I hate to be the first to have a moan, but are the SU costs for transporters a bit too steep?
Looking at the Galaxy just under 9.6% of it's total cost is taken up by the transporters! That's more that the entire warp system (nascelles, PIS & engine).
Nah, I don't intend to change it, that's nearly heresy as far as I'm concerned!
I was mainly curious if there was a rationalisation for it that had come up during design or playtesting. ie. along the lines of "transporters are often important plot devices & so their SU is high for game balance". At least that's how I consider it.
Game balance/importance in play is certainly one of the considerations involved. As I noted early in the manuscript, that often has more to do with a system's SU cost than its actual size. But I was also assuming that transporter systems, as a whole, had to be pretty big -- each set of pads gets its own room, and I'm betting there's a lot more equipment than what we see "behind the scenes" making everything run right. The multiple redundant backups needed to keep the transporter safe probably take up considerable space by themselves.