Teleporters and Transporters

Energize!

Comanderette Zircon: Shall I have Snotty beam you down?
President Skroob: I don't know about that beaming stuff. Is it safe?
Zircon: Oh yes, sir. Snotty beamed me twice last night. It was wonderful.
Skroob: All right, I'll take a shot at it. What the hell, it works on Star Trek.

—Spaceballs

Phlebotinum constructs that "beam" characters from the Cool Starship to Kirk's Rock and back again. Could also be done on-demand if the character has a device to "summon" one, or if the story puts them Inside a Computer System and they can just select the place within the system to teleport to.

Characters stand in teleporter, special effect happens, they disappear. Cut to planet surface, where they reappear by reversed special effect.

Considerably cheaper than a shuttlecraft, from a special effects point of view. Star Trek only has them because the cost of landing craft effects proved to be too much for the budget of the original series. However, years later, Gene Roddenberry admitted they could have just handled things with a jump-cut between "Launch a shuttle!" and "Here we are on the surface.", as evidenced in Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, where they don't generally have transporters, but do have very fast, rarely seen shuttles.

With very few exceptions (The Tomorrow People, Stargate SG-1), such devices are capable only of comparatively short-range transport. You still need a Cool Starship to get between stars.

This technology has the potential to short-circuit the drama of a story, so all examples have limitations built in to cause the transporter/teleporter/ disintegrator/whateverator to fail whenever it is needed most. (See: Plot-Sensitive Items, Phlebotinum Breakdown, and Teleporter Accident.)

The ability to accomplish the same thing without technological means also crops up from time to time, either by "magic", or as a kind of superpower. Non-technological teleportation accomplished by psychic power is often called "Jaunting", after Alfred Bester's science fiction classic, The Stars My Destination.

The Star Trek-style turn-you-into-energy-and-back-again transporter is perhaps the single most physically impossible piece of Phlebotinum in all of Science Fiction, for a large number of different reasons, including enormous temperature and data storage requirements, computational time (many times the age of the universe), massive energy output (more energy than is available in the entire universe), and unachievable transmission focusing resolution (all explained by physicist Lawrence Krauss in The Physics of Star Trek). This puts it among the crown jewels of Weird Science.

It also raises some hairy metaphysical questions as well, regarding just what happens to you when you step into the thing, and who exactly emerges at the other end. This issue was explored rather bleakly in the James Patrick Kelly story "Think Like a Dinosaur" (later adapted into a 1990s Outer Limits episode). And that's if the process works. See also the Twinmaker teleporter, a teleporter that analyzes the contents of one booth, sends a description to the other, creates a clone there and destroys the original.

Due to the above, teleportation in modern works often works by warping space somehow, or passing through Another Dimension.

See also Portal Network.

Used offensively to kill or incapacitate, it's Weaponized Teleportation.

Related tropes:

Examples of Teleporters and Transporters include:

Anime and Manga

  • Dragon Ball: Goku learns a specialized movement ability called "instantaneous movement", though he can only teleport to places where there are people with ki to lock onto. This means his effective limit is his limit for sensing ki.
    • But given that Goku can simply skip into the Spirit Realm to extend his range, basically, if there's life (or afterlife), Goku can go there.
  • In the end, the whole plot of Martian Successor Nadesico boils down to a fight over the Applied Phlebotinum that allows teleportation of everything from individuals to whole fleets of starships (note that the former is actually harder, as it takes a lot of effort to teleport living creatures without killing them). As a bonus, said teleportation also allows for Time Travel, or rather, vice versa.
  • A Certain Magical Index:
    • Kuroko Shirai can teleport herself or anything she comes in contact with. The higher concentration required relative to other types of powers prevents her from using it if she can't stay focused.
    • Musujime Awaki has the ability "Move Point" which is basically a stronger version of Kuroko's Teleport: while Kuroko can only teleport things she touches, Awaki's ability boils down to "everything from point A to point B" as long as both are within 800 meters and the target doesn't weight more than 4,5 tons. It also has a downside, though: while Teleport displaces matter from the destination space, Move Point does not. In her backstory, Awaki found this out the hard way when, to quote The Other Wiki, "she miscalculated and teleported her leg inside a wall, accidentally tearing her leg skin and muscles out from the wall".
    • Some kinds of magic do something that looks like teleportation, but is actually movement of everything except the target in the opposite direction. Othinus can do this with a spiritual item known as the Bone Boat, allowing her to move thousands of kilometers from the Sea of Japan to Denmark. Thor, in his "Almighty" state, can do the same but on a much smaller scale.
  • Noticeably absent in Gundam for all of its Sci-Fi tropes until The ∀ Gundam and the Turn X. Notable for being done with Nanomachines somehow.
  • In Gantz, the titular sphere uses a slow teleportation process to send the team members on their missions. In keeping with the Crosses the Line Twice spirit of the series, the insides of the characters' bodies are visible during transportation. Also, one of the Gantz weapons, the Y-Gun, uses the same process to send captured enemies to an as yet unknown location.
  • Doraemon had the "Anywhere Door", which was a door that could take you wherever you specified. You have to be pretty specific about your target location, as it doesn't care whether or not it'd be practical for you to, say, end up walking over the threshold straight into the ocean.
  • Common in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. Cool Ships like the Arthra come equipped with them for sending crew members passengers down planets and space stations; good enough mages can transport themselves across planets and dimensions though it will require quite a bit of preparation; and powerful summoners could teleport entire armies en masse and at multiple points as a secondary ability.
  • The ability to teleport in Mahou Sensei Negima is treated as an extremely difficult and high level type of magic. Artfacts tend to be required, usually an entire rune port being involved; these are the mage versions of an airport and there are were only 11 in the Magical World. A small few can teleport without one (usually by creating an elemental gate of some sort).
  • Psychicers in Psyren sometimes have this power. W.I.S.E. Commander Shiner's Hexagonal Transfer System fires a beam that teleports everything it engulfs to a specified location on top of standard teleportation. Lan's hypercube boxes engulf areas and then "download" the contents of one to another.
  • Among the titular Zettai Karen Children, Aoi is the teleporter. Her ability is a function of mass, distance and target density. Mio is her antagonist counterpart who has an ability to create Portal Doors on chosen locations, and several other characters use a little bit of telesensing for their composite abilities.
  • In Star Blazers / Space Battleship Yamato, the Gamilons have a teleporter called the SMITE that can transport whole ships (or whole flocks of space mines) across relatively short tactical distances. Also, the space warp ability possessed by most ships in the Yamatoverse is essentially a form of very long-range teleportation.
  • This was the ability of the large monster in Cencoroll, who seemed to create small holes in the air and get sucked throught them.
  • This is one of the powers Madara Uchiha from Naruto demonstrated, along with intangibility. This apparently works by using his own eye as a portal.
    • The 4th Hokage developed the ability to use summoning abilities to rapidly teleport himself to locations where he had placed special seals.
  • Ryoko has this as an ability in most Tenchi Muyo! incarnations. The main limit she cites is needing to have previously been in that location.
  • The 00 Raiser from Mobile Suit Gundam 00 can "quantize" itself when in Trans-Am, allowing for effectively short distance teleports. From the movie, the 00 Qan[T] has the same ability, except the Qan[T] can quantize itself over vast interstellar distances.


