A replicator has a greater selection and is of higher quality. Especially after watching TAS, the food slot seems to have very similar capabilities. The difference might be the same as the difference between a landing party and away team: a linguistic change that developed after a century.
^Replicated Tribbles.....Mmmmmm. The major difference between a Food Slot and a Replicator is that with the Food Slot all items are said to come from a central series of Food and Beverage Synthesizers. The order is generated at the panel and the meal is assembled at the synthesizers. The tray with the meal is sent up through the ship to the Food Slot via a special turbo elevator system - which is why Tribbles get to hitch a ride over with a free meal en route. With the Replicator the meal is generated at the unit itself using a transporter linked network connecting to various raw material sources. You know the rest....
Of course, the tribbles might have gotten into the slots at the business end, sneaking in and waiting for the meal to arrive. In that case, the meal need not arrive using anything as clumsy and inefficient as a dumbwaiter: it could arrive in the TNG replicator fashion, being generated in situ. A dumbwaiter system is a major drain on internal volume; if it could be avoided, engineers certainly would do so. Starfleet already expects the crew to gather on specific spaces for their meals, so it would make sense to have the food-generating machinery right there, not three decks down and fifty meters to starboard at the end of some sort of a pipeline. There's a food slot on certain transporter rooms, too. Probably not due to there being a kitchen right behind the wall in that case. But it would be easy to argue that if these things are (primitive) replicators, then they utilize transporter technology and transporter resources, so a transporter room would be the most natural place in the world for having an extra food slot! If these putative primitive replicators indeed exist, then one might argue they can produce other things besides food. An excellent thing to have next to the transporter, then, so that landing parties can be swiftly equipped with things like period clothing, local currency or breathing apparatus. Timo Saloniemi