The replicators work very well, thank you.
IIRC there are 3 different methods seen for food creation in Star Trek.
Protein Resequencers (ST:ENT, ST:TOS): which presumably take stored amino acids and combined them with supplementary minerals and flavouring into nutritious cubes that look like marshmallows.
Matter Recombinators/Food Sythesizers (ST:TOS): capable of taking stored matter and producing ‘simple’ foodstuffs like drinks, iced cream, slabs of protein similar to chicken breast or steak, etc. I think these were sometimes called replicators but the distinction is the production is done elsewhere and the food delivered in seconds on request.
Replicators (ST:TNG +): I swear they described this as direct energy to matter conversion but I can’t find the source for this. The seemingly ridiculous energy demands this requires can be justified by the fact they use matter+antimatter reactions for energy supply. A cup of water would take a cup of fuel give or take. (edit: To confuse the issue, it’s also described in Discovery that waste matter is broken down and used for things like replication, but matter=energy so it is all the same in the end).
Transporters: it’s been clear from the beginning the matter is being deconstructed into energy and sent to the destination where it is reconstructed using the original’s pattern. The ethics of it are dubious because every time you see someone transport they are being literally killed in front of your eyes and a new copy created elsewhere.
So… and I’m in no way a Memory Alpha-level ST nerd, caveat lector:
- transporters are matter-to-energy-to -matter transformers; which implies
- they have both energy-to-matter conversion technology, and matter-to-energy technology; which means
- assuming the conversion process itself isn’t using vast quantities of energy, they could easily be turning energy into matter, and powering it with matter to energy, losing some energy in the conversion tax; which means
- they may as well be turning humanoid waste into food
It would imply that transporter and replicator technology are, basically, the same thing.
However, there are cannon issues.
- Even assuming metaphysics beyond what we know, they’d have to be violating the laws of thermodynamics to get more efficient energy production than matter-to-energy conversion. Which would make dilithium crystals and such less efficient than the technology they use to create food… so, why use it? Well, because
- The conversion process isn’t low cost. They can transport people, and produce from from energy, but it’s a super-expensive process. Like, you lose 90% of your energy in the matter:energy:matter cycle, out something. Which would mean
- Transporter technology isn’t converting things to energy and back; it’s using some cheat that does the same thing effectively, but with constraints, such as limits on how much you can alter the source object to destination object in the process; and getting pure energy out of matter is really lossy. But if you go from baseball to baseball, but in a different place, you avoid the energy penalty.
My head cannon is that this is how both replicators and transporters work. If you take a Riker and turn him into Riker somewhere else via a conversion loophole, it’s pretty cheap. If you take a 236g of lead and turn it into a cup of Earl Grey (hot), it costs you some energy loss but you’re using basically the same loophole. But if you try to turn Riker into pure energy to power the Enterprise because the warp core is offline, really you only get a couple of grams of usable energy because you can’t use the loophole and most went into the conversion process – which is why they still need an efficient fuel like dilithium.
Like, matter-to-energy requires antimatter, which is expensive to produce; but the loophole lets you skip over the antimatter part as long as, in the end, you have basically the same sort of matter.
The Technical Manual explanation is not that replicators create matter out of pure energy - they are a type of transporter that dematerializes raw material and rematerializes it to match a molecular pattern. They are “matter-energy converters” only in the sense that the stream of particles during the materialization process could be called an energy stream.
These replicator system headends are located on Deck 12 in the Saucer Module [of the Enterprise-D] and on Deck 34 in the Engineering Section. These systems operate by using a phase-transition coil chamber in which a measured quantity of raw material is dematerialized in a manner similar to that of a standard transporter.
Instead of using a molecular imaging scanner to determine the patterns of the raw stock, however, a quantum geometry transformational matrix field is used to modify the matter stream to conform to a digitally stored molecular pattern matrix. The matter stream is then routed through a network of waveguide conduits that direct the signal to a replicator terminal at which the desired article is materialized within another phase transition chamber.
Was about to cite TNG Tech Manual as well - although that also said that holodeck characters’ bodies were replicated meat puppets, which I think they didn’t stick with.
It thankfully stops short of “meat”:
Such animated characters are composed of solid matter arranged by transporter-based replicators and manipulated by highly articulated computer-driven tractor beams. The results are exceptionally realistic “puppets,” which exhibit behaviors almost exactly like those of living beings, depending on software limits.
Objects created on the Holodeck that are pure holographic images cannot be removed from the Holodeck, even if they appear to possess physical reality because of the focused forcebeam imagery. Objects created by replicator matter conversion do have physical reality and can indeed be removed from the Holodeck, even though they will no longer be under computer control.
Obviously, there is an inconsistency here, as we saw that later holographic characters could not be removed from the holodeck, and therefore must not have been replicated.
Admiral Vance:
“It’s made of our shit, you know?”
Well, as noted in that conversation, it wouldn’t work in the real world.
My understanding of canon is that transporter technology does use the energy produced by the warp core to deconstruct matter into energy, then reconstruct it at the desired location.
In that process, a computer has to hold the “pattern” long enough to make the transition possible. Hence pattern buffers.
Replicators use the same method, but have what amounts to better memory, and lower resolution.
A transporter can reconstruct things to such a small scale that every synaptic connection remains intact. Replicators can’t. They are, barring some exceptions that don’t really make sense, unable to produce anything alive.
A replicator cab only produce something it has a “recipe” for. At some point, someone used a transporter or similar device to deconstruct a given thing, like a hot cup of tea. That “pattern”, rather than being held in volatile memory, was recorded. Iirc, in the novels it was Spock that helped refine the technology to be as useful as it would be in TNG, but I haven’t read those in ages.
So, when Picard wants “earl grey, hot”, the replicator pulls up the pattern, uses the energy from a source that isn’t well specified, and turns that energy into matter. Literally every single cup of that tea is going to be the same, within the ability of the replicator to resolve. Since tea isn’t complicated in terms of long chains of molecules, it should be the exact same cup of tea.
However! There were instances I recall seeing of people adjusting replicator files. Tweaking them to their liking.
And, there’s on screen use of big replicators to turn out shuttle parts, as in body pieces.
There’s apparently an upper limit on complexity, which was supposedly about not wanting to make things too easy and make it harder on writers to come up with viable plot points. After all, if you can just replicate entire ships, things get crazy fast. “Oh, the Klingons are invading? Let’s churn out a few dozen extra battle cruisers”
one of latinums things was it can’t be replicated.
That isn’t actually stated anywhere, but…it kind of has to be true in order for latinum to work.
I swear its been stated by characters in ds9
I don’t think so - I’ve never been able to find it.
Had to look this up on Memory Alpha. The base principle for both replicators and transporters is confusingly termed “matter-energy conversion”, yet doesn’t appear to create matter from pure energy. Rather, it seems to use energy to convert matter from/to atomic or subatomic particles (for replicators and transporters, respectively). During the process, the matter is “energized”, and - I’m no expert, but - I’d imagine the subatomic particles in the transporter’s matter stream exhibit energy-like properties.
So replicators do rely on atomic matter stores (often recycled from waste or unnecessary items), and I’d still expect the conversion processes to use a lot of energy, but not as much as creating the raw matter.
This is sort of what I imagined it would be. Maybe stored as up quarks, down quarks, and elections? Quarks, leptons, and bosons?
I am WAY outta my depth.