Comic Books

  • In the X-Men comics, Nightcrawler has the ability to teleport through another dimension, with a characteristic "BAMF!" noise and puff of brimstone. He also crops up in X Men the Animated Series, X-Men: Evolution, and the movies.
    • There's also Lila Cheney, who can't teleport less than intergalactic distances (she crosses most of the universe just to go half a mile). There is also Magik, who can teleport through both time and space but has to go through the demonic dimension of Limbo to do it. Subverted in that increased time or distance can (and has) distort the chances of arriving in the right...time or space.
    • Magik's spell has been taught to another character, Megan Gwynn (Pixie) who made Nightcrawler feel obsolete for a story (as the Magic Teleport travels greater distances and accurately). However we've never seen Magik or Pixie teleport a 'short' distance.
      • Magik's teleportation is her mutant power, which makes the spell Pixie uses a bit of Did Not Do the Research. Illyana's also done short distances, too, in combat.
    • The female mutant Blink from Age of Apocalypse and Exiles is also an example. She can teleport large groups of people as well as parts of objects.
    • U-Go Girl from X-Force was a teleporter, but she wasn't a very good one - even after a while on the job as a superhero, porting still made her feel ill. Venus Dee Milo would more or less replace her on the roster when the team changed to X-Statix, and was a marked improvement who even had other powers besides.
  • Blow Out of The New Universe has the paranormal ability to teleport, but the place he's in blows up immediately after he teleports out. This creates problems when he goes homicidally insane.
    • Peek-a-Boo of The DCU has the same power, but is not homicidally insane...yet.
    • Another New Universe example: Sedara Bakut, a character from later issues of Psi-Force, can create door-like portals in space.
  • Misfit, also from The DCU, has teleportation with the added bonus that it heals her when she does it.
    • It actually accelerates her already super-Healing Factor. She can go almost anywhere without fault without the need to visualize her destination (at least, not specifically in the way most others do). However, she can't take anything organic with her, else they explode.
  • Charles Brigman, aka "Greyhound" from PS238 is a high-level teleporter, capable of teleporting himself plus at least one passenger in physical contact to any place he has previously physically visited in an instant, regardless of distance (he can even teleport across dimensional boundaries). He, as well as anyone teleporting with him, keeps momentum between jumps.
  • In the Marvel Universe, Cloak can teleport via the "darkforce dimension," which his cloak is a portal to. He can take passengers, but it's a pretty traumatizing ride if his partner Dagger isn't around to ameliorate the effects.
  • In the Mirage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mirage series, teleportation technology, due to its obvious wartime applications, is a goal for nearly every space-faring race. When Professor Honeycutt appears to have reached a breakthrough, he is hunted by two different cultures. Only one culture, the usually-benign Utroms, have achieved it, and other groups theorize that they actively, if covertly, prevent other people from obtaining it.
  • The universe of Watchmen has teleportation tech - with a major drawback that things teleported tend to explode upon arrival. This effect turns out to be a major part of Ozymandias' Batman Gambit
  • John Stone of Planetary has his Blitzen Suit which enables short-range teleportation.
  • Tempest of Atari Force has the powers of Nightcrawler, but in a lighter flavor. (Transfer dimension is a pleasant, sunny place.)
  • Brita in Darker than Black got the ability to teleport herself and touched living creatures. Clothes don't count, by the way (not that she cared much).
  • Doctor Strange has at least one teleportation spell, though it's implied to be a considerable magical effort and also very noticeable—he's happy to take ordinary transportation if he's not certain the destination is safe, or in non-emergency situations.


Fan Works


Film -- Live Action

  • Spaceballs deliberately parodies Star Trek's transporters, down to "Shall I have Snotty beam you down, sir?" It does not go well, as one man ends with his body twisted around. It wasn't particularly necessary, as he was one room over.
  • Galaxy Quest exploits the same joke with the "digital conveyer". Using it is more an art than a science, and it only works with humans. Using it on pig-lizards has negative results.[1]
    • It must also be noted that the idea of conveyer is less naive that the traditional transporter. It must be actually targeted on the object to transport or place to transport back.
  • One early, well-known example of teleportation in film is the 1959 feature The Fly, which was successful enough to lead to several sequels and a big budget 1986 remake (which had a sequel of its own). The entire franchise is based on the results of teleportation experiments Gone Horribly Wrong.
  • A machine that duplicates a person and teleports the copy is a major plot point in The Prestige.
    • Or does it leave the copy and teleport the original?
    • Or does it obliterate the original entirely, and produce two copies, one in the machine, one at a distance?
  • The titular ship in Event Horizon used the Another Dimension version of this to achieve Faster-Than-Light Travel. Unfortunately...
  • Let us not forget the Star Trek films themselves (ST:I - VI TOS cast, VII - X TNG cast, newest one a "reboot" of TOS cast). Interestingly, the 2009 Star Trek film by J.J. Abrams uses a different visual effect for the transporter beam, to try to differentiate it from all pre-existing versions, it uses a swirling pattern as the molecules are dissolved. Also interesting to note that in this film, they have problems locking on to some people, and at one point Scotty uses a new method he developed to beam on to a ship that is far beyond normal transporter range.
  • While typically depicted as a sort of jump-gate technology, Space Bridges in the Transformers Film Series are teleportation devices utilized by the Seekers to (initially) find unpopulated solar systems to harvest. They can take passengers, but landing is apparently troublesome if you're not a giant robot.
  • Mars Needs Women starts with three women vanishing abruptly in bad jump cuts. The Martian later states that: "We attempted to seize three women by transponder." Their failure probably has something to do with the fact that a transponder is an entirely different device from a transporter.
  • Members of The Adjustment Bureau can fast travel to anywhere that is connected to a door, provided the person who opens the door must have a special hat to fulfill this condition.
  • The digitization laser in Tron was originally intended to be used as a teleporter, but its use has so far been limited to sending people into Cyberspace.

