Poll Picard Show Transwarp beaming?

[Christopher]

I've never been convinced. I assume that the matter stream is actually transferred by subspace or similar, hence they can beam inside of buildings. How do the scanners work to a molecular, let alone quantum, level, at a distance of thousands of km?

Of course it doesn't really make sense, but it makes more sense than the old "matter-to-energy" idea. A single gram of matter contains about as much energy as was released by the Hiroshima bomb. Converting a 70-kg human to energy and firing that energy at a planet would basically be a WMD attack.

 

[Annorax849]

I don’t remember exactly how “Harrison” used it, but maybe it could be explained that it required Borg technoloy + Scotty.

 

[Kor]

I don’t remember exactly how “Harrison” used it, but maybe it could be explained that it required Borg technoloy + Scotty.

He had a portable device.

Kor

 

[F. King Daniel]

He had a portable device.

Kor

Yep. Section 31 had confiscated his/Old Spock's formula and were using it with portable transporter devices.

The novelization by Alan Dean Foster fudges it by saying he beamed to the moon and used a larger transporter there, but the movie makes it pretty clear it's one teleport. And why not? As Christopher pointed out above, many Aliens of the Week in TOS had similar technology, as well as the Dominion and 24th century Starfleet (although perhaps not quite the 140ly range of Into Darkness)