Re: Star Trek Weapon

On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Brian Burger wrote:

> On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Thomas Anderson wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Nyrath the nearly wise wrote:
> > 
> > >	In Larry Niven's "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation"
> > >	he points out that a transporter teleportation device
> > >	which does not need a transmitter/receptor pair
> > >	will destroy the civilizations that make them.
> > 
> > this is incorrect.
> 
> Big Rockets are fairly conspicious, to the right systems. These days,
you
> probably can't launch anything ICBM-like and not get a lot of
attention.
> Cruise missles are different, but also detectable.

this is true in 1999. it wasn't so true in 1950.

> With a transporter, you can just slip a small nuke through, then be
> sympathetic about your enemy's "terrible lab accident". "What, you say
> there wasn't a nuke lab at that location? You're obviously lying, sir,
as
> the whole world knows about the mushroom cloud."

you assume it's not possible to detect the use of a transporter. this is
sort of the equivalent of missiles in 1950 (or in 3226ish - A Canticle
for
Leibowitz, anyone?); who's to say that a few years down the line,
transporters aren't detectable?

> No sattelites detecting launch signatures. No cruise missles to crash
and
> leave embarrasing hard evidence. No radar tracks of 'something'
inbound.
> No surviving witnesses saying they saw a Tomahawk stream go overhead.
> Nada. Just your enemy with a glowing hole in the ground, a state of
> paranoia, and that Big Red Button.

or a tachyon refraction pattern recorded in particle observatories the
world over. this all depends on the details of the technology.

> Sounds like Niven has a point. This has been mentioned by various
people
> w/ regards to Star Trek, as well: Why don't they just transport a few
> grams of anti-matter into their ship? Who needs photon torpedoes,
phasers,
> and similar? (scriptwriters...)

in ST, transporters don't go through screens. i believe that SFB had
transporter bombs at one stage; i assume they can only be used against
targets which no longer have shields.

On Mon, 15 Feb 1999 DracSpy@aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 99-02-15 13:54:49 EST, you write:
> 
> << this is incorrect. in niven's example, teleporters are used as
nuclear
>  warhead delivery systems. big rockets can also be used in this role,
in a
>  way that is essentially the same as teleporters. our civilisation
has, i 
>  understand, invented big rockets; why, then, has our civilisation not
been
>  destroyed?
>  
>  Tom >>
>
> 'Cus missiles take time, in the US launched an Alpha strike on Russia
it would
> have time to fire back, with a teleporter it does not give the oponet
time to
> fire back.

depends. if i scatter my teleport-bomb launchers all over the country
and
the ocean - and they don't have to be big - and wire them up to
computers,
i can get a strike in after yours, because you won't have killed all my
transporters. plus, if i get flashy-light effects during beam-in, like
in
star trek, that's plenty of time for the automatic defence system to hit
the smite button.

furthermore, in the absence of sophisticated detection and control
systems, four minutes warning is not enough time to get a counterstrike
out. this time falls even further with Fractional Orbital Bombardment
Systems. now, we do currently have such automatic control systems, but
we
didn't always: i believe this applies to teleporters as much as it does
to
missiles.

anyway, i stick to my central argument that the capacity to do something
does not necessarily lead to it being done. the us could currently nuke
russia and get away with it, given the state of the russian strategic
rocket forces. that they don't is because they have more to gain by not
doing it. in most cases, if a nation blows up under teleporter fire, it
will be pretty clear who did it, from the current political state.

Tom