Literature

  • The Harry Potter novels and movies have the Floo Network, a government-regulated teleportation system that operates through the user's fireplace. It is also possible for wizards to learn to 'apparate', that being the ability to disappear from one place and appear in another at will (with some restrictions). This, however, is difficult, highly uncomfortable and quite dangerous if done badly (failed apparition can result in the wizard getting 'splinched', i.e. leaving parts of themselves behind). For this reason, a license is required in order to legally apparate.
    • If we're counting the Floo, then portkeys should count as well.
  • Steven Gould's Jumper (and sequel RefleX) are about a teenager (and, in RefleX, his wife) who can teleport to any location he can remember clearly. Made into a movie, which was sorta vaguely related.
  • The time travel of Michael Crichton's Timeline involved a mix of "turn you into data, transmit, retranslate back into matter" (accomplished via super-powerful quantum computers) teleportation and alternate universes.
  • In David Weber's Empire From the Ashes series, in addition to standard FTL, the Fourth Empire also made use of a network of "mat-trans" devices that threw matter through hyperspace and caught it on the other side. This caused the fall of the Fourth Empire by allowing the spread of a horrifically-effective bio-weapon.
  • Robert A. Heinlein's book Tunnel in the Sky has a "Ramsbotham Gate" that requires equipment only at one end.
  • In the novel Good Omens, apparently demons can transport themselves over the telephone network. When Crowley escapes a Lord of Hell, he traps the aforementioned Lord in his answering machine's tape in a Crowning Moment of Funny.
  • Tunnel Through Time by Lester del Rey has some characters going back to the time of the dinosaurs, the Applied Phlebotinum breaks down and they are stranded, then later, one of the scientists comes back to get them after developing some improvements that allow him to summon the gateway with a device like a remote control.
  • Larry Niven's Known Space 'verse has humans installing "transfer booths" throughout the world, which creates all sorts of changes in society on Earth due to their virtually free running costs: Geographical identity vanishes in the face of global monoculture; people travel all over the world for minor errands like shopping; whenever anything happens on the news a massive "flash crowd" zips in from every corner of the earth after hearing about it; and whenever there is a crime, no one has an alibi. The Puppeteers' "stepping disks" also play a major role in the Ringworld sequels.
    • He also put teleporting booths in the otherwise hard-science A World Out Of Time. Unlike the Known Space teleporters, these were innately short-range and required a long, unbroken string of booths to travel long distances.
    • Niven also wrote another Verse where exploring the social and economic ramifications of similar teleport technology is the main theme of the stories.
  • Dan Simmons's novel Ilium has some of its cast living in the aftermath of The Singularity. Most transportation on Earth now involves "neutrino faxing" through faxnodes, which achieve instantaneous travel from any node to another by transmitting only the data of the traveler's composition from node to node, breaking down the original into raw matter, stored for the reconstruction of other travellers. Faxing is technically death and instant cloning at the other side, complete with memories. When they find out, this bothers the main characters for all of 5 seconds. Hinted at to the reader who recalls that "fax" is a shortening of "facsimile," or exact copy...
    • Simmons does extremely high technology in his science fiction as a matter of course. His somewhat more famous Hyperion series had galactic society linked by wormhole-like portals on countless worlds. The absurdly super-rich had houses with doors built out of these portals, meaning their house could technically be on a dozen or more different planets. Of course, when the portal network crashes...
  • Explored heavily in The Resurrected Man by Sean Williams. Also includes neat spin offs, like saving brain backups and teleport surgery.
  • C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine Cycle novels (begun long before Stargate was conceived, and based on ideas in still earlier Andre Norton novels) feature a network of gates originally built by a long-vanished species, which link countless inhabited planets together. The gates can be used for Time Travel, but if anyone tries to alter the past the result will be catastrophic for every planet that has gates. In an attempt to prevent this, the title character Morgaine travels from planet to planet, attempting to shut down the gate network one planet at a time.
  • Anne McCaffrey uses this in two of her series, Dragonriders of Pern and The Tower/Rowan series. In both Psychic Power is used to move people and things through space (and we find out later, time). In the Tower books, range is limited to the Talent's personal strength, though they can use purpose-built power generators to boost their powers (both range and "lifting" capacity) massively. The Dragons are apparently only limited by the lack of accurate reference points. (Riders have accidentally time-traveled by visualizing their desired location at the wrong time of day.)
  • Marion Zimmer Bradley used this in some of her Darkover novels. Towers full of powerful psychics could send people or objects from tower to tower instantaneously.
  • Katherine Kurtz's Deryni have Transfer Portals, which are small areas on a floor or earth (usually roughly a square meter at most) that have unique psychic signatures (described as a faint tingling sensation for the Deryni who touch them or stand on them). Deryni can travel instantaneously between two Portals by standing on the departure Portal, mentally concentrating on the destination Portal and "warping the energies just so". There are a number of limitations which keep them from being excessively advantageous:
    • Deryni must know the signatures of both Portals (to ensure they end up where they intended to go and can safely return). A highly skilled Deryni could give another Deryni a sufficiently accurate inpression of a Portal's signature for the recipient to able to use it, but most Deryni read Portal signatures directly for themselves.
    • Repeated jumps are mentally and physically tiring, as are longer distance trips.
    • Thanks to the persecutions and the Laws of Ramos, some Portals were destroyed and others are kept secret. Building a Portal requires specialized knowledge that in twelfth-century Gwynedd is not widespread, as well as a great deal of energy.
    • A Deryni can take another person or similar amount of matter through, but not much more than that. Taking another living person through requires that the "passenger" relinquish mental control to the active partner. This can mean lowering one's shields or being unconscious.
    • Portals can be set to limit their use even if their signatures are widely known. A Portal may be set so that it can only be detected by certain people, and it can be set so that a person could use it yet be unable to leave the Portal square (even to teleport back!) unless released by the Portal's owner or some designated person(s).
  • The wizards in the Young Wizards series can use a transit spell (a.k.a private gating) to move around the world, to another planet, or even to another star system. Even though the spell is easy to learn and safe to use it does tire out the wizard, especially for long trips, so most wizards use it for short trips to naturally occurring world gates and then use the world gates for long distance travel, since world gate travel takes much less energy. On planets with very advanced technology non-wizards can use the world gates for inter-stellar travel.
  • The stories set in Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga feature a galaxy connected by a network of stargate-like wormholes. The preferred method for interplanetary travel? Railroad, of course.
