It could also be argued that Kruge's transporters were indeed down. After all, if they weren't, Kruge could have captured Kirk right after his beam-down, simply by beaming him back up. Or Kruge could have evacuated the prisoners. Or done a dozen other nasty things. There was still some Klingon crew remaining on Kruge's ship, including at least himself and Maltz, top officers who might have been technologically skilled enough to repair the transporter. There could have been more Klingons there as well, even if none were shown. For all we know, the transporter operator remained behind to repair his machinery - this would also explain why Maltz wasn't in the transporter room when Kirk and his friends beamed up, but was minding his own business on the bridge. All this in addition to the idea that Kirk was rolling over in order to please Kruge, not in rebuttal if it. I like the concept - but it's probably already pretty close to the use of the "pattern enhancers" we see from TNG onwards. That is, there are technologies that boost the turning of a person into a phased matter stream, technologies that one can do without but that help in tight spots, and they may be built into the starship pads and the away team enhancer poles. Both a pad and a pole need a full transporter machine somewhere, and the machine can work without the pad or the pole. The little button in ST:NEM could be rationalized as a microminiature enhancer pole. The transporters of the mothership were said to be "down", but this shouldn't hold true for all of them, because the mothership ought to have multiply redundant systems - if not otherwise, then thanks to having transporter-equipped independent shuttlecraft aboard. But all of this could plausibly be "down" if key sensors on the ship's hull were down and the spatial anomaly serving as the fight's backdrop was impenetrable without those sensors. Add an enhancer pole or button at the other end, though, and it's not so impenetrable any more... Timo Saloniemi
That's kinda the point. What would they have used in Kirk's day before TNG-style pattern enhancers were available? Probably something a bit bulkier and a bit more self-sufficient, having to make up for far greater shortfalls in starship transporters. It's just that I would extrapolate something like that still existing in the 24th century. I just don't think transporters should be as convenient (both in operation and in failure) as depicted; there should ALWAYS be a degree of difficulty in beaming to and from the ship without dedicated hardware at both ends. It's one of the things I actually liked about STXI: if the transporters are able to save your ass at the last minute, it's not because they work so well, it's because somebody really good is at the controls.
And looking like it's made out of WWII surplus doodads and 1960s consumer products. That much is certain. I'd really fancy a roll-out porta-pad, if it looked sufficiently like having been made of 1960s materials yet featured the high-tech look of today's soft displays and keyboards - and had some sort of an aesthetic connection to the TNG enhancers. If it could fit within the backpack we saw in "The Cage", all the better. But the step from pads to poles is a major one, visually. Perhaps an arrangement of poles that have prominent dishes on top, dishes that clearly are miniature versions of the transporter room pads? The dishes would be aimed at the transportees from multiple directions; TNG tech would turn the mechanically aimed dishes into neat little "phased array" cones, and would eliminate the underfoot porta-pad. Did we ever have a TOS episode where this tech would have been "logically necessary"? One where the landing party would beam down to a location they knew in advance was hostile to transporters? I don't think so - so the tech could indeed exist off-camera. Timo Saloniemi
I've always thought the transporter room was there to have an exact and specific location into which to beam, rather than say beaming into the engineering room and ending up in a wall. Though considering the technology of the time... that kind of problem shouldn't arise.