Not quite true. I remembered it being used at least once, and Memory Alpha backs me up. In “A Piece of the Action,” Scotty directly transports one of the mob bosses from their office to another one, and then all the rest have been beamed in in the next scene.
And if the movies still count as TOS era, then Scotty used the transporters on the Bird of Prey to beam the crew at the hospital to just outside the ship in Star Trek IV.
That said, we can fanwank it with it being easier on the Bird of Prey, and assume the mob bosses did briefly stop on the transporter pads but didn’t notice. In the regular series (before the movies), transporters did freeze you in time when transporting. (This was due to how the effects worked.)
And @Chronos is apparently right about how they supposedly pull it off in TNG. According to Memory Alpha, they are dematerialized, taken to the transporter buffer, but then they send another beam to rematerialize them elsewhere, rather than on the pads. It does seem to be an extra step that is less efficient.
When someone beamed down from the transporter room, their sudden absence would leave an area of vacuum. The air rushing into that space would lead to a sudden pressure decrease noticeable to anyone still in the room, but no one ever mentions that effect. It seems likely to me that as a person beams down, an equivalent volume of air beams up, solving both problems at the same time.
I always assumed it swapped places with the contents of the target location. So a wee bit of planet air would appear in the Transporter Room. Which might be another reason for a special room–in case you pulled someone out of a hostile environment and wanted to contain it.
Nobody has so far mentioned the main point of the Transporter, which avoided every episode starting with them having to “drive” down to the planet’s surface. From a story-telling perspective, that’s a brilliant innovation!
Oops, sorry Robot_Arm, I somehow missed you saying the same thing about swapping places! It’s Monday.
Except there is no special security in the transporter room. It’s a basic set of sliding doors with an obvious gap at the bottom, and anybody can walk in or out at will. There is also no indication that material is beamed up from the planet or wherever someone is being transported. In
The main point of the transporter was that the production didn’t have a budget to build a full-size shuttle prop, shuttlebay set, or perform FX work for a shuttle flight, so they came up with a gadget which just required some simple animation and a sound effect. There was clearly no thought put into this in terms of details of how it physically functioned, nor all of the plot complications that would arise in this show (and the then-uncontemplated franchise of related shows, films, novels, comics) from such a magical technology.
Known as McCoy’s Paradox: “A difference that makes no difference is no difference.” Coined in James Blish’s original novel Spock Must Die. Strange because it’s actually uttered by Scotty in response to McCoy’s observation that “The first time we put someone through the Transporter, we’re committing murder.”
In “Day of the Dove,” Spock affirms that intraship beaming is indeed possible “but is rarely done because of the pinpoint accuracy required.” You could easily find yourself materialized inside a bulkhead.
I’ve always thought it interesting that there was a receiving booth in Mr Lurry’s office in “The Trouble with Tribbles.” I wonder if they used that for intrastation beaming on board K-7.
In addition, using the ship or a shuttle to transport crew to a planet’s surface would have taken much too long while stretching the budget. The Transporter was conceived as a way to get in and out of stories quickly at minimal cost.
Never mind that the Enterprise was designed to operate in space only. Interesting that Voyager was capable of landing on a planet, though. And that the time needed to land and retrieve shuttlecraft didn’t matter when it came to NX-1.
It is much worse than that; you are discorporeated atom by atom, conscious of the blood and intracellular fluids gushing out while still somehow being conscious of the entire experience. Fortunately, the copy at the other end of the transport has no memory of this, and instead is provided with constructed memories of a pleasant journey, except for the time Chief O’Brien inserted a program with cthuloid worms latching onto people being transported to get back at Barkley for hitting on his wife.
And yet, somehow people being transported down to a planet don’t find themselves stuck half in a foam boulder or falling because they arrived several centimeters above the surface, notwithstanding the energy that would be release if one solid material were to be transported interspaced with another. So, somehow these things have a precision that can be measured on the range of micrometers or better across many thousands of kilometers.
Deflectors should have been able to stop intruders from beaming onto or off of a ship. Unless, of course, the story demanded otherwise, like in “A Taste of Armageddon” and “The Enterprise Incident.”
That may have been the original impetus for creating the transporter, but it didn’t take long for it to become a plot point on its own. It was only the fifth episode when a transporter malfunction split Kirk into his good and evil parts.
And how exactly does that work? How does it produce two bodies from one, or create a functioning brain in each that lacks some metaphorical component of psychology, or somehow ‘reintegrate’ them back together in the end? For the original Star Trek series it is fine because there was very little attempt at continuity (especially in the first season) or offering even minimal technobabble explanations for their technology, and of course many of the stories were as blatantly metaphorical as The Twilight Zone, but once you start trying to come up with a mechanism that has any degree of plausibility it falls completely apart, not to mention the complications of having to regularly come up with ad hoc limitations to explain why a transporter can’t fix most of your plot conflicts.
When the writers go to such lengths to ‘explain’ the technology and use it to resolve the plot complications, then yes, I think they also need to have a degree of consistency. This is why it generally doesn’t make sense to explain how an advanced technology works in science fiction; it is better to just treat it like something that the people using it don’t understand any more than the average person can explain how a smartphone works.