    • The sequel saga, The Void Trilogy, does this straight. Most important planets, like Earth, are covered in a "T-sphere", a network created by miles-high orbital towers, that can create wormholes the size of a person and send them from place to place on the planet instantly.
  • In Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt", people who use the titular teleportation device have to be dosed with sleeping gas before being sent through. That's because anyone who makes the trip while conscious suffers a horrific side effect: while their body is transported instantaneously, their consciousness floats through a featureless limbo for what seems like eons, and they emerge from the experience permanently insane.
  • In addition to teleportation as an occasional Psychic Power, the Perry Rhodan universe features ubiquitous 'matter transmitters'. These generally require a receiving unit to work, but there is also a stock starship weapon that teleports large-caliber nukes without needing one of those at the target location. (It doesn't work through modern shields, but a direct hit on those or even a near miss is still bad news.)
    • Also feature Star-transmitter that allow ships/Fleet/Planet teleportation between galaxy. Not common but used as a plot coupon more than often.
  • Teleportation devices known as displacers are common in The Culture. Most of the large ships have them and they can be used for things like transporting cargo and putting an anti-matter nuke in you opponents back pocket. However, it is noted that there is an average failure rate of one in seventy eight million displacements, usually with undesireable results.
    • This is a nice comment on acceptable risk. For The Culture all other methods of transport/emergency evacuation are essentially perfect, thus displacement is rarely used.
    • It should also be noted that teleportation in the Culture is not done by the disassembly/reassembly mechanism, but by the use of some vaguely described short-lived wormhole technology
  • Teleportation via sorcery is commonplace in the Dragaera Verse, where all that is needed to do so at will is Imperial citizenship and the proper training. Steven Brust makes teleporting the basis for a running gag in the Vlad Taltos novels: while Dragaerans suffer no side effects, humans become extremely nauseated by the sensations of spatial displacement and usually puke afterwards.
  • The Luggage in Discworld can be considered to be a transporter, since it can return previously dirty clothes washed and ironed. It can also make people disappear (by 'eating' them), and can teleport 'itself'.
    • Magical teleportation is known. Known to be a pain, anyway. Teleport mishaps are not unknown as a concept, and are very unwelcome.
    • The Nac Mac Feegle have a famous ability to get into anywhere, including Another Dimension, which is eventually explained as a form of teleportation called the "crawstep". They rarely use it to travel within a dimension; for that they have "feets".
  • In Rogue Moon, teleportation is done the Star Trek way of decomposition and reconstitution. The book is more interested in the implications: two copies of the same person genuinely are the same person, giving them telepathy until they diverge enough. This is useful in investigating an alien machine that kills its occupants. The decomposition is lethal, no ifs, ands, or buts. The scan can then be reconstituted any number of times, but this is a separate process. Rogue Moon is messed up.
  • In George R. R. Martin's shared world series, Wild Cards, there are several characters who use various forms of teleportation. Examples include "Popinjay," a private detective who uses his forefinger and thumb to form a gun and can teleport anyone or anything he points at to anywhere he can visualize including the N.Y. jails or the scoreboard at Yankee stadium. In the recent books, "Lilith" is an assasin who teleports herself and can teleport others she grabs.
  • Alfred Bester's novel The Stars My Destination posits a future in which people have learned to teleport ("jaunte"), but only over moderate distances (up to a few hundred miles, depending on the jaunter's skill). Jaunting through space is believed impossible, until the protagonist somehow jaunts several hundred thousand miles to escape from his doomed spaceship. It doesn't improve his life.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: "I teleported home one night with Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Maggie's heart away, and I got Sidney's leg." The actual process seems relatively safe, though—the only issue is some protein and salt loss for first-timers, and the only mishaps are either user issues or someone helping themselves to the transport.
  • The Guardians each have a unique Gift related to what they were in life. Teleportation is common among those who yearned to see the world but were trapped in their hometowns. Currently only three Guardians have this Gift, Michael, Selah and Jake Hawkins.
  • The Grimnoir Chronicles: Travelers from the Grimnoir books.
  • Harry Harrison's short story collection One Step From Earth posited the idea of a teleportation system that involved taking two objects and connecting them across any distance by allowing them to share the same spot in another continuum (where, conveniently enough, time doesn't exist). As one character puts it: "What goes in one comes out the other." The book then goes on to explore the impact of such a thing on everything: warfare, romance, colonization, medicine, crime and punishment, and mankind's ultimate destiny as a species.
  • Transporters (obviously) feature in the Star Trek Expanded Universe. One novel, Federation, has a character from the late twenty-first century be transported and become depressed because he thinks he's gone through one of the experimental teleporters from his own time, which simply transferred the information to make a copy and then killed the original. Starfleet officers have to explain to him that the modern transporter converts your original molecules to energy and back again and then reassembles them.
    • Additionally, the novel Spock Must Die! (only the second Star Trek novel ever published) allows Doctor McCoy to explain his distrust of transporter technology. He believed that when a person's body is broken down into particles by the transporter, the individual no longer exists, and the reconstituted person who appears on the other side is merely a copy who doesn't realize this himself due to having the memories of the previous individual.
  • In the Heralds of Valdemar books, this falls within the telekinetic skill called 'Fetching'. A skilled Fetcher can move living things without harming them; under duress they can even move themselves. Companions and other magical beings (Firecats most notably) can move themselves and a passenger this way, though it's somewhat unpleasant, especially if they make a number of 'Jumps' in a row.
  • Septimus and Marcia Overstrand in Septimus Heap use teleportation spells a few times. These have a rather long lag time between the start and the end of the process, which results in a few troubles.
  • Ron Goulart's The Emperor of the Last Days not only has teleporting as a commonplace means of transportation, but a character named Deadend has a psychic ability that's unusually versatile, even for the setting. Deadend can lock on to and teleport things without having previously known their size, shape, or exact whereabouts. "All he had to do, he wasn't sure why, was to get in the vicinity and think about what he was after. Inside his head would come a picture. Then he concentrated, willed the thing to move." He can also use this for ...And Show It to You.
  • In The Phoenix Legacy by M.K. Wren, the matter transmitter was a new technology developed by the Society of the Phoenix. Not only was it useful to them in their revolutionary efforts against the Concord, but it could also potentially make obsolete the transportation cartel which was the Big Bad's main source of power. People who needed to be retrieved by "MT" had to wear transponders called "MT fixes" to let the distant system lock on to them.


