[Prince Charon]

On Teleporters

Basically, our equivalent to Star Trek's transporter would be a psychotronic exoteleportation system (that is, it teleports the passengers, but not itself). The question is how similar, or how advanced, do we want it to be?

* No transporter. They use shuttles, drop-pods, or even land the spacecraft, but they don't have an exoteleportation system that works like the transporter.

* Platform to platform teleportation. Like the Goa'uld Ring Transporters in Stargate, you need to have a big gadget at both ends to travel (or maybe just to teleport safely; teleportation accidents could be quite horrifying). If the other end refuses the connection, you aren't going anywhere (or again, not safely). These may be freestanding platforms, enclosed booths, tunnels like the zeta beam chambers in the Young Justice cartoon, or some other such thing. Depending on power requirements (and the ability of the vessel to wirelessly transmit power) and bulk, one end may be in a shuttlecraft.

* Platform to beacon and beacon to platform teleportation. Similar to the above, but you don't need a big gadget at both ends. You can have a portable beacon that lets the platform lock onto your location (and perhaps makes reality 'thinner,' or something like that). Depending on how portable it is, the entire away team might have them in their communicators, or even as implants. You still can't (safely, if at all) just lock onto a location with the vessel's sensors and teleport people to or from it.

* Platform to anywhere-in-range and anywhere-in-range to platform teleportation. Like the transporter on Star Trek (apart from when the writers are fudging things), the vessel's sensors and the teleporter's systems are good enough that you can usually beam down to a location without a platform or beacon and expect to be intact and unmodified, and beam back up likewise.

* Anywhere-in-range to anywhere-in-range teleportation. Like the Asgard transporters on Stargate, you don't need to be near the machine that's teleporting you on either end of the journey. This is also seen in Star Trek The Next Generation, but I only recall it for beaming directly to sickbay, and sickbay is likely to have a hidden transporter system for exactly that reason. Basically, you can be picked up from a planet and appear on the bridge, sickbay, or even another vessel than the one teleporting you, without ever needing to appear in the transporter room... and there may not even be a transporter room, for that matter.

My current preference is that this is simply a line of technological progression, and how good your spacecraft's transporters are (if you have them at all) depends on when in the vague timeline your game is set, and who you're playing; basically, it's even more optional than most things here. Of course, you can go completely off from this, and have telepoters be smaller versions of the vessel's FTL drive, that you carry around with you, like a baseball-sized teraporters in Schlock Mercenary. That departs rather a lot from the 'Star Trek' theme of this setting, though.

Unless there's a serious objection, I'm going to link this later on as the current title, rather than creating separate 'question' and 'answer' posts.