Right? Absolutely no point to the pads, since you can dematerialize anywhere and rematerialize anywhere else. They might as well hide the equipment and make a nicer reception area.

There's some hand-wavey technobabble about annular confinement beams and whatnot but the real reason was because TOS didn't have the money or time to show a shuttle land or receiver pad sent down, etc. It was cheap to depict and the audience bought it without much explaining (step into booth, shimmer, be someplace else).

It was just a sciency-looking version of what I Dream of Jeannie did.

I accept transporting to somewhere without a pad because mumble, mumble, Star Trek science. What I always wondered about was how blasé folks usually were about transporting to somewhere that didn't have a transporter pad. Who makes sure no one is standing in the beam to area. Does the transporter have safety protocols to just not transport if there is something of a certain size in the way? Transporting someone partially into rock has been shown in Star Trek (one instance, PIC s2e9). Weaponized use of a transporter, maybe by overriding transporter safety protocols? That was done intentionally, but still.

... Can't believe I've never thought about that, but now I'll never fail to notice... Damn it

Funnily enough, it's kinda more like SW hyperdrive than warp. Point-shoot-pray, can't see outside, can't change direction, lots of calculations needed to find an unobstructed path

The other part of that is, of course, that they don't seem to use the technology (or artificial gravity or the tractor beams for that matter) for anything else. In particular no weapons or defence systems.

I wonder if there's a technical manual out there that tries to explain it. It seems like energy manipulation is something startrek tech excells at.

The Jaunt also comes to mind.

Teleporters are interesting because when you think about it long enough, you realize the person on departure end died.

You think about it more... and if the person that comes out the arrival end is an exact replica -- down to the atom -- and, further, has internal continuity of experience... You realize that if you accept they died then you kind of also have to accept that the "you" of any given instant is constantly dying and giving way to the "you" of the next instant. That person living that experience at that exact moment will never exist again; they're dead.

So you're kinda back to transporters being business as usual again, but with a fun new existential crisis on the side.

This is refuted by in-universe POV accounts. We have traveled through the transporter with several characters, and not once is their stream of consciousness or even vision broken.

Barclay even observes creatures slightly out of phase in the transport stream and manages to pull them in. (TNG, "Realm of Fear")

I know it's described as disassembling and reassembling, but in practice it looks more like they're being adjusted out of phase, pushed to their location using the annular confinement beam, and resequenced into phase with the rest of the universe. This is what happens with Geordi and Ro in TNG, "The Next Phase."

It doesn't explain transporter clones or most transporter accidents, or even TNG, "Relics" but the transporter as a whole is kinda sorta space magic anyway.

Dr. McCoy famously hated the Transporter. He always complained that his atoms were being scattered, but never once did he voice the opinion that the transporter killed the transportee. Also, I don't believe even with Badmirals abounding, that Starfleet would allow such a death machine to be in regular use.

Nah it just feels tingly.

if the consciousness transfers, then what is the practical difference, though?

No the fuck it isn't. Dualism is clearly true in Star Trek's universe and even if it weren't we see consciousness is maintained while beaming but is normally too brief to be perceived. (TNG: "Realm of Fear")

Beaming is no more death than sleeping, or existing for longer than a single Planck unit of time is.

I kind of love the galactic barrier in how weird and obviously differing from our reality it is, scifi shows don't need to make their universes behave the way ours does.

I realllllly loved the discovery episode where they went out the galactic barrier, it was just so damn weird.

As long as the characters behave with a scientific frame of mind, it doesn't really matter if the physics of star trek is absurd. It doesn't matter if the calculations do or don't add up for some fantasy tech in star trek, it matters how characters interact with the unknown and approach trying to understand problems (where the heart of science really lives). The 4th season of Discovery did an amazing job with this in my opinion, it was cool to see the crew sent to meet with 10-C stumbling through the logic of trying to figure out a way to make contact (or even WHAT 10-C was before they found them).

According to Memory Alpha, the barrier appears in at least three TOS episodes: "Where No Man Has Gone Before", "By Any Other Name", and "Is There in Truth No Beauty?"

One of the theories i've heard about it is that one of the races with much higher power levels, or a higher powered being, may have constructed the barrier to protect our galaxy from something outside. I imagine that we'll probably never know what the person who originally suggested this idea might've thought for an origin for it, or if it was just a plot device they came up with to turn that one guy into a super being... but... you're right, given that as far as we know, even the spore drive turns to useless when nearing the galactic barrier.

However... one might find that the mycelial network picks up again somewhere on the other side of the barrier, and might allow for rapid intergalactic travel.

But, it's not really necessary -- the Milky Way is still even in Discovery's current time, quite unexplored by the Federation. We could make hundreds of years of Star Trek stories without ever needing to leave the galaxy.