Live Action TV

  • Star Trek. The main built-in limitation was the need for communicators to provide homing signals (directly or via forward observation) for the ship's transporter system, although practically any Negative Space Wedgie will probably also conveniently block or disrupt the transporter beams until it's been dealt with. Transporters were also supposed to be unable to beam through shields, although there have been several counterexamples.
    • Star Trek: Insurrection had some sort of energy beam which was being used to capture colonists and force-migrate so that the planet and its resources could be exploited. The exploiters weren't willing to commit murder, but kidnapping by teleportation was sufficient.
      • The bad guys in Insurrection used regular transporters just like every other species in ST has, but since Captain Picard and company had set up transport inhibitors (jammers), the bad guys had to use drones that hit each colonist with tags (like RFID tags), which would enable them to get a transporter lock. The transporter effect looked a little different, as it does with each species, i.e. Federation is blue/white, Klingon is red, Cardassian is orange/yellow, Borg is green, etc.
    • Whenever there is a transporter malfunction leaving people stranded on the planet, the crew immediately forgets about the shuttlecraft, without even so much as a hand-wave to explain why they can't use them.
      • Let's not forget (although the crew seems to) the subcutaneous transponder, which is supposed to be able to allow them to be located and transported without a communicator. Its real storyline purpose was to have a cool new way to escape a jail cell.
  • A throwaway line on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the only examination of the social effects of the transporter that Star Trek ever had: Sisko says that when he first started going to Starfleet Academy in San Francisco, he got so homesick that he went back home to New Orleans every night to have dinner with his father. He used up an entire month's worth of transporter credits in a week. For comparison, today this would be a four-hour plane trip costing around $500.
  • In Star Trek: Enterprise the transporter was a new technology "approved for bio-transport", but with the crew reluctant to use it for anything but inanimate objects. Sheer necessity forces them to do otherwise during the Season 3 Xindi conflict, and after that 'beaming' becomes a standard tactic. However, there was an episode ("Vanishing Point") where Hoshi Sato uses the transporter and begins to fade out of existence. It turns out to be All Just a Dream experienced in mere seconds as Hoshi was rematerialising. A recommendation is made to Starfleet to compress the transport beam.
  • Blakes Seven. Teleportation was performed through teleporter bracelets, which therefore had to be nicked from the characters. Virtually every episode. Even in their first use "Cygnus Alpha", Blake was relieved of his. The Liberator's teleport bracelets were also fragile and highly prone to breakage. Those used aboard the Scorpio were sturdier, but no less nickable. (BBC budgets being what they were, the "special effect" involved was drawing a thick white line around the person before they appeared out of thin air.)
    • Interestingly, the effect on the transporter pad was different than the effect on the planet (or other remote location.) The planet had the white outline, while the transporter pad had a sine-wave distortion effect.
    • When the special effects improved in Series 4, the Scorpio teleportation effect was more similar to a Star Trek-style beaming.
  • Doctor Who has used an occasional TransMat device, most notably in "The Seeds of Death", set in a future where only weird eccentrics had any interest in any other means of transportation.
    • The TARDIS itself, by dematerializing and rematerializing somewhere else in time and space as it does, could be said to behave similarly to a teleporter, though it is made clear that the TARDIS moves through the time vortex to get places.
    • The old series established the rule that "short hops" in the TARDIS - moving only a small distance in time or space - were very dangerous and for emergencies only, because many plots could have been resolved too easily if the TARDIS could be used as a teleporter. The new series have quietly dropped this rule.
    • In the second half of the Tenth Doctor's run, he seemed pretty hostile towards people (or at least humans) trying to use, develop, or exploit teleportation and teleportation-related devices.
  • Stargate SG 1 has "rings", which require a ring platform at both ends (usually. Ringing from an atmospheric craft to the ground can be accomplished by just dropping the rings out the bottom of the ship), and can be intercepted by flying into the transmission beam. The Asgard have an even more advanced and flexible beaming system that can beam things of any size and doesn't require such things as rings. Humanity has adopted that technology in limited numbers. Stargate Atlantis introduces Wraith transporters, which emit a visible beam that "scoops up" anyone in its path and stores them in compressed form until needed. Atlantis has its own internal teleportation system which lacks any kind of special effect except a descending light through stained-glass doors (Which seems to imply that they are merely a redesigned ring platform), and functions exactly like a Sufficiently Advanced Elevator. Also, as more and more technical details are revealed, the stargates themselves are turning out to be highly advanced teleporters.
    • Subverted in one episode where O'Neill and Teal'c are trapped in an experimental spacecraft. Jacob Carter shows up with a Tok'ra spaceship but they face the problem of how to get the two from the disabled craft to his. When O'Neill asks if he can't just "Beam them up", Carter responds "Who do I look like, Scotty?"
    • The Stargates themselves do not count. They are wormholes, which work by bending space-time.
      • Although they do in fact create wormholes, the Stargates also dematerialise and rematerialise the objects being transported through them ("48 Hours" being the prime instance of Phlebotinum Breakdown related to this).
        • Presumably it's easier and/or more power-efficient to beam things through a tiny wormhole than to create one capable of taking a human-sized (or larger) object directly. This is alluded to in the finale of Stargate Atlantis, when it is implied that creating a wormhole big enough to take a full-sized ship without beaming requires an enormous amount of power.
    • The Asgard transporters are far more advanced than the old Ancient 'ring' transporters (that the Goa'uld use all the time) in that the Asgard ones are not particularly limited by the size of the object (the Prometheus transports a whole skyscraper in Dues Ex Machina for example, and in Thor's Chariot, an Asgard vessel practically hoovers up a trio of pyramids and everything else the Goa'uld have brought). They can also transport through things that rings can't get through (in 'The Intruder' they beam Sheppard through the cockpit of the F-302, and in 'Critical Mass' they apparently use it to beam a Goa'uld symbiote out of a body).
    • There were also the Aschen transporter platforms that did not require rings. You just get on the platform and choose your destination on the small console. A small flash later you're there. No word on what happens if the destination platform is not empty.
      • The city of Atlantis (and, presumably, all the other Ancient mobile cities of the same design) have internal transporter platforms that work in the same way. If both platforms being used are occupied, anything on them simply swap places.
  • Power Rangers: Teleportation existed in several of the show's incarnations in different ways. The original rangers could teleport by turning into colored streaks of light, though it sometimes appeared that they were actually flying instead. In later seasons, teleportation was less common for the heroes whose powers weren't alien in origin, but villains usually maintained some form of instant transmission. For the seasons that had it, PR was considered one of the exceptions mentioned in the article lead: they could and did travel to other star systems via teleportation.
  • Andromeda did not have reliable teleportation technology, though they occasionally encountered characters with access to "tesseract fields", which most often allowed instant transport, but could also allow time travel, intangibility, and pretty much anything else the plot called for. Also, many of the more advanced beings (such as Paradine and avatars) being only loosely rooted in time and space, could pop into existence wherever they liked.
    • There was also that time-travel device built by Harper and the Perseids based on the concept of quantum entanglement, that was used to successfully send Dylan 300 years into the past and back. They also try to use it later to teleport Dylan from the edge of a black hole, unsuccessfully this time.
  • The Tomorrow People: Teleportation was an innate ability of some of the characters.
  • Red Dwarf has featured several different teleportation devices, each of which has had different rules governing its operation. Usually the Rule of Funny.
  • The original 1960s version of The Outer Limits featured teleportation in several episodes.
    • In "The Mice", aliens from the planet Chromo send human scientists the instructions to build a "Teleportation Agency" so that one of their people can be "transmitted" from Chromo to Earth—and, eventually, vice versa.
    • In "The Special One", Evil Teacher Mr. Zeno travels between Earth and his homeworld via a "lightning bolt" effect that is one of the series' most striking visuals.
    • In "Fun and Games", the Anderan alien "electroports" two humans to and from the site of the Gladiator Games his planet holds.
    • And let's not forget the series pilot, "The Galaxy Being". A tinkering radio station engineer makes First Contact with the titular alien, who is somehow teleported from a planet in the Andromeda galaxy to Earth when a disc jockey increases the power of the station's transmitter.
  • This is one of Hiro's powers on Heroes.
  • The TV show Sliders had them traveling from alternate universe to alternate universe through a portal that they opened when it was available through a device similar to a Motorola Tele-Tac cellular phone.
  • In Charmed, just about any magical creature can teleport, with different special effects. Witches used to have Blinking but that ability was stolen by Warlocks and is now considered evil.
  • In the Peter Sellers episode of The Muppet Show, Bunsen fries Kermit's nerves by causing various things - usually Beaker - to pop in and out near him. When he demonstrates it on the Muppet Labs portion, Kermit confronts him, only to be transported to Africa.
  • In Soap Saul and Burt try to escape the UFO using a transporter and manage to go back in time to Ancient Rome and in front of a Mexican firing squad.
  • An episode of Earth: Final Conflict has a human scientist develop a teleportation device, which he uses to teleport small bombs near Taelons. When his hideout is raided, he teleports himself to a warehouse he owns, not realizing that the feds previously raided the place and moved things around, so he ended up fused with a shelf. In order to prevent himself from being captured and end this horrible existence, he teleports to the same exact location, which somehow creates Antimatter and blows up the warehouse (really, that much anti-matter should've destroyed the entire city at the least). The technology is lost, of course, and is never mentioned again.
    • There are also ID portals that send people and objects through inter-dimensional tunnels, possibly involving dematerialization. There are installed all over the world for quick transportation. Once again, the possibility of Teleporter Accidents or Tele Frag is not mentioned.
  • In The Adventures of Superman episode "The Phony Alibi", Bungling Inventor Professor Pepperwinkle creates a system for transporting people through telephone wires. As usual with Pepperwinkle, a gang of crooks befriends the naive professor, then uses his invention for evil; they commit crimes in Metropolis, then phone themselves to distant cities and make sure plenty of people see them to set themselves up with a (seemingly) perfect alibi.


Tabletop Games

  • Almost every race in Warhammer 40,000 has a few. The Imperium's are relatively advanced (Even if the Mechanicus to have to do the whole chanting and sacred oils to make themselves look important), Eldar can make microjumps through the Warp in what might as well be teleportation, and Necron teleportation works across interstellar distances. The Ork mek Orkimedes also created a "tellyporta" device for the Battle of Armageddon, which apparently is standard issue for meks in Dawn of War.
    • Except the Tau, as they know practically nothing about the Warp (which is one of the many areas in which the Imperium is more advanced than them).
  • Traveller has a set of rules worked out for psychic teleporters based on energy limitations, changes in momentum and altitude, and numerous other hard-physics factors.
  • The "Warp" advantage in GURPS. A later supplement built a whole power around the ability to teleport, including the ability to teleport poison out of your body.
  • Dungeons & Dragons early editions featured spells that let you be this, namely 'Teleport'. Note that a higher-level spell was 'Teleport Without Error'. All translocation methods require access to some or other plane and since strategical implications are very clear, there were several ways to block it. (teleport and greater teleport)
    • So many Demons and Devils have the ability to teleport at will, in fact, that it is surprising most of them still have legs and/or wings.
    • 4th edition appears to limit this to 'set' teleport circles, and a special ritual to try to beam yourself to one. This had the overall goal of balancing increased access to utility spells (rituals can be cast by any character) against the ridiculously powerful nature of the 3rd edition spells.


Toys

  • Bionicle has several methods that allows a being to teleport. Some beings (like Botar's species) have the power naturally, others needs to wear a Kanohi Kualsi ("Mask of Quick-Travel", allows one to teleport to any location within eyesight). Finally, the mysterious Arthaka apparently has the power to teleport anyone from anywhere, as he did when he summoned the Toa Nuva to his island.


