Transfer booth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The transfer booth is a fictional teleportation technology from Larry Niven's Known Space universe. It is inexpensive, with a trip anywhere on Earth costing only a "tenth-star" (presumably equivalent to a dime), and the existence of cheap, common teleportation has greatly altered and homogenized Terran "flatlander" society into a true monoculture (Niven does not go into great detail about this in the Known Space stories, but he has written other stories which describe how teleportation could affect society).

The transfer booth requires an enclosed chamber at both ends of the transfer, and works at lightspeed. The conservation of energy is also in effect; for short distances this is usually not a problem, but for longer jumps around a planet, where the altitude, latitude or longitude of the endpoints differs significantly, energy and momentum compensators are required.

In the Ringworld Series, the Pierson's Puppeteers have networked their planet with 'open' transfer stepping disks, that transport one without the necessary enclosure.