Continuing this discussion from the Armchair Movie Critic Thread:
SilverWook said:
The transporter has always been a story problem in that it can be a magical problem solver in one episode or movie, that is forgotten about when a similar dilemma comes up. One reason it frequently gets damaged, or external phenomena renders it useless.
TAS and TNG opened a can of worms in using molecular patterns to reconstitute a character or restore them to health. (The person doesn't remember anything that happened after they last beamed out.) Which leads to the thorny question why you can't beam up someone who just died in your landing party and restore them to life, as the "alive" pattern is still in the buffer?
This discussion is all true, the transporter is a bit of a problematic piece of technology. One question I have in all Star Treks is why even have a transporter room? It's clearly not needed, either to dematerialize or rematerialize the person in transit. And there are times where it broke the rules, such as the TNG episode with Scotty and the Dyson sphere and how our heroes beam through the shields.
Another strange rule in Star Trek is the cloaking device. I could buy the excuse that it takes too much energy to fire a powerful plasma weapon while cloaked in the earliest days of its development, and thus it had to de-cloak to fire. However, over the course of 100 years, I'm sure they could have improved on the technology. I mean, photon torpedoes, for one thing, are self-propelled, and even if they need something to launch them, it seems to me that other things would consume far more energy than the launching equipment, such as the ship's engines. And considering the substantial tactical advantage that ability would provide (not to mention the Federation's idiotic signing of a treaty that prevented them from actually using the technology), you'd think that research would be heavily invested in that area. How, in all those years, were there only two ships capable of firing while cloaked?