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In TNG S6 Ep22, Crusher wants an autopsy to help determine whether someone was murdered, but the dead guy’s family has cultural objections. In the story she goes ahead anyway, jeopardising her career - and that’s not the point.

To me, it seems obvious that some simple combination of replicator and transporter should allow Crusher to make a copy of the corpse and autopsy that… or if you want to be awkward about it, quietly autopsy the original and offer the copy to the family for whatever ritual their culture follows.

Personally, I think the very idea that even early Trekkers couldn’t use their transporter buffers to keep back-up copies of every transported “passenger” risible, except for bandwidth or storage capacity but even that isn't the point.

Routinely buffering every transport might be unreasonable but here in S6 Ep22 it’s by no means routine… it’s next to being an emergency and if we could imagine such a replicator or transporter copy taking 10 or 100 times the normal resources, is anyone suggesting a whacking great starship couldn’t cope with that?

Robbie Goodwin
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  • Good point actually, in DS9 they also managed to temporarily store several crew members in a holodeck simulation during a transporter malfunction. – A.bakker Nov 27 '20 at 20:08
  • Yes, quite… I'd forgotten that one and even without malfunctions, aren't there at least two TNG episodes in which Moriarty is stored in a holodeck buffer, in one for years? – Robbie Goodwin Nov 27 '20 at 20:19
  • In theory it makes sense but I suspect you are still overestimating the capability of replicators. In practise transporters have been made over-powered too but that is way out of scope. A ct scan and whatever transporters scan should have been plenty for Dr. Crushers needs. – lucasbachmann Nov 27 '20 at 20:44
  • @lucasbachmann You're going far sideways.

    Irrelevantly, the episode specifically states that a tricorder scan won't help. Not the point; neither would a CT scan, or anything like it, help.

    The only point here is what replicators and transporters could do… not whether the same object might be achieved by other means.

    Far from overestimating the capability of replicators, I'm Asking members to explain their limits.

    Whatever "transporters have been made over-powered" means it's not out of scope. It's the whole point.

    "whatever transporters scan" should have been plenty means what?

     – Robbie Goodwin Nov 27 '20 at 20:59
  • @Robbie Goodwin - Are you sure you mean, Moriarty, the holodeck character? Or did you mean to say Scotty? Scotty was stored in a pattern buffer for 75 years, although his crewmate, who was stored in another buffer, couldn't be retrieved, as his pattern had degraded too much. Evidently, pattern buffers weren't designed to store patterns indefinitely, and although they could be modified to do so, it only had a 50% success rate the one time that was attempted. – LogicDictates Nov 27 '20 at 21:47
  • @Robbie Goodwin - If you did actually mean to say Moriarty, then no, he was never stored in a pattern buffer. He was always stored within holodeck memory, like other holograms. In fact, "Ship in a Bottle" made it clear that holograms cannot normally be transported, as according to Geordi: "A holodeck object is just a simulation. There's nothing there to provide a pattern lock for the transporter." The USS Voyager's EMH was able to be transported, but only after he gained the portable holo-emitter, a physical object that could be locked onto. – LogicDictates Nov 27 '20 at 22:18
  • @LogicDictates Thanks and yes, I did mean Moriarty and I did fail to account for the difference between transporter buffer memory and holodeck memory. I suggest the point isn't the type of memory but the nature of the character… and just you watch how quickly a holodeck object stops being a "mere" simulation when a script-writer thinks of the possibilities! – Robbie Goodwin Dec 01 '20 at 21:11
  • @A.bakker Yeah, they needed the station's entire computing capacity to do so, though, and the signals wouldn't remain stable for long. – Asteroids With Wings Jan 10 '21 at 22:45
  • @AsteroidsWithWings Have you considered how unlikely any transportation would really be, if it truly took the station's entire computing capacity to temporarily store even a few crew members in a holodeck simulation during a transporter malfunction? Don't you think that's giving too much trust to scripties far more concerned about drumming up potentially problems than creating a logical universe? – Robbie Goodwin Jan 10 '21 at 22:56
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    @RobbieGoodwin Let's not jump to conclusions. You're making a ton of assumptions about how a fictional transportation technology works in detail. – Asteroids With Wings Jan 11 '21 at 10:19
  • @AsteroidsWithWings You'd need to take that to chat but here and now, pointing out a single, obvious flaw in your thinking is neither jumping to conclusions, nor making many assumptions.

