Also, witness B5. They didn't have "tedious shuttle flights", they just sped things up a bit.

B5 obviously had to use shuttles because they coudn't possibly employ transporter-type technology. They had to set themselves apart from Trek. To have used them would've been seen as a blatent rip off of Trek.

In "Family Business", I think Sisko and Yates had a discussion about the quality of transporters aboard the Xhosa. It was told that transporters came in "marks", and Kasidy's old "mark V" was too primitive to handle the transportation of some delicate goods, so her crew had to haul the barrels by hand. Ben had thought Kasidy had the old model "mark VI" aboard, so presumably the modern TNG-style variant used by Sisko himself was mark VII or newer. (Note that they are apparently indeed discussing the age of the system, and not something like affordability, with Kasidy having bought the economy model of a modern device - I don't remember the dialogue word for word, but will check.)

Now, seven consecutive, gradually evolving marks or more (eight or more if we say the Voyager version came later) is just barely enough to account for all the transporter visual effects we have seen so far. Kirk's gold-shimmering TOS device (and the Jenolan's or the Ligonians' device) could be, say, mark III. Then there would be a blue-sparkling mark IV for ST:TMP, lasting for little over a decade; mark V with those scanning lines for the TOS movies; mark VI in between, if Paramount wants to revisit the E-C era or something; and finally mark VII for TNG, to be followed by mark VIII for Voyager and the TNG movies (these effects share such great commonality that I think they should be regarded as the same).

This leaves two marks for pre-TOS times, and gives an average of about 15 years of "mark lifetime". If we assume that the rapid discarding of the TMP version was due to an atypical failure of that design, then we can hike the lifetime closer to 20 years. This would place mark I somewhere in the 2230s-40s - which is exactly where fanfic has been placing it all the time!

One could say that marks were only assigned to human-cleared systems, and that cargo transporters and experimental, transporter-psychosis-inducing teleportation devices were in existence for some decades before that. This would still leave the device history somewhat short of the mid-22nd century mark...

One could of course also say that the marks do not proceed chronologically after all, nor span the whole history of the transporter technology. They could parallel the shuttlecraft "types" or "classes", neither of which has shown a satisfactory linear trend (class 4 for the TNG "van" in "The Outcast" yet class 2 for the VOY "sportscar" in "Drone" or "Extreme Risk", and no canon confirmation of types at all - and the type numbers are only at 9 now, even though shuttle design lifetime seems awfully short and dozens if not hundreds types of shuttles would be expected to have been created by TNG time).

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Voyager's transporters might look the way they do thanks to whatever engineering team installed them, whereas the Enterprise E's slightly different effect comes from some tweaks LaForge has made.

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My thoughts exactly. Transporter effect is generally the same in the Federation 24th century.. hell its only slightly diffrent in the 29th century.