Shooting vs beaming in Star Trek

[Dînadan]

Alternate Swiss cheese approach - transport an area into the same space, but all jumbled (tangent, iirc this is actually how Dalek guns are described as working in some ancillary materials).

And actually considering transporters and replicators are supposed to be related tech, would it be theoretically possible to use the transporter to beam something away and beam it back in a different configuration?



Side discussion, what factions would actually use these ideas people are generating? It's all well and good coming up with these ideas, but the lack of them in Trek could be down to the various factions having an aversion to them. Best I can think of is the Federation has standards which may make them have an aversion to such tactics (and/or they abide by a Space Geneva Convention), maybe Klingons see it as dishonourable (and something those dirty Romulans would use) and Romulans themselves prefer avoiding direct confrontation and focus more on misdirection and sneaking around, but even if these are the case, doesn't explain why the Cardassians, the Breen, etc don't use it. Unless there is a Space Geneva Convention that bans transporter weaponry (iirc in the Chains of Command review Chuck mentions weapons that are banned by treaties that even the Romulans obey, and isn't the super weapon in Nemesis also said to be banned tech, so maybe transporter weapons are likewise banned?).

[Dindu]

It takes several seconds to complete a transport, even if you don't rematerialise.
That's plenty of time to have automated systems react, and ships can move pretty damn quickly, so...

Of course all you'd end up with if you could just use transporters as weapons is someone writing up why it's so easy to defend against. From a writing point of view you'd be on a pointless exercise.

Then again ST has a long and illustrious history of failing to think through their hand wave tech, and most of the time that's fine, it's just frustrating when they lose stories because of it. I'd have liked to see an episode where, for example...

The Grey Lady picks up a distress signal, tries to help, manages to beam the crew off. Take them home, drop them off, and are immediately arrested for murder because that culture sees transporting as (the old argument) killing a person and creating an identical copy. There be drama in them thar hills.

Also, we're not given a good reason why you can't set your alarm clock to something along the lines of...
"6am, lock on, I'll be in bed, beam me directly to the bridge, in my uniform this time, trim the beard up, you know the way I like it, and a double espresso's worth of caffiene directly to my stomach. Whilst you're at it, I could do with losing about a pound and, AND, there's still not enough arch support in my shoes."

[The Romulan Republic]

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

Well, they have been used to beam weaponry on occasion.

[Fixer]

Post TNG Trek has always been weird on how it handled technology.

As Chuck pointed out, you have for example though, the TR-116 rifle. I believe the TR stands for "Too Reliable" as this badass weapon was never used by Starfleet yet they had the ability to replicate them at any time.

It was modified with a micro-transporter, allowing it to shoot through walls combined with a targeting sensor that could see through armoured bulkheads.

All of these technologies have countless different applications, which are never used because the character never thought about it again and shoved it all in a box.

[Dînadan]

Speaking of that rifle, they probably could have easily explained its lack of use with the addition of just a few lines; make the micro transporter something that's only been possible due to recent breakthroughs (think similar to how your mobile phone has more computing power than an entire room of computers from the sixties) and that either it's too prone to interference outside a controlled environment or it requires a part that's rare and can't be replicated, and make the eyepiece be one of the ones used by the Vorta on Dominion ships in place of a viewscreen and that either the Federation hadn't figured out how they work or again they're built with a crucial part that can't be made with a replicator (and in this case can only be found on Dominion controlled worlds meaning the only way to get one is to capture it from the Dominion directly).

[Fixer]

There's a lot of technical handwaves that you make with a few lines of appropriate technobabble. Really a lot of it comes down to two writing sins that crop up often in Trek a lot.

One, the introduction of incredible technology with easily imagined applications beyond it's use in the story.
Two, forgetting that they have a lot of this tech on-hand. Most often the "transporters are shut down" issue when there's the computer virus or holodeck malfunction of the week when they have shuttles with their own transporters built in.

[drthmik]

As has basically been mentioned; It has to do with basic Thoughtlessness
Writers using "magic" (and all technobabble is really magic when you get right down to it) to wave away something inconvenient and not thinking for even one second what the implications would be.
It's lazy writing or at least rushed

As such in the real world Transporters would ABSOLUTELY be used to deliver weapons and as a weapon themselves. Likely in ways we can't even imagine.