I know this probably an aside, but I always read this as like.
people mid-transport are vulnerable to attack/disturbing to look at so covering that up with a separate visual effect is a safety thing/makes stuff more pleasant for those involved, and different space civilizations have different ways of dealing with it?
or maybe that's just the case with caligulan transporters, so they use fog, but others don't?
or something in between.
Honestly that's as good of an explanation as any; the original line in the very first version of this scene (written when I was twelve) was "it looks cool."
I've been a fairly instinctive writer pretty much the entirety of my relationship with LOP, I'd often come up with something I liked the look of and then talk my brother into coming up with an actual explanation for it, lol (which is why he gets editor credits obviously)
So the real, doylist explanation is "it looks cool and it makes a nice hallmark of these specific transporters"
But as watsonian explanations go this one works as well as any. =)
people mid-transport are vulnerable to attack/disturbing to look at so covering that up with a separate visual effect is a safety thing/makes stuff more pleasant for those involved, and different space civilizations have different ways of dealing with it?
or maybe that's just the case with caligulan transporters, so they use fog, but others don't?
or something in between.
I've been a fairly instinctive writer pretty much the entirety of my relationship with LOP, I'd often come up with something I liked the look of and then talk my brother into coming up with an actual explanation for it, lol (which is why he gets editor credits obviously)
So the real, doylist explanation is "it looks cool and it makes a nice hallmark of these specific transporters"
But as watsonian explanations go this one works as well as any. =)