Video Games

  • The story of Half Life begins with Black Mesa trying to learn how to use an alternate dimension as a means of teleportation. HL2 deals with the consequences, although the remaining Black Mesa scientists are still trying to perfect teleportation technology, which they now know much more about. A Transporter accident drives the plot forward as well.
    • Combine teleportation technology may work, but it is far more crude. The Citadel is capable of sending objects and information through inter-dimensional space, although this sometimes destroys the original, and it requires an immense amount of energy. In Episode 1 they overload the Citadel's reactor to open a portal strong enough to send an SOS through... which blows up an entire city in the process.
    • Teleportation technology is the only area of science in which humanity is actually ahead of the Combine. It's the only advantage humanity has, and it is far more compact and energy efficient. It also doesn't, you know, explode.
  • Halo has a few examples.
    • The single-player campaign had plot-controlled teleportation at times, and the books provide Techno Babble vaguely justifying it.
    • All the teleporter technology was developed millenia ago by the Forerunners, and almost none of their technology is ever explained. Each of the Halo rings has a "local teleportation grid" which can remotely move objects around. There are also the fixed teleporters found at the various multiplayer installations.
      • Given the Forerunners' mastery of slipspace (their version of cryosleep involved storing them inside slipspace, and they also have the ability to Time Travel with it), their teleporters probably worked by moving the traveller through slipspace, rather than the Star Trek method of killing you and building an identical copy at the destination.
  • In the Zone of the Enders games, some of the Humongous Mecha has the Zero-Shift ability. By compressing the space between the Orbital Frame and its destination, it could appear to cover the intervening distance instantaneously. Usually used in the game to teleport into attack range, particularly to warp in behind enemies for a sneak attack.
  • Sonic Adventure 2 introduced the "Chaos Control" ability, in which the user has to have a Chaos Emerald in order to warp (although an object with the same wavelength and properties as an Emerald will still do).
  • Minecraft! The recent halloween update lets you create portals to a hellish world (called the Nether) which you use to travel back to the surface again in an alternate-reality way. 1 block in the Nether equals 8 blocks on the earth-like main world and so people are using them to travel large distances.
    • There's a similar type of gate that takes you to "The End," a floating island in a spooky black alternate dimension. These gates can't be built, though; you have to find one in the overworld and activate it with a bunch of rare items.
  • World of Warcraft engineers can build a Wormhole Generator. It can teleport you to a location of your choice in Northrend. However, it may decide to deposit you 100 meters above the target location. Best have a parachute on hand.
    • There are also the Ultrasafe Transporters, which have a number of funny side-effects.
    • WoW also has hearthstones, a similar Shaman spell, summoning stones (both environmental and player-created), Mage portals, and of course the Mage spell Blink. There's also naaru ships, which work like Blink but on a much larger scale.
  • The Worms have this as a weapon, and it reaches anywhere on the map, complete with Star Trek sound effects.
  • In Zork: Grand Inquisitor, you can use magical teleporters (that look like phonographs) conveniently placed around the Undergound to instantly teleport yourself. All you need to do is first walk/ride to the teleporter you want to go, which then appears on your map.
  • Bloodline Champions has a decent amount of this, the differences varying so much it's better just to list who can teleport: the Inhibitor, the Igniter, the Herald of Insight, the Blood Priest, the Seeker, and the Stalker - the last can go to Teleport Spam with their ultimate on.
  • In the Crusader series, the fact that the WEC has built a network of teleporters that can be "hacked" is one of the reasons for the successes of the Resistance.
  • Teleportation in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is subject to some very clear rules: either you teleport to a Dunmer Temple (the Almsivi Intervention), an Imperial shrine (the Divine Intervention), or you set a teleportation point with the Mark spell and later return there with the Recall spell. The Mages Guild also runs a teleportation travel business.
    • You could also move between fixed "Propylons", so long as you had the Propylon Index that activated the one you enter. They were of course out in the middle of nowhere, and the indices weren't exactly easy to find.
  • This is the central part of the plot in Doom III:, where teleportation is done by moving matter through Hell itself. Needless to say, Satan didn't liked the idea of seeing stuff coming in and out of Hell just like that, and next time the people know, the Legions of Hell come barging in through the "teleporters" and start wrecking massive havoc on Mars.
    • This is of course also the plot of Doom I and II. The original Quake which had slipgates which attracted the attention of Lovecraftian monstrosities rather than the more traditional fire-and-brimstone demons of the Doom series.
  • In StarCraft, most Protoss units and buildings are "built" by "warping" them in from the Protoss homeworld. (Only robotic units such as Probes are actually built.) The Protoss Arbiter ship has the Recall ability, which lets it teleport other units to its own location.
    • Teleporters also occasionally appear in Terran installations, with no explanation having been produced and distributed by the notoriously unreliable Transmatter Inc.
  • In StarCraft II, Protoss players can create a unit called the Stalker which, when researched, can use the Blink ability for short range teleport.
    • Additionally, the Protoss transport unit, the Warp Prism is described as effectively doing a slow-motion teleport: The transported units are stored as data, but the warp prism needs to move across the battlefield to the target location before reconstituting them there.
    • Gateways can also be upgraded to Warp Gates, which instead of acting like a Stargate allows the player to "warp-in" infantry anywhere within Pylon power range. The Warp Prism can also deploy as a Pylon.
    • The Arbiter is now gone, but the Mothership retains its Recall ability in the form of Mass Recall. Players can warp entire armies to any location on the map, like the enemy's base.
  • One word: Portal.
  • One of the Power Pools in City of Heroes is Teleportation, containing powers that allow you to teleport allies, enemies, yourself, and everything around you, in that order. With the open profiles of the game, you can justify it however you want. (or not at all)
  • Team Fortress 2: Engineers to can build teleporter entrance and exit platforms to facilitate getting teammates closer to the front line.
  • The Unreal Tournament games have translocators which fire a small homing beacon and allows the user to teleport to its location. It can be used to Tele Frag, but if another player shoots the beacon, it shorts out and an attempted teleport will result in death. If used while holding a flag in CTF, the flag is instantly dropped.
    • Unfortunately they had a serious side effect, prolonged use could result in Teleportation Related Dementia as well as increases in aggression and paranoia. (This never actually happens, although excessive translocating might make opponents more aggressive.) Later games mentioned they were classed as 'significantly safe' but considering it's an evil megacorporation making them...
  • Parts of Eternal Sonata, such as the To Coda Ruins and the Mysterious Unison, have teleporter pads. Some let you choose where to go.
  • In Chrono Trigger, Lucca's invention, the Telepod, reacts with Marle's pendant to really kick off the events of the game.
  • In Metroid Prime, the thing that sends you between the Artifact Temple and the Impact Crater could be considered one.
    • Another appears on planet Bryyo in Metroid Prime 3, which sends you to the other side of the planet. The object scan even confirms that it is a teleporter.
  • Some entries in The Legend of Zelda series feature magical versions. Often, they provide a quick way out of the dungeon from the Boss Room.
  • Linking Books from Myst are portable, unlimited-range Teleporters, with the disadvantages of being hard to make, fragile, and set to a single destination.
  • Ciel's side story in Kagetsu Tohya does its best to explain plot holes and answer odd questions. One was how Arcueid got to Japan if it's on an island when a boat would have to be in daylight at least part of the time. The answer is, as a True Ancestor, she taps into the power of Gaia and vanishes from wherever she was, and then the planet slowly rebuilds her at her destination. This ability seems to be unique to her as there are no other powerful and sane True Ancestor's left.
  • Primary means of moving about in Marathon. Human teleporters can only operate between particular points within a couple of kilometers, while Pfhor teleporters are much more advanced and can teleport objects and people seemingly from anywhere to anywhere within a very large range (teleporting supplies and people planetside from orbit is trivial; one Pfhor fleet even manages it from the outskirts of the solar system).
  • Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri has two teleportation-related things: the Psi Gate (a base facility) and the Bulk Matter Transmitter (a Secret Project). The former allows you to teleport your units from base to base, subject to certain limitations. The latter increases minerals output (i.e. production) by two at every base, but its most notable feature is its movie, which provides this thought-provoking quote:
"And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?"
—Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We Must Dissent"
  • In Backyard Baseball, the ball can teleport by using a powerup.
  • In the Pokémon games, Teleport will end battles with wild Pokémon when used by either side; Abra doesn't even learn any other moves normally. Teleport can also be used outside of battle, where it works as an Escape Rope.
    • There's also the Pokéballs and Pokémon storage system. How else can you fit a 28 foot long rock snake in a ball that fits in the palm of your hand? Or drop it off in Lavender town to be picked up in Fuschia city a few days later?

