TELEPORTATION

Within the federation there are established and efficient transport systems, wormholes providing direct links despite great distances, and a whole range of vehicles for quick local transport. But transport systems are not always available, and so teleportation provides a solution.

It is well known that matter acts both as particle and wave, this is easy to understand in the form of light and electrons, there are very easy experiments that demonstrate this. Matter will also demonstrate wave like properties at much larger scales even people and planets can behave as waves, the secret to unlocking this behavior is to remove the interactions between object and environment.

Everything we experience does so because it interacts with the universe, we can see where a book is by observing the light reflected from it, the touch of our fingers on its surface. The book also reacts in ways beyond our senses, its gravity pulls on the earth, its matter might effect passing neutrinos, but if the book stopped interacting with anything, with light, with gravity, then nothing could determine where the book was, the book has become decoherent. Without interaction its position is unknown, and also its actual existence as an object, a particle, ceases, it is in this state that matter takes on wave behaviour, this continues as the object ceases to interact with the universe, as soon as it does the identity and the position is once again known, this information is conveyed to the universe, by perhaps a reflected photon, or its gravity perturbs some atom or molecule.

While an object is decoherent it can be manipulated in the same way as a wave, it can diffract, it can slide through other matter, and this manipulation allows a teleporter to send the object to a location irrespective of the vacuum of space or another ships hull.

The teleporter, in short, is device that is capable of transforming a whole object into its decoherent state, and by using an exchange packet transporting all the information about that object to a remote point where it is decohered and returned to its original state.

There are two commonly used forms of teleportation used, one requires a similar device at the receiving, the other does not. The first stages of teleportation are the same in either process, the teleportation chamber distorts space around the object and in doing so insulates it from the universe, this generates the decoherent state, the device can collapse this to form a tachyon, a particle that can contain all the information of the object but can be manipulated a bit like a photon, at this stage the two process begin to differ.

The most commonly used process is exchange particle entanglement, or EPE teleportation, this method requires another teleporter device at the receiving end, the advantage of this process is that is less likely to error, and therefore safer. EPE works by using a phenomenon called entanglement. Entanglement is a strange quantum phenomena, which cause entangled particles to be come inseparably related, changing one particle would change its entangled twin instantaneously, despite any distance between them. The receiver teleporter generates blank entangled tachyon pairs, with one of the pair contained in the teleportation chamber in the receiver device, and the other transmitted to the object holding device. When the object holding teleporter successfully entangles the blank tachyon with the object tachyon then all tachyons harbour the information of the object tachyon, at this point the receiver device converts the tachyon in its chamber into the decoherent object, and the teleporter finally collapses the isolating field returning the decoherent object to a coherent state, successfully transporting it to the receiving device, the other tachyons in the sending teleporter will now only have the information of the blank photons.

The other major form of teleportation is direct translation, or DT teleportation. The object containing tachyon generated in the first of the process is contained within a quasi-stable isolating field which can exist independently of field generators, this unit then can be transmitted to the destination. Generating a destabilizing field at the destination collapses the isolating field, which then decoheres the object and returns it to normal existence. Specialized field generators attached to the teleporter systems can accurately position the destabilizing field to intercept the object tachyon at the destination.

A similar process can be used to recover a remote object and return to a teleporter device, so an object on a planet’s surface can be returned to a teleporter aboard the ship, this process is DT return, or DTr (as opposed to teleporter to elsewhere which is DTe). This is a somewhat more sophisticated process that requires very powerful field generators to generate the isolating field, and to direct the tachyon back at the ship.

Teleporters have remained an almost exclusively used ship technology, due to certain field generating problems, and relative velocity of the destination objects it is far easier to teleport from ship to surface, or to other ship, than a planet to teleport to planet. The main reason to this is that the isolated object preserves its velocity and momentum, and even with inertia modifying equipment, it is best if the object is transported to a destination that is moving at the same relative speed, in the same vector.

Teleportation does allow for useful and safe transportation but its use can be limited by certain conditions, with EPE there are only a few limitations and these are mainly involved in the transmission of a blank tachyon, though these can be indefinitely until one is captured an entangled in the object containing teleporter. With the DT method problems arrive in preserving the transport of the tachyon to the destination, this is more easily disrupted as spatial distortion, or certain environments encourage collapse of containment and premature return of an object to its coherent state, which can be disastrous for a living being. For this reason personnel are required to wear at least an environmental survival suit when using DT, or be placed in temporary self field stasis, so that if field collapse does occur the person is protected until he is recovered by DTe.

Teleportation has become a very safe transport option, and is routinely used for ship applications, EPE is still safer than DT though the difference has been greatly reduced with a new generation of polarized field generators. The cost of teleportation however is the high energy running cost, and also the bulk of the equipment required. Though small size teleporters have been made for small craft, their energy requirement is even higher still, and operating such systems requires pre-charging of specialized accumulators that powers the teleporter.