Transporter technology is often misunderstood within our universe. The official name for this mode of travel is actually known as, “transportal relocation”, because short-term artificial wormholes transfer people and objects between two coordinates, or portals.
The transporters that we know must always operate between two compatible transporter pads. This is required since each pad generates a terminal vortex. Without two vortexes, there cannot be a generated wormhole, thus no transport. For this reason, an individual aboard a starship cannot travel down to a planet’s surface, unless there is an operational transporter pad to arrive upon. As a result, unless a planet has a network of transporter substations, most away teams from a starship travel down to a planet’s surface via shuttlecraft.
Now, some shuttles, like the Type-7 cargo shuttles carried aboard the Enterprise, or our compliment of Danube-class runabouts, do have small transporter pads integrated into the vessel. If an away mission to an uninhabited planet requires a transporter connection, one of these auxiliary vessels can land on the planet’s surface, and facilitate a temporary transporter pad, thereby allowing subsequent transport between the away team and the starship in orbit.
At the present time, all personnel and cargo transporters have a maximum range of 40,000 kilometers. The power needed to generate a transporter wormhole is currently too great to expand the operational distance any further than these limits.
Transporters are unable to work site-to-site on a planet’s surface, due to both the gravitational pull and the curvature of the planet. For this reason, all transport from one location on a planet to another is directed to intermediary transport stations in orbit. If someone wanted to travel from a pad in Moscow, Russia (on Earth) to a pad in New York City, USA, they would transport up to an orbital transport station, and then transport down again to the New York transport pad.
There have been theories within the scientific community, that could, some day result in digital relocation. The theory – currently unproven -- is that a person could be disassembled on a molecular level, routed through a computer processor (or buffer), and then reassembled at a new transport destination. The problem with this theory, however – and the reason why this doesn’t exist, is that people and objects cannot be turned into energy, and then be reintegrated as solid objects. Living beings are far too complex to be taken apart on a molecular level, and then put back together at a destination, exactly as they were before. There are no computers even remotely powerful enough to handle this kind of digital data for objects, living or otherwise.
Since transporters consist of generated short-range wormholes, and these wormholes have distance limits, most traffic to or from the Enterprise makes use of shuttlecraft. As a result, our Main Shuttlebay can be a very busy place, with shuttles coming and going on a daily basis. In addition, whenever the Enterprise is docked at a drydock or large space station, there is an umbilical connect – a tunnel – that connects the station to the neck of the Enterprise, on deck 25. There are also two vertical cargo elevators that can attach to station arms above or below the Enterprise, and raise or lower people or cargo through the saucer.
Transporters are an integral part of living in space, however, just like anything else, there are limits to what it can do. Someday, we may find a way to break those limits, but, for now, we have to make due with the physical limitations imposed by the reality we live within.
-Lieutenant Sam Archer
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June 14, 2364 -- (Original Devron Timeline)