ABRA was transferred to Bill's PC.

    • Trainers themselves teleport in the Saffron Gym in Pokémon Red and Blue.
    • Trainers with a member of the Abra line, or a couple of other mons as well, can use it to take themselves to the last Pokemon center they visited.
    • Some of the villainous team buildings also have warp panels. The Team Galactic headquarters in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl /Platinum has them, and the Team Rocket underground headquarters in Pokémon Gold and Silver and their remakes.
  • The Space Pirates of Metroid are very fond of doing this and seem to have multiple styles. Sometimes they appear from nowhere, and other times they appear to materialize in beams of light. Still others have personal teleporters (mostly Commandos) that they use constantly. As well, certain creatures, like Warp Hounds and Reptillicus in Metroid Prime 3 are able to teleport naturally and magically, respectively. And Leviathans can open wormholes at will.
  • Master of Orion II has 2 teleporting technologies: Subspace Teleporter for teleporting the entire ship and Transporters for Boarding Party enemy ships and stations.
  • Mega Man, his cousins X and Zero, and his counterparts Vent, Aile, Ashe and Grey constantly teleport from place to place, generally at the beginning of levels. Averted with the Battle Network and Legends series, since in one the "Mega Men" are simply packets of data traveling through a representation of computer systems and the internet, and the other is in a future so far ahead that this kind of technology has been probably lost forever.
  • It is fantastically easy to teleport in Achron. The tutorials teach you cross-map teleportation before they tell you about control groups. The humans have teleporters which can send units halfway across most maps, as well as slingshots (a smaller, shorter ranged, mobile version of the teleporter). The Vecgir have an upgrade that gives their vehicles the ability to self-teleport, and can build sligates which can teleport and chronoport units.
    • According to the dev blog, they've had to repeatedly tone teleportation down because the absurd ease with which it could be used started devolving the game into telefrag-fests where players routinely jumped their bases to different points on the map. It's a lot better now.
  • With all the expansion packs for The Sims 2, there are no less than three kinds of teleportation available.
  • RuneScape has a mind-boggling variety of teleports, both fixed and portable, including (but not limited to): toadstool rings, stargate-like portals, vials of goo, crystals, magic lyres, glass spheres, endless pieces of jewellery (amulets, necklaces, rings, bracelets), animals, various items of clothing (capes, boots, gloves, hats), various weapons (ankh, various staves, including one made of bones), MANY teleport spells spread over 3 schools of magic and plenty of simple glowing-circle-on-the-ground portals. And this isn't even counting all the other forms of instantaneous travel that aren't technically teleportation.
  • Touhou Project character Yakumo Yukari is a nigh-omnipotent Reality Warper, but (perhaps due to her extreme laziness), her usual way of using her power in the fighting games is to teleport various objects on top of her opponent.
    • Komachi Onozuka has the power to manipulate distance, which she uses to teleport in battle, change how long her boat takes to cross The Sanzu River, and, most efficiently, for slacking off.
  • The Red Alert series has the Chronosphere, a mass teleportation device based on time travel technology.
    • The mass-teleport version of the Chronosphere is instantly fatal to any unshielded biological creature.
    • Red Alert 2 has a number of teleporting infantry units based on the Chronosphere technology. Fortunately, while they can move anywhere in an instant, it takes a while to materialize completely, leaving them vulnerable for a short time. There's also the Chrono Miner, whose teleportation is limited to making a return trip home with a truckload of ore.
  • Good old Gauntlet (1985 video game) had these as floor tiles (in the original 2d incarnation, at least). Very annoying when a whole cluster were around, some exits were blocked by walls, and so on ... still, fun to Tele Frag Death that way.
  • In Sam & Max Season 3, Max gains Psychic Powers in the form of ancient Toys of Power. One of these, a telephone, allows him to teleport to any number he dials.
  • Space Quest V and 6 feature Star Trek teleporters that beam you to your select destination. Part of V played a homage to The Fly when Roger was spliced into a fly and in the beginning of 6, a teleport malfunction puts his waist below under the road.
  • In Miner 2049er, two stations feature teleporters that connect four different levels. These have to be allowed to recharge between uses.
  • Tutankham had warp portals in several places allowing the player easy passage between the top and bottom halves of the level.
  • The X-Universe series has two sets. First, we have the games' jumpgate network, which instantaneously transport objects entering them to the gate they're paired with. Works like Stargate Verse gates, except the gates are two-way, and the link between two gates is permanent (though the Ancients and the Hub can change which gate goes where). Secondly, pilots can purchase a Transporter Device add-on that allows cargo and personnel to be transported ship-to-ship without needing to dock both ships at a station (or one inside the other, in the case of carriers and fighters).


Web Comics / Web Original

  • The teraport in Schlock Mercenary, with the notable (and realistic) twist that it revolutionizes pretty much the entirety of galactic civilization (and starts a war). People's discomfort with the metaphysical implications of what a teraport does is also mentioned.
  • The Law of Purple has two kinds of teleporters; one kind is inherently dangerous to use, and the other makes a smoke effect - for no other reason than to look cool.
  • Sluggy Freelance involves lots of teleporting through time and other dimensions, though so far only the wizards in the "Torg Potter" stories have used more traditional teleportation.
  • Parley from Gunnerkrigg Court accidentally discovers—in the most embarrassing manner possible short of leaving clothes behind—that she has the ability to teleport herself and others.
    • Jones insists on calling it "distortion of space" though. Even Tom makes fun of her.
  • The Cyantian Chronicles: Techmages are often able to teleport, and the Siracs are able to do this as well using their Psychic Powers. In addition Campus Safari started with Chatin making a personal transporter and Cilke accidentally using it to send them to Earth.
  • Arkady is the only Freakangel capable of teleportation, but it is suggested that this is only because the others have not explored the full extent of their powers as much as she.
  • In Wapsi Square various supernatural(?) creatures can "poit" from place to place, apparently anywhere on Earth and neighbouring dimensions like Phix's Library. Later on Monica figures out how to do it too, though her landings aren't always elegant.
  • Sonoda Yuki from Megatokyo.
  • Doc in The Whiteboard made a "Pizza Teleporter" so he could get food in seconds. Unfortunately it only teleports to a specific spot on his counter, trying to send it to say, the field results in the toppings and crust separating or cheese blocking up an engine.
  • In the Whateley Universe, it's a mutant superpower. Several high schoolers at the Super-Hero School Whateley Academy have the ability in one way or another. One is even codenamed Jaunt: she can only teleport short distances and has the bad habit of not knocking before dropping in on people. The most powerful teleporters make huge salaries as transporters and couriers. Some high-level wizards can do teleportation too, and Carmilla can teleport by the convenient use of her dad's demon dimension. Several devisors also have access to teleporters; the usual caveats when dealing with technology that defies the laws of physics apply.
  • First Guardians from Homestuck are full-on Reality Warpers, but their main use of their powers seems to be teleportation (with a quite weird visual effect, to boot).
  • Drake in Gold Coin Comics has the power to conjure a teleportation portal.
  • The Halo teleporters show up in Red vs. Blue. Initially, the main issue is that it tends to cover the soldiers' armour in 'black stuff'. There also seem to be some time delays. And don't forget user error and sabotage..
  • The Pilots can do it mentally; this discovery overturns, well, everything.
  • Mostly averted in Order of the Stick, where the story needs to take time to explain why Vaarsvuius can't teleport whenever he or she wants. In a fantasy story based on a specific tabletop game, the audience would assume that the ability to teleport is easily achieved at a certain level of skill with magic. Usually, either it's unknown where exactly the party needs to go until it's there, or their much more powerful opponent already closed a big, big area.
  • Parodied in Starslip, where the characters step onto what looks like a set of transporter pads from Star Trek, only for it to turn out to be a chamber that physically drops out of the bottom of the ship and crashlands on a planet.
  • In Blue Yonder, the fighter jet is teleported to the rings of Saturn -- or Edinburgh by The Cavalry.