    Suspending deductive reasoning while watching the show is one thing. Maintaining the suspension here is quite another.

    In a world where an every-day operation like cloning a transport buffer could need the entire capacity of DS9, why not sign up for Quark's new Easy-Payment Ponzi Pyramid Plan? He prolly won't even ask you to distinguish "computing" from "storage" capacity.

     – Robbie Goodwin Jan 11 '21 at 11:02
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    @RobbieGoodwin As a software developer, it's not in any way a stretch to imagine that allowing data to pass through a buffer from point A to point B like a data stream is not quite the same thing as actually copying an entire person's worth of data in-place. The latter is a classic scalability problem, often fixed by using the former instead (though the trade off is that you can't clone that way). By the way, you have a really bad habit of your first response always being the "you have an obvious flaw in your thinking" angle, and it's not very pleasant. Try humility, and an open mind! – Asteroids With Wings Jan 11 '21 at 12:14
  • @AsteroidsWithWings Do you truly not see that for a technology capable of equipping a ship with several transporter rooms, each able to transfer half a dozen people at once, keeping copies is more than likely to be a relatively trivial problem? By the way, the purpose of Comments is to seek clarification, and that briefly. – Robbie Goodwin Jan 11 '21 at 12:54

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First, replicators cannot replicate living matter (at least, Starfleet replicators cannot. source and another question with a great answer about it). So at the very least all that doing what you are proposing would do is get you a bunch of corpses. Now, your question does specifically ask about replicating corpses, so I suppose in that sense it would ALMOST do what you want. Except that patterns degrade in the pattern buffers.

So, to combine the two technologies, you'd have to deal with the limitations of both. The replicators cannot replicate matter exactly, because they do not store the data of individual molecules (see the linked SE answer). The pattern buffers COULD hold that data, since they have to replicate the person on the transporter pad, but they can't do so indefinitely. Thus, storing a copy of a person with the fidelity to replicate them or their corpse exactly is not within the realm of starfleet technology.

Michael Stachowsky
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    There appears to be a counter-example to this in the TNG episode with Montgomery Scott. In that episode, Scotty was able to jury-rig a setup which stored himself in the transport buffer for 75 years. While that may not be normal, it indicates that storing a person in the transport buffer indefinitely is within the realm of the technology available. It may not be something which is routinely implemented, but it's possible. – Makyen Nov 28 '20 at 04:59
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    Actually no. In that episode it is explained that Scotty had to really mix things together to make it work, his companion in the buffer degraded, and Scotty himself degraded but only very slightly. My link above cites that example – Michael Stachowsky Nov 28 '20 at 18:09
  • @MichaelStachowsky Thanks and if you're saying what I proposed would get Crusher a corpse, that's all I wanted or she needed.

    The one and only thing I asked for was "a copy of the corpse and autopsy that… or if you want to be awkward about it, quietly autopsy the original and offer the copy to the family for whatever ritual their culture follows…" Everyone is welcome to talk about other ideas elsewhere but here, could we stay on track?

    Sorry the buffer was a bit of a red herring… more relevant to general scope than the specific case.

     – Robbie Goodwin Dec 01 '20 at 21:02
  • By the way, tonight's TNG episode (here, anyway), Second Chances, featured two wholly viable Will Riker's caused by a transporter incident which might make many of us re-think what's technically possible. – Robbie Goodwin Dec 01 '20 at 21:06