Chief O'Brien at Work

[Captain Seafort]

Yes.

[Graham Kennedy]

For some reason I am having a hard time making sense of this.

So the person is beamed up by a transporter which is then transferred to another to beam to somewhere else?

Pretty much.

When you beam up, your matter stream goes into a pattern buffer where it swirls around in suspension. This is where you are if you are held in transport - Scotty survived in Relics because his matter stream was just left swirling around in there for decades.

Normally, to complete the process, the matter stream is sent to the pad where the transporter pattern is used to reassemble it. However, in a site to site transport the stream is instead sent to a second buffer and then beamed to the destination. So you need two buffers to do it, rather than one. And it takes more power, puts more wear on the system, etc, etc.