Western Animation

  • A number of Transformers have this ability, mostly Decepticons. The most famous is Skywarp, and he has a limiting factor that isn't part of the technology: he's about as bright as a box of hammers and requires constant supervision.
    • He mostly uses it to pull pranks on his fellow 'Cons. Because, come on, a suprise push down a staircase is hilarious.
    • One comic series features "orbital bouncing", allowing near-instantaneous transportation for anyone to anywhere else on the planet, working much like Star Trek's transporters except for the much greater limitation of where they can be put (line of sight is implied to be a factor) and with the implied necessity of the Transformers being beamed needing to do so in their natural robotic forms rather than their vehicle modes. Also, while they work quite well for the Transformers themselves, the one time humans were seen to be sent through the process (in the official comics) suffered almost fatal health problems as a result.
    • And of course, the Space Bridge is a teleporter that works across intergalactic distances and can be built large enough to transport a whole planet. Since its most common use seems to be transporting stored energy from Earth to Cybertron, one assumes that the bridge itself consumes danged little energy when operating.
      • Maybe not - in the original 3-parter, they were able to store enough energy to go back to Cybertron on a single spaceship. Yet they spend the rest of the next two seasons constantly gathering energy and sending it home through the space bridge. It must not have been all that efficient. A possible explanation is that until they made contact with Shockwave, they didn't realize how much time had passed, and how badly de-energized Cybertron was after 4 million years.
  • Kim Possible had an episode featuring a teleportation device which sent the user through the telephone network.
  • Totally Spies!: As a variation on the teleport theme, the "WOOHP" organization seems to have thousands of pneumatic suction tubes all over Beverly Hills, able to abduct their three teenage agents away from their civilian lives at any time.
  • Justice League: Although teleporters were deliberately avoided in the first seasons of the show in favor of the "Javelin" shuttlecraft/plane/submarine, the rebuilt Watchtower of Justice League Unlimited has a teleportation system, as well as a whole fleet of "Javelins". In a Shout-Out to the Silver Age, the teleporters are probably captured and repurposed Thanagarian technology, since they didn't appear until after the invasion in the multi-part episode "Starcrossed".
    • After the Watchtower was attacked by Cadmus agents, the League went after the true mastermind Luthor/Brainiac. All of the Javelins were destroyed and the teleporter naturally was disabled, prompting a dismayed Martian Manhunter to mutter that "they are more trouble than they're worth". Of course it's necessary, just so the original seven can face down Brainuthor...
    • Livewire could turn into electricity and travel along power lines. She could teleport anywhere as long as there was an electrical outlet nearby. 'Cept for that one time the Flash grabbed a wire and threw it into a flooded fire engine...ouch.
  • There was an episode in Jackie Chan Adventures that featured the titular character fighting with a relics thief of sorts over a necklace that enabled teleportation. While it wasn't the main plot point of the episode it played a crucial part when Jade (who else?) got a hold of the necklace. Portals also appear several times throughout the series that transport someone (Jackie or Jade most of the time) to different places in space and time.
  • To Be, a Canadian cartoon short by John Weldon, spotlighted on the extinct Cartoon Network show O Canada investigated the philosophical issue of teleporters. In it, a scientist shows off to a crowd a teleporter that functions by making an exact copy of someone elsewhere then destroying the original. A woman in the crowd, horrified by this, suggests to the scientist that he test the moral ramifications of the process by stepping through himself, and delaying the destruction of the original by five minutes. Thus, the scientist has an exact clone. They find this wonderful and exciting, until it comes time for one of them to be destroyed, whereupon each claims to be the copy. After the issue is resolved and one scientist is zapped into nothingness, the scientist changes his mind about the usefulness of the teleporter. The woman feels guilty for possibly impeding scientific progress basically killing someone to prove her point, and atones for this by stepping through the machine herself, claiming that her new copied self is free of guilt for what her original had done.
  • The Centurions use a teleporter to transport themselves and their Assault Weapon Systems all over the world. The device has a serious limitation, though; it can be safely used only by someone wearing an Exo Frame or similar protective device.
  • In Biker Mice From Mars, Lawrence Limburger used a transporter to bring various psychos for hire to Earth to hunt down the Biker Mice.
  • In the Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers episode "Tower of Combat", evil militaristic alien The General uses a stolen alien teleporter to kidnap several of the heroes.
  • The astrobeam on Challenge of the Go Bots functioned like the zeta beam in Adam Strange comics—it could teleport an individual across interstellar distances, but only temporarily; after a given period of time, the person would automatically and unavoidably teleport back to their starting point. On one hand, this makes troop extraction after a mission extremely easy, and it avoids any danger of capture. On the other hand, it makes the device useless for travelling anywhere you do intend to stay. Hence, the Go Bots still make heavy use of spaceships.
  • The Prison Planet in Shadow Raiders is an entire teleporting planetoid, intended to hold dangerous criminals by warping across the universe so that they can't get home. In the finale, the planet is used to teleport the Beast Planet away. Unfortunately, it's implied that the Beast Planet assimilated the teleporting ability.
  • Code Lyoko has several of these. The most obvious of them is the scanner, which transports human beings into the virtual world of Lyoko (and back). In Season 4, the boarding pads for the Skid count as a teleporter and the "broadband acceleration" nodes count as a slower-than-light transporter.
  • The Care Bears had their Rainbow Rescue Beam which is quite similar in concept to the transporters in the Star Trek franchise. However, it was only really prominent in the first movie.
  • The evaporators in the original Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century short.
  • In Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Big Bad Saw Boss uses "the power of the black light" to teleport his headquarters from place to place.
  • One episode of Men in Black featured a portable unit. Lampshaded by J: "You mean, like, Captain Kirk?"
  • As an Eliatrope, Yugo from Wakfu can create teleportation portals. Shushu king Rushu is particularly interested in acquiring Yugo since Eliatrope portals are the only means of travel off the Shushu world.
  • On Jimmy Two-Shoes, an app on Jimmy and Beezy's phone will automatically teleport Heloise to them.


Real Life

  • This story about scientists in Australia.
  1. ↑ of the "turns-it-inside-out-and-then-it-explodes" variety
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