So power limitations should also affect transporter range.
I'm not sure why this should follow. A nuclear plant has a limited output. It doesn't follow that this limitation would restrict the number of emergency lighting LEDs installed on the nuclear plant - supply and demand are from different universes altogether, and do not affect each other in the slightest.
Transporters might consume power, but this power has never seriously competed with propulsive power. Somewhat absurdly, even
life support competes more evenly with warp drive: shutting down a deckful of the former boosts the latter. (This might be because the most important form of life support is inertia control, and that particular type of magic might be a high-power application until otherwise proven.)
Would the power needs of a transporter ever grow to match those of a warp drive, no matter how much rock the beam had to penetrate or how many lightyears it had to span? Apparently not, as Khan in STXI was able to do an interstellar transport without even creating an immediately identifiable power spike in the San Francisco grid.
...though in TMP there was still a shuttle service of some sort that goes to Star Fleet HQ.
Or then there was a pier for the personal airyachts of high-ranking personnel, take your pick. Kirk's craft was decidedly lacking in traditional mass transportation qualities.
Transporters can pick people up from anywhere without worrying about space restrictions, thanks to sight-to-sight beaming, unlike shuttles, but it seems preferable to beam from the platform.
One wonders what customs and mores are in place to limit transporting - say, to the neighbor's bedroom. Beaming
into places might present all sorts of hazards that are neatly avoided by having designated beam-in targets (cheaper and more reliable than scanning whether the target area is safe), and even beaming
out might be more practical if the system involved did not have to guess which of the garden party guests to extract.
The very same system might have modes available in emergencies or for authorities, though, so that it can perform medical pickup at a random location, or insert troops to quell a riot, or remove a fire or install some air. And then commercial modes so that, say, the grand piano doesn't have to be manhandled into the living room with antigravs, and the delivery boy doesn't have to leave his home to provide the district with annoying advertisement pamphlets.
Transporters should really supplant all non-local modes of travel leaving only walking, private and public flying cars, and shuttles for non-planetary travel.
Perhaps vehicles would exist in quantity chiefly for emergency use? We see so frustratingly little of Earth or other core worlds in Star Trek, but the latest CGI-boosted glimpses into London and San Francisco do feature public and utility vehicles that appear redundant with transporter technology, yet not so redundant as to be replicas for nostalgic entertainment rides. Perhaps the government maintains a vehicle-based infrastructure for those days when the transporter net goes down globally (a rare occurrence in "Paradise Lost", but apparently not something that would immediately send people to the streets panicking and shouting that the End of the World as We Know It is coming).
Timo Saloniemi
