Star Trek used transporters due to budget limitations

If you’ve ever watched a television show before you’ve undoubtedly have seen a decision made that was strictly budgetary in nature. It happens all the time, well did. In the era of modern streaming services, the production quality has gone up exponentially. It wasn’t always the case though. Series like Arrow or Supernatural are limited in the scope of the story they can tell. Budgets are tight, and decisions have to be made not just for that episode but for the entire season as well. That’s why the original Star Trek series had to limit the use of shuttlecrafts seen on the show.

It was apparently going to be very expensive to film all the scenes of shuttlecrafts landing on the surface, and thus an alternate idea for getting the landing party onto the planet was created.

The answer to the problem was to create transporters, in order to beam up and down crew members to reduce the show’s budget. There were a few rules put into place, as the Star Trek Encyclopedia points out (via CBR).

The series took precautions to add in some limitations to the technology, as to not make storytelling impossible. Those were the tremendous amount of power, and transporting could only be done within line-of-sight.

The addition of teleportation in the Star Trek universe has added a lot of unique and Trek-centric moments that are specific to that series. From the iconic “Beam me up” quote, to the transportation accident that created Tuvix, and all the way to the iconic Star Trek teleportation sound effect.

Heck, even the teleporters in Star Trek have become iconic. So iconic that the original transporter floor from the Original Series was used as the transporter ceiling in The Next Generation.

Without the use of the transporter, Star Trek would be far different, even if it is the one form of technology that seems nearly impossible to actually create.