[caseysoftware]

> Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on.

I'm more interested in how it would rewrite the rules of war. If you can transport a nuke (or even a strike team) directly into your enemy's headquarters, wars end faster with less widespread destruction.

Until you develop no-transport fields but now you've just created massive dead zones which - in themselves - highlight key points of interest to investigate and/or target.

Then you have to deploy LARGE scale (think city wide or bigger) no-transport fields or lots of smaller fields to obfuscate the high value targets.

But regardless, you still need normal shields because teleporting a nuke just outside the zone and letting it drop in is just as effective.

And all of that still ignores conservation of mass.. the physical material has to come from somewhere.

[crooked-v]

> the physical material has to come from somewhere

Extended canon Star Trek has references to both (a) feedstock material storage, with big blocks or tanks of elementally pure materials that get shaved off and recombobulated as necessary by the replicators, and (b) synthesis of elements from pure energy on demand, though usually with the preference of the first method over the second because it's far, far less demanding on all the systems involved to just move atoms around.

[caseysoftware]

That works well if you're going TO a transporter pad.

It doesn't work when they use a transporter to go to a desolate planet.

[mnw21cam]

Schlock Mercenary https://www.schlockmercenary.com/ dealt with this particular theme quite thoroughly. One of the protagonists invents a "Teraport", and promptly a "Teraport Area Denial" is invented to protect against it. Recommended read, though the archive is huge.

[jimbokun]

In a Star Trek novel, where bad guys take over the bridge of the Enterprise, someone in the crew repurposes a mini transporter that’s part of a game, to transport explosives into the parts of the ship controlled by the enemy as a way to fight back.

I thought that was a clever use of transporter tech.

[hef19898]

With the federation transportes, as depicted throughout the series, the impact is limited. Easy to block, unreliable. They are used so, all the time, for boarding actions.