Transporter pads

[wautd]

What the deal with the transporter pad. The away team always stands upon it before going on a mission. But IIRC there are numerous occasion where they use the transporter withouth the pad on numerous occasions (like transporting a wounded crewmember to sickbay)

[Isolder74]

Perhaps it is just more efficient that way. Site to site seems to require more energy and computing power(so you do not end up in a wall.)

[General Zod]

What the deal with the transporter pad. The away team always stands upon it before going on a mission. But IIRC there are numerous occasion where they use the transporter withouth the pad on numerous occasions (like transporting a wounded crewmember to sickbay)

a combination of convenience and energy efficiency, likely. someone whose perfectly healthy and going on a standard mission isn't going to need to be beamed site to site. while someone whose wounded, bleeding to death, catching a harmful virus or something that could be contagious, or if it's a situation they don't want to take any risks then site to site would be preferred, even though it's likely more energy costly.

otherwise i don't think we're given any in universe explanation save for plot devices.

[Ted C]

We know for a fact (from "Symbiosis") that it's easier to beam someone from pad to pad than from site to pad or site to site.

If your "target" is on the pad, the system doesn't have to do much work to obtain a "transporter lock" on them, since they're in a known location. The "transporter beam" doesn't have to travel very far, either, mitigating risks of interference from odd particles, energy fields, or intervening material.

Going from the pad would therefore appear to be significantly safer than site-to-site transport, which would account for use of transporter pads whenever possible (even if the site-to-site transport risk is small, there's no reason to take it if there's a pad nearby).

[Hardy]

Think of it this way. Try taking a picture of a document from 10 meters away through several sheets of paper and then try scanning that same document on your scanner. Which one has a higher resolution/quality?

Location to location transportation is convinient but to get a quantum resolution scan of a person from 100 meters away is much more difficult than getting the same scans from within a set of scanners working together at a close range from different angles.

I still dont know how they get a quantum resolution scan from 40,000 kilometers away.