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In Star Trek, whenever someone wants to make a surprise attack against a ship or station or such with their shields down, why is beaming in a bomb such a rarely used tactic? For one, that would get you past all those pesky outer layers of armor and structure and it seems like you could pinpoint it at crucial facilities.

It's called, "We invented beaming as a clever way to get characters to new locations without having to worry about docking or landing animations, the actual mechanics of it in relation to weapons or the internal logic of the world were not thought out to that level because it was a silly genre show in the 60's. We really did not consider thousands of nerds work shopping ideas and loopholes for multiple decades. Who could have?"

Why didn't they just shoot around scenes where the shuttles would be then? Just have it go:

KIRK: OK, Spock, Bones, Crewman Ricky, let's go check out the hostile planet's surface.
[CUT]
Spock, Bones, Kirk, and Ricky are walking around the planet's surface

Or if that isn't flashy enough:

KIRK: OK, Spock, Bones, Crewman Ricky, let's go check out the hostile planet's surface.
[Reusable shot of a shuttle leaving the Enterprise]
Spock, Bones, Kirk, and Ricky are walking around the planet's surface

I am relaying the stated reason by everyone who worked on the production for why the transporters exist.
Apparently the shuttle craft set wasn't ready in time for the pilot, so they made a transporter set instead. I don't know why one is easier than the other, but that's the truth.

I can believe that they would find my solution really cheap; after all, it's just as bad as Voyager's off screen juggler. I can't believe that a pilot that was almost never aired needed to have the "going down" scene in there. After all, if they did pick up the show, they could just shoot the scene that needed to be there. On the other hand I could see this happening in the production office:

Suit 1) Well, if we do go ahead with the shuttle, we're going to need to spend $50k on a big plywood shuttle exterior and 5k an episode to move it into the right place, in addition to the shuttle set. Or we could use that replacement the writers made up. What do you think?
Suit 2) I think we need that $5k for the lyrics to the theme.
Suit 1) Great, let's pick that second one,

I think Trek would have been served well by making beaming (and using the replicators, for that matter) a more intricate, sensitive process. They wouldn't need to explain the mechanics- it would make sense for beaming to be hard to do when dealing with ships moving in unpredictable patterns or other possible disruptions presenting themselves.

There are a lot of instances where smart use of transporters, as they're shown in the shows, would have solved a lot of problems. How many times could they have avoided capture? Even in Best of Both Worlds, it's not at all clear why they couldn't beam a nuclear bomb (or Federation equivalent) over instead of personnel. Then there's the new movies, which are the worst offenders of all with their long distance beaming.

Crowley wrote:In Star Trek, whenever someone wants to make a surprise attack against a ship or station or such with their shields down, why is beaming in a bomb such a rarely used tactic? For one, that would get you past all those pesky outer layers of armor and structure and it seems like you could pinpoint it at crucial facilities.

Voyager did this at least once if I recall. Generally speaking if something is kinda cool and causes an explosion, Voyager has tried it once. Yet if this was considered to be a common threat, every ship would have to approach any crowded part of space with shields up or run the risk of a transporter bomb.

But here's another question: Why can't the transporter itself just rip apart the other ship? We've seen Transporter Code 14 at work, after all.

ChiggyvonRichthofen wrote:Then there's the new movies, which are the worst offenders of all with their long distance beaming.

This is nearly as bad as "Threshold" from a science perspective, and surely has to be decanonized by now?

Remember, to beam a bomb onto an unshielded enemy ship you need to drop your own shields which means they can beam bombs onto your ship (along with if you haven't taken out their weapons they can simultaneously pummel you with regular weapons fire and potentially take out critical systems which are now unprotected).

My personal solution would be to place a transporter inside a torpedo delivery system. Launch it through shields. BAM! Transport to enemy vessel.

In fact, transporters could be used in so many delightfully devious offensive capabilities without delivering a warhead.

How about the swiss cheese approach. Randomly transporting out several 1cm spheres of matter from things like the warp core reactor shielding, vital control systems or enemy crew's skulls.

there must be some sort of universe geneva convention that bans the use of transporters as weapons platforms