Can you tell me about the role of the transporter in this? Apparently it�s only used for cargo because it�s a dodgy thing to travel in?

Yes. One of the new technologies for the crew of the new series is the transporter. That was a well established technology by the time of Captain Kirk and Mr Spock. It was something that Gene Roddenberry invented for the original series primarily for practical reasons. He was doing a show about exploring a new planet pretty much every week and he had to get his characters from this huge ship in orbit of the planet down to the surface relatively quickly. He knew it would be way too expensive to try to land this model starship on a planetary surface model set every week, so he thought well, use some sort of self teleportation device and let�s call it a transporter. They�ll walk into this chamber and they�ll just be beamed down to the surface of the planet. So it was really a practical solution to a production problem.

Today, because we have better special effects budgets we can send our crews from the ship in orbit down to the surface aboard little shuttles. That�s a special effects kind of a sequence that we can do pretty affordably these days. So we�re going to suggest in the new series that the transporter is an experimental technology and this will be another element of the show that will tell the audience that this show takes place well before the era of Kirk and Spock. We are only really using it for cargo as it�s considered too dangerous to use for human transport. Perhaps over the course of a few years we�ll become more comfortable with it and decide that it could be used for transporting people routinely. But again the idea is that that technology which is, again, a far future technology, by any measure, is an experimental technology in the new series.