LIMITATIONS OF USE The personnel and cargo transport systems are enormously useful for starship operations, but are nevertheless subject to significant limitations. Some key limitations of operation include: ĽRange. Normal operating range is approximately 40,000 km, depending on payload mass and relative velocity. Emergency evacuation transporters have more limited capabilities and are limited to approximately 15,000 km, again depending on available power. ĽInterference from deflector shields. When deflector shields are raised to defensive configuration, it is impossible for the ACB to propagate normally across the required EM and subspace bandwidth. In addition, spatial distortion from the shields can seriously disrupt pattern integrity. For this reason, transport is not possible when shields are in place. ĽDuty cycle. Although the transport autosequence lasts approximately five seconds, pattern buffer cooldown and reset takes an average of eighty- seven seconds, yielding an average duty cycle of just over ninety-two seconds. Since the transport beam conduits permit the matter stream to be routed to any pattern buffer, any given chamber can be reused immediately without waiting for cooldown by switching to another pattern buffer. Since there are only three pattern buffers normally used for personnel transport, this process can be repeated twice before waiting for pattern buffer reset. This translates into an average of about 1.9 six-person transports per minute, resulting in a total system capacity of about seven hundred persons per hour. ĽTransport while at warp. Warp fields produce severe spatial distortion in transporter beams, making it impossible to transport when the ship is traveling at warp speeds. The only exception is when both the ship and the target site are traveling at the same integral warp velocity. ĽReplication limits. Personnel transport is accomplished at quantum-level resolution using analog image data. By contrast, food and hardware replication (which employs transporter technology) employs digital image data at the much more limited molecular-level resolution. Because of this crucial limitation, replication of living beings is not possible. Ć