StarDestroyer.Net BBS

About to go to bed, but want to point out, starships like Voyager are military/exploratory ships expected to operate in hostile/dangerous/unknown situations. A space station like Deep Space Nine has similar concerns. Their chances of something going wrong that warrants a specialized human operator actively monitoring the process have to be a lot higher than regular travel on Earth or Vulcan.

Deep Space Nine has the added complication of being a Cardassian built station that has had Federation tech added at some point, causing reliability issues. Then they parked it next to a bit of unique phenomena.

Ralin's got a point. The operator is there for belts and braces on Starfleet vessels that regularly encounter

In the non-canon pre-TOS Set Novel The Last Reflection personal teleporter operators in the klingon Empire a sign of rank. Officers get special operators to make sure they get there okay. Marine grunts get pre-set computerised transports and can get "scrambled" if they are unlucky. (like a couple for a ship's company. not enough to degrade)

For it as a public transport system, you might only get to pick pre-approved stations (or maybe a custom destination would be more rations), I'd speculate going pad-to-pad would be safer and easier to automate.

very ghetto edit: Ralin's got a point. The operator is there for belts and braces on Starfleet vessels that regularly encounter.. weird out of the ordinary conditions and might have to adapt on the fly to them.

Ralin wrote: ↑2023-03-05 05:49am About to go to bed, but want to point out, starships like Voyager are military/exploratory ships expected to operate in hostile/dangerous/unknown situations. A space station like Deep Space Nine has similar concerns. Their chances of something going wrong that warrants a specialized human operator actively monitoring the process have to be a lot higher than regular travel on Earth or Vulcan.

By the same token, exploratory vessels tend to get the state of the art technology, while for reliability reasons, civilian infrastructure tends to use older, proven designs. And what do you know, the public transporters we see in Star Trek: Picard at Starfleet headquarters are pad-to-pad transporters. Not pad-to-anywhere. What I'm saying is that pad-to-anywhere seems to warrant a human operator just in case, because while any one transport might seem trivial, when millions of transports happen a day then the low odds of someone getting hurt become a certainty that someone is going to get hurt. And automation wasn't trusted enough to do away with the role of Transporter Chief even by the 25'th century. Pad-to-pad has those traffic flow issues I mentioned earlier, though. Pad-to-anywhere is taken for granted by fans because, as I said earlier, we haven't seen enough of civilian life in Star Trek, biasing our perception towards the unusual lifestyle of high ranking Starfleet officers aboard exploratory vessels. We hardly know anything about Earth in Star Trek. We don't even know which cities for sure were wiped off the map during WWIII, other than New York (because seeing that skyline destroyed is obligatory in disaster movies) and Washington DC (because of course that place would get nuked).

On the "casual beaming" topic, I think there's a middle ground.

By the mid-late 24th century especially, beaming does seem fairly routine but like, they're also not going to just beam down the hall just because. In terms of a planet or larger base, beaming would almost certainly be a bit more long-haul travel... Picard would go from La Barre to San Francisco via transporter, but would take local transport/walk within the city, likewise going from Starfleet Command on the ground to Earth Spacedock in orbit.

Might also make sense on something as large as Earth Spacedock to take the transporter if you're somewhere at the "top" and need to get to the "bottom"... it's a big station...

As seen in PIC, "public transporters" do seem to have fixed locations.