My headcanon (and maybe real canon somewhere?) is that it’s probably safer and more efficient to use the pad.
If you beam from the transporter pad, you have all the scanners and equipment right there to ensure the process is as safe as possible, performed at short range, while point-to-point means you’re doing the riskiest long-range part twice. Intuitively it should take more energy to carry out the remote part of the process, and we’ve seen that there are plenty of ways to interfere with it (though sometimes being on the pad doesn’t help either).
I imagine a point-to-point transport is like two transports just without rematerializing in between.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought too. In a lot of cases, characters will call a direct point to point trip an “emergency beam out” or use some similar phrase.
My headcanon (and maybe real canon somewhere?) is that it’s probably safer and more efficient to use the pad.
If you beam from the transporter pad, you have all the scanners and equipment right there to ensure the process is as safe as possible, performed at short range, while point-to-point means you’re doing the riskiest long-range part twice. Intuitively it should take more energy to carry out the remote part of the process, and we’ve seen that there are plenty of ways to interfere with it (though sometimes being on the pad doesn’t help either).
I imagine a point-to-point transport is like two transports just without rematerializing in between.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought too. In a lot of cases, characters will call a direct point to point trip an “emergency beam out” or use some similar phrase.