Star Trek transporter LED coasters materialize your cocktails
Beam up your scotch in your own home with a set of LED coasters that come complete with Star Trek sound effects.
The Star Trek universe is full of enviable technologies we'd love to have in real life. Science has delivered on items like communicators, tricorders and hyposprays, but we're far, far away from that sweet transporter technology that dematerializes and materializes people and equipment over long distances. It's OK, though. We can assuage our longing over a glass of Klingon bloodwine placed on top of a Transporter Pad LED Coaster from ThinkGeek.
The coasters, which slightly resemble silver hockey pucks, light up on top in the familiar transporter pad pattern. That LED light radiates upward through a glass to make the contents appear to glow, as if in mid beam-down to the local pleasure planet.
Setting a drink down or picking it up activates the coaster, triggering the LEDs and playing a materialization or dematerialization sound effect from the original series. The sound can be turned off, but why would you want to do that?
You don't need dilithium crystals to power these drink accessories. The coasters run on button-cell batteries and the lights automatically turn off after 10 seconds to help extend the battery life. A set of four coasters will cost you $29.99 (about £20, AU$41). I'm not sure how much that would be in Federation credits or Klingon darseks.
ThinkGeek is careful to note that the coasters won't actually beam your drinks anywhere, so you can't set your Romulan ale on a coaster in the kitchen and transport it to a coaster in the living room.
You won't get much thrill from setting a beer can down on the coaster, but a short, clear glass full of a bubbly liquid should look pretty impressive. If you're more of a Picard fan, there's no reason you couldn't use the coaster to protect your table from "tea, Earl Grey, hot."