In some of the Trek TV series a transporter room was used to beam from the ship. In the post 1980s we saw a lot more site-to-site beaming. via Memory Alpha We also saw it in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home). and there is portable transporter, Multidimensional transporter device, Folded-space transporter, Temporal transporter come on! Just tech invented as plot devices. I kind of liked how in early ENT episodes the technology was so new they would only use it for inanimate objects first. newtype_alpha brings up a very valid point for the next Trek series 6. I decided to create this poll based on a few posts on an old thread about why transporter rooms are used more often.
Supposedly, the Enterprise J is sooooooo big that crew members have to site to site transport instead of using the turbolift. WOW - THAT'S BIG!
There are pros and cons. Personally I prefer to place story-telling restrictions on the technology so that the writers know exactly what cannot be done and you can focus on the drama. Techno-drift leads to inconsistencies and plain silliness and is often used just as a time-saving exercise. I'd rather transportation is usable ONLY with a communicator signal and that transportation onto warp-capable ships should only be pad to pad due to general low level warp distortions thrown out by the engines. It would have been cool to see some enemies trying to beam on without using the receiving pad coming to a bad end in a bulkhead.
A new series involving a post-Voyager time period, in my opinion we could just about eliminate the transporter room all together. Does the special room with the console, steps, platform and pads really continue to serve a purpose? I mean in terms of telling a story. You had to have one during TOS, otherwise the viewing audience wouldn't understand how the heroes were getting on and off the ship. By the time of the last season of Voyager rolls around they were making use of that particular standing set surprisingly infrequently. They would state that they were beaming down and in the next scene they were. Half the time they simply beamed out of whatever room they happen to be standing in. In a new series, given the Star Trek march of technology, the transporter platform might be obsolete. Most likely there would be a unseen Chief Kyle somewhere at a console down in the bowels of the ship. However from the prospective of the viewers, the heroes would simply stand up from their chairs in the briefing room and in the next breath dematerialize. .
Funny, I was thinking about this earlier today. It would be neat to see some limits placed on the tech--an idea I had was that the ship had to have line-of-sight contact with the beam-in/beam-up site, and there could be no intra-ship transportation. As it's used, the transporter generates some plot holes. If you can beam people around your ship, why bother sending security teams down to a fight? Just lock onto any lifeforms in the area and beam them into separate holding cells. There shouldn't be any urgency to a medical emergency (wow that rhymes): just beam the afflicted crewman into a stasis unit, and the doctor can finish his lunch before seeing what's the matter.
In a hard reboot, transporters would have probably been best depicted as transmitter station-to-receiver station, only. And then more like Charles Stross' transport-gates (little wormholes, essentially) than the problematic assembler-gates (human-resolution replicators) they turned into. T'Girl's right about the lack of any real need for a transporter room, although maybe on-site supervision by a technician is slightly safer than otherwise. I wouldn't mind seeing a doctor mention that 80% of his or her job is dealing with bit errors and resulting cancer, though. Finally: no beaming antimatter. That's just annoying.
Before Enterprise began, there was some speculation about how the early transporter would work. The best suggestion I read was that a receiver pad would have to be at the other location. It could be a fixed pad, like at a starbase or another ship, or it could be portable, launched from the ship or carried to the target via shuttle. I still think this would have been a much better early transporter solution than we got.
Perhaps in the 12 years or more between NX-01 launching in 2151 and the first operable transporter being developed before 2139 they did use these methods for biological objects. Of course for the next Trek series it depends on what time period it would be set in for the canon technology to matter.
I'd prefer no transporters of any type. To me that has always been one of the greatest weaknesses of Trek, because that level of seemingly magical technology saps drama and potential plot points, as well as creating numerous potential plot holes for fans. Originally the idea of transporters were created for Trek to provide a low budgeted and quick way of getting our actors to whatever planet or ship was in an episode. But today it is not that expensive to show a shuttle or whatever flying down to a planet. And as others have stated, "Sometimes it is not the destination, but the journey that matters." And taking out transporters would make traveling much more interesting.
I agree. Obviously we're not going for realism here, so my problem with the transporter isn't that they're not realistic; it's that they just make things too easy.