Another interesting question is, have we ever, in Trek, seen pad to pad transport? STMP's tube to tube may be the only case, as far I can remember, and even then I don't distinctly recall seeing the tube on both ends of the transport.
The transporter room is there because it was to pricy to show the ship landing on new planets every week.
The first example that comes to mind is "Trouble with Tribbles," Kirk and Spock beaming into the transporter pad in K-7's office. Also, Kirk and McCoy beaming aboard Kronos-1, pad to pad. Even earlier, the Klingon crew beaming from their transporter to the Enterprise' transporter in TSFS. And the transportiest episode ever, "Realm of Fear," features mostly pad-to-pad transport using the Yosemite's hardware.
To be sure, we didn't see the Klingon end of the process in ST3. But this just highlights a broader issue: whenever somebody from a friendly or hostile starship beams to the Enterprise and arrives at the Enterprise transporter room, we can probably safely assume that he or she began the journey at the corresponding transporter room in his or her starship. Our heroes always do that - why wouldn't our sidekicks, guest stars and villains? We could speculate that pad-to-pad is the standard, easiest, safest, most efficient way to transport. Pad-to-nature and nature-to-pad are a bit more challenging, but necessary for most missions. Perhaps there exist cheapo transporters that can only do pad-to-pad? Unknown... Pad-to-pad would also seem to be the easiest way to boost performance in challenging circumstances, although it's rarely practicable if there really is a crisis requiring a boost. The big question from the tech and VFX points of view is, do both endpoint transporters participate in pad-to-pad? When the Klingons came over in ST3, the effect was that of Federation transporters. Yet when the single Klingon came over in DS9 "Dramatis Personae", his effect was the Klingon one even though he materialized on a Cardassian pad. Perhaps two transporters will negotiate on whose protocol or machinery shall be used, and usually end up using the receiver's system, but in emergencies may decide otherwise as well. Timo Saloniemi
I think that in TOS, there were some technical issues that made site-to-site transport difficult, but by the time of TNG, I believe that these two provide part of the explanation: ...and additionally, the Transporter Rooms make a good staging point for leaving the ship. Equipment lockers for phasers, tricorders, non-standard-atmospheric gear, etc, plus (although it hasn't been shown this way, I don't believe) costume replicators, and light surgery stations for cosmetic surgery for black ops or for beaming to locations with Prime Directive issues, or regular triage for incoming wounded.
I would make the argument that you've got to put the transporter somewhere. I mean, sure you can beam people site-to-site, but it's the transporter doing all the work. One could also assume that the transporter is used much more often than is depicted in the show. so beaming transferring personel directly into our out of their quarters could get messy and difficult to organize. Another problem is why you need this big bulky Transporter pad and console when you can just slap a device the size of a penny on someone and beam them wherever you want.
Haven't we seen several cases where it was necissary for off-ship crew members to have a communicator for beam-up? And I can think of at least one example where they had to get back to their point of origin for beam-up. ^Talk about that. ^
Just before beaming, though, we have Kruge saying "Transporter, standby!" That's implciitly pad-to-pad beaming, and it had to be implicit because they never designed a Klingon transporter set for TSFS. In many a fanfic I have taken it as a given that fold-down transporter pads (the type that can interface with the larger system on the ship) are standard equipment on all major away missions. Something the size of a briefcase that opens up like a police spike strip, enough that six people can stand on it and beam back to the ship.
There's no physical transporter room set in ST3, but that ship has to have a transporter aboard, because it's how Kirk gets off the planet after the Enterprise is destroyed. Up until this point in the franchise, site-to-site beaming was still relatively rare, though site-to-pad and pad-to-pad were common. In later Trek, there doesn't seem to be much advantage at all in using the tranporter pad. The pad doesn't even appear in the last 3 TNG movies. In Star Trek 3, the effects were the same, but the Klingon transporters were red, while the Federations are blue. If you'll recall, Kirk and company beam down to Genesis on the pad with a blue effect, and a moment later, the klingons come in with the red effect. All transporter effects after the Enterprise is destroyed are red. This is depicted inconsistanty on Trek, so it's anyone's guess. I'd personally go with the ST3 method of "always use the sender's effect on arrival" but there are many times on TNG when Klingons and so forth come aboard the Enterprise and arrive with the Federation's VFX.
^That could be though, because the Enterprise is the one doing the beaming. Similar to beaming an away team back to the ship, they'd be "picking up" the visitor from their ship. Maybe as a matter of courtesy...who knows. Perhaps the Enterprise's transporters are less energy intensive on their power supply than those of a BoP, so it is easier for Enterprise to do the beaming. Conversely, if the other ship insisted on doing the beaming, then their transporter effect would be the one shown both ways.
^um, the Klingons were invading the ship in TSFS and the ship was empty when they beamed over. Enterprise did not and would not be doing the beaming.
I went back to check, and you're right, they do beam in blue. I could have sworn they beamed in red. Precisely.. although Kirk does tell the Klingons that "we are engaging transporter beam" which would seem to indicate that the Enterprise is beaming them over.. which is, admittedly.. weird.
Transporter Room & Transporter Tech A transporter pad on the ship gives an exact location and less chance of something going wrong using a target location, where the energy pattern is reconverted into matter (rematerialization). Technology changes and it should be expected other alien worlds have advanced technology as well as Starfleet's transporters technology improving. In ENT an alien race did slap on a little device and tranported things off the NX01 but that was more for targeting assistance for a transporter elsewhere. It's the same idea like Having a full size stereo component single CD player and having a small CD walkman. Both play the disc but both have different quality components to do the job. That job being convert data back to an electrical voltage. Yes the job gets done but there is more error correction capability for the cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon coding in the large stereo component CD player. Think of using a transporter room & pad as having better error correction for dense metals, solar flares & various forms of radiation for dematerialization & re-materialization to prevent transporter accidents. Maybe better use of bio-filters?
Re: Transporter Room & Transporter Tech I don't think it's said anywhere that site-to-site transporting or transporting via an "emergency transporter" are any different than using the actual pad, but I do admit, I like this idea. I never really liked the "personal transporters" that were used as a plot excuse.
Maybe not. It was the Klingon effect when Kirk and McCoy materialized on Kronos-1. And IIRC, it was the Klingon effect when the two assassins beamed aboard as well. Actually, I think this fits into the same category as visual communication to a certain extent: there's a bit of handshaking between devices such that one device can activate another device remotely, sort of like a telephone call. There seem to be protocols that are exploitable so that you can force a transporter to accept incoming beams with or without the operator's permission (as Spock does with visual communications in both "Balance of Terror" and "The Corbomite Maneuver" to get a picture of what the aliens look like).
I wasn't using STIII as an example. Just generalizing. I probably could have been a bit more specific. Good point. There must be some sort of communication between devices, and I think (just waking up when I first responded to this thread) that where I was attempting to go with my post is that it is during this "handshake" that the devices would decide which one is to be used in the transport. As for STVI, (going off of my own theory)...it makes sense that the Klingon effect would be shown, as the assassins were no doubt aided by someone on Gowron's ship (or perhaps even got there by a site-to-site from Chang's ship, who knows), and therefore used the Klingon's own transporters to avoid alerting anyone on the Enterprise by using the ship's own transporters. In this case, I'd imagine that the Enterprise's pad was passively communicating with the Klingon's pad, allowing the Klingon ship's transporter to do the work, without the need for the Big E's transporter system to activate, leaving little trace of the assassins' activities.
It is. At first I thought that Kruge's transporter was knocked out by battle damage, but that doesn't square with it being operable just a short time later. One could argue that it was a psychological ploy, forcing the Feds to beam their own captors over (with the implied threat of the BoP's guns to make sure they didn't just "turn off" the beam mid transfer). As for how the Enterprise could actually DO the beaming with Kirk and Co unable to operate the controls, remember that the system DOES have an "automatic" setting (cf "Mirror, Mirror").
^ Actually, remember that Kirk had explicitly surrendered the Enterprise to avoid having more hostages killed. The implication is that he was bringing the Klingons aboard willingly so they could take command. This would be a little like docking two ships together to transfer personnel; the Klingons still have to pass through the hatch on the Enterprise' side to get into the ship.