back together.
Hell, it would probably break, or blow up, half way through even completing the self disintegration.

Well...I actually came up with a techno-bullshit way, but that's for another entry.
Suffice it so say...it involves subspace. ;)

Let's just go with that it simply works.

So, now that we have something that beams itself, now we need step #2...turning this thing into a frikkin' huge thing that can beam a whole ship along with itself.

Well, first, we have to ask ourselves "can transporters interlink to each other, and to other devices, and can/does this interlinking impart the proprieties of the linked thing to the transporter?".

Well, we see pad-to-pad beaming in "The Menagerie", and "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", and this could only be accomplished with an interlinking of transporter units, so...yep, they can interlink.

In TNG's "Rascals", Crusher links a desk-sized replicator into the transporter to help restore the adult DNA patterns of Picard, Keiko, Ro, and Guinan.

And, in Voyager's "Jetrel", they hook a doohickey to the transporter designed to make the patterns of dead victims of some kind of super-duper-atom-bomb re-emerge and re-integrate.
This thing can do this by itself on a small scale, but hooking to the transporter gives it a boost.
And this thing is alien equipment.
Gotta figure Starfleet tech all running off the same OS will network even better.

So, then you gotta ask "will networking a transporter to another transporter boost its own properties?".

I think so.
Just look at "ST: The Voyage Home", when Scotty beams up the whales, and several tons of water.

If you think he squeezed all that through one transporter pad, you're smoking something.
All the pads of a single transporter have to be able to network, and work as one big transporter.
So, that's a transporter boosting itself.

Also, in TNG's "power play", O'Brien beams down through a storm by getting a boost off all 8 pads, then, setting up pattern enhancers on the surface, and beaming back up.
So, it's not even vague, it's official onscreen canon.

So, if pads of a transporter can network, and transporters can network, then...why can't multiple transporters network to get a size boost as well as a distance boost? Or, instead of?

I mean, it would take cutting the object up amongst the transporters...but it's already getting cut up into jillions of atoms in the first place.

And, getting cut up amongst the pads of the Klingon cargo transporter didn't leave the two humpback whales, George and Gracie, worse for wear.

Also, and this is the clincher, in TNG's "Masks", the replicators network together, and start transforming the whole friggin' ship.
Well, replicators are like mini-transporters, and they networked into a big transporter just fine.

So...yeah, gotta go with networking transporters makes a bigger transporter.

And, Data's emergency transporter hooks into the innards of his arm, and then his brain can hook into the ship's computer, so, the ship can access his transporter, so, by transitive property, the rescue transporter can just hook into the ship, and thus, the other transporters.

And, like Jetrel's doohikie, and Crusher's replicator, it should be able to property-transfer-transmit it's self-beaming trick through the big transporters.

And then, the transporters, cargo transporters, shuttlebay transporters, shuttle transporters, and replicators, all networked together, boosted by the backup computer core, and channeled through the deflector, should be able to beam the fuggin' ship.

So, there, we've got the big fuggin' transporter.

Now, we just need #3, speed/range to make it worth it.

And, all we need there, is Scotty's transwarp beaming equation from JJ Abrams Trek.

And, bammo, not just transporter drive, but transwarp transporter drive.
It can be done.

But...HAS it been done?

I gotta go with...YEAH.

In Voyager's "hope and fear", and "timeless", they both discover, and utilize "quantum slipstream drive".
Now, the exact workings of this monstrosity are left rather vague, but inside "slipstream space", is also referred to as "a matter stream".
Well, a matter stream is exactly what's in a transporter beam.

So, either they're somehow creating a transporter effect around the ship, and riding it like a log flume, or, the ship is transporting itself.
I...see it as a difference without distinction.
It's transporter drive.

And, Seven Of Nine in "hope and fear", points out that Quantum Slipstream is very similar in principle to Borg transwarp technology.

So, transwarp conduit, is a slipstream, is a transporter beam.

And, while the Borg do have a pre-established network of conduits, Borg transwarp coils can create a conduit too.
In Voyager's "dark frontier", they swipe a Borg transwarp coil, and shave 20,000 light years off their trip.
So, it can be a self-contained drive.

And, in Voyager's "threshold", Tom Paris broke the transwarp threshold, and re-emerged from, yep, you guessed it, subspace.

Yeah, there's references in these episodes to "slipstream space", and "transwarp space", but...as the last entry showed, that's all a bunch of bullshit.

Not just for the reasons I pointed out there, but...also, allegedly (according to TNG's "schisms"), there are an infinite number of subspace realms.

Well...infinite wouldn't seem to leave much room in the universe for all these other bullshit-spaces, would it?

So, I'm going with that all these other bullshit sub-subspaces are actually sort of like frequency bands along the continuum, like AM, FM, UHF, VHF, "sat-band", and "bluetooth", to us.

And, where transwarp once denoted a drive system, and now has come full circle to a type of beaming, I gotta go with that transwarp itself is simply subspace travel on a higher "band".

Anyway, that's it, transwarp is beam-drive, is slipstream, is transwarp conduit, is transwarp drive.

And "threshold", seems to make it clear that it's what Excelsior had in prototype form in "Search For Spock".

And, if it was indeed a big transporter, one could indeed gum it up by sabotaging the computer, as Scotty does, since a big computer is what you'd want for essentially e-mailing your ship through space.

Anyhoo, that's enough for now.
I'll break this down further in the next entry "a wormhole is a wormhole".