Teleportation and the conservation of energy

[hyzmarca]

Here is a little thought experiment for you.
Create a cylindrical steel tube just wide enough to accommodate a ring device. Make this tube some arbitrary length greater than the length of two pairs of rings and place two ring devices in it, one on top of the other. Now, set it so that the bottom rings always sends to the top rings and is activated by any object falling into it from above.
At the top of this tube, place a mechanism containing a projectile of arbitrary small enough to fit into a ring device. Seal the tube so that it is air-tight and create a vacuum in it.
Now, have the mechanism release the projectile, which should fall though the top rings and into the bottom rings which should send it to the top rings so that it will fall into the bottom rings which will send it to the top rings from which it will fall into the bottom rings and so forth.

Now, acceleration from gravity on Earth is a constant 9.98m/s^2 downward no mater how large an object is. In a vacuum there is no terminal velocity so the only limit to the object's velocity is the light speed limit. Given enough time, this method should be able to accelerate a projectile to relativistic speeds, assuming the device can keep up. Then all one has to do is set the device too teleport the projectile into a set of rings that is pointing at an enemy ship. Since the mass of the body doesn't slow acceleration from gravity, one could create an absurdly large projectile and launch it at absurdly high velocities using this method, although range would be limited.

However, this violates the conservation of energy on its face. As the projectile accelerates, it should take more and more energy to send it back up, otherwise we wind up creating energy from nothing as the projectile accelerates.
Discuss.

[crudelius]

Wow, your theory is very interesting, but you are right that annoying conservation of energy would get in the way. I doubt the writers where thinking of an idea like this when they made these devices. However say we could make teleportation rings, and we found a way to make it all work, this would be very interesting, it would be an impressive weapon. One possible problem, to the rings conserve momentum like the stargate? Whenever we see someone go true the rings they are always standing still. But I have only been watching stargate episode by episode up to season 4, so you might have more info then me.

[mizzoueng]

Good theory, but there is a problem.

For your application to work, the matter stream must go in a circle. From the show, assuming its cannon, matter streams from rings go in straight lines. They also slow down and stop before rematerializing and instantly being dematerialized and sent back to the other set of rings. Same problem at the first set.

But it should be possible to attempt your experiment.

Take your rings, but get say about 500 more sets.

Place them all in space and near one major gravitational force that will pull through the rings. Now set the rings apart by say 1000 meters. Modify the residence time in each ring to be less than 0.05 seconds. By residence time I mean the time it takes for the matter stream to enter the ring buffers and be transfered to the exit of the rings.

By doing this, you will accomplish two things. First you will have one major source of gravity that pulls the matter stream towards the source and thus accelerates the stream. Depending on which source you use, this can either be great or normal (to Earth).

The second thing is that you will avoid any drag forces being in a vacuum.

As you activate the first set of rings, the matter stream will begin to accelerate as it gets closer to the gravitational source. Theoretically you should attain either near light speeds or Ancient 0.99999 speed.

[An-Alteran]

I think Transporters, especially Ring transporters are simply short range offshoots of Gate technology.

Think about it:
The gate rapidly dissassembles matter in a semi-sustained form of buffer pattern that allows a limited amount of awareness of the person durring the travel time (but in an almost dreamlike way), then sends that through the wormhole to the other side.
Transporters seem to use a form of subspace carrier wave to pull the person to or from the materialization area. A buffer "packet" is sent along the carrier wave that by nature of its dresign reassembles the target, using very little computer power. Unlike in Star Trek, massive data storage is apparently unneccessary.

Wraith devices seem to be an even simpler and shorter range version, the carrier waves are directed by the beam to the targets and that auto-dissassembles them and stores them in a subspace bubble.
They can't access that energy and use it as a power source of course becausem of the nature of the field.

That is how I view Stargate Transporters.

[hyzmarca]

Good theory, but there is a problem.

For your application to work, the matter stream must go in a circle. From the show, assuming its cannon, matter streams from rings go in straight lines. They also slow down and stop before rematerializing and instantly being dematerialized and sent back to the other set of rings. Same problem at the first set.

Actually, the matter stream only needs to go in a straight line. It just happens that that line is in the upward direction.

When two Stargates connect, the orientation of those gates doesn't matter. The speed of the traveler is maintained perfectly, but the velocity of the traveler is realitive to the recieving gate's orientation no matter what the velocity once was. Assuming that the rings are similar, the velocity of the mater stream and the velocity of the transported material are two seperate things. So long as the rings are oriented correctly, the material will maintain its downward velocity.