Oh, and this one's for you Larry. Your idea of Transporter immortality was actually the plot line for a fairly recent Star Trek comic IDW published called "Star Trek: Leonard McCoy Frontier Doctor". In it, there is a race of aliens called the Tarseans who wear special headbands whenever they use a transporter. When they use the transporters, they literally reset themselves to a previous state when they first used them. The only catch that the Tarseans saw was that if you didn't wear those special headbands, reverting back will also wipe your mind of any memory that you accumulated after using the transporter for the first time.
McCoy also discovered another problem with this method of immortality. The Tarseans are dying. Whenever their bodies are reset via the transporter, some "present" unliving cells get passed on into the "past" reset form. This doesn't happen when transporters are used in their normal fashion because you're not being reverted into anything outside of what you currently are. And since the Tarseans cannot reproduce, they know that this will eventually lead to the extinction of their race. Not bad for a non-canon book to explore the dangers of transporter technology.
So in the end, the Transporter is merely a tool that should have a lot of restrictions, and any violation of those restrictions should at least not happen often. When you introduce that Transwarp formula that gets rid of every transporter rule in the book with incredible ease, you're introducing an element to the franchise where there should be no reason at all not to continue to use it. Even Deep Space Nine was guilty of this when they introduced that rifle that could literally see and shoot through walls. An Vulcan used it to kill off many people without even being caught until that same rifle was used against him. Yes, a weapon that can see and shoot through walls and Federation has no tactical use for it during a war.
And one more example of not having transporters be the #1 problem solver in the universe.
*shivers*
Those screams still shake me.
McCoy also discovered another problem with this method of immortality. The Tarseans are dying. Whenever their bodies are reset via the transporter, some "present" unliving cells get passed on into the "past" reset form. This doesn't happen when transporters are used in their normal fashion because you're not being reverted into anything outside of what you currently are. And since the Tarseans cannot reproduce, they know that this will eventually lead to the extinction of their race. Not bad for a non-canon book to explore the dangers of transporter technology.
So in the end, the Transporter is merely a tool that should have a lot of restrictions, and any violation of those restrictions should at least not happen often. When you introduce that Transwarp formula that gets rid of every transporter rule in the book with incredible ease, you're introducing an element to the franchise where there should be no reason at all not to continue to use it. Even Deep Space Nine was guilty of this when they introduced that rifle that could literally see and shoot through walls. An Vulcan used it to kill off many people without even being caught until that same rifle was used against him. Yes, a weapon that can see and shoot through walls and Federation has no tactical use for it during a war.
And one more example of not having transporters be the #1 problem solver in the universe.
*shivers*
Those screams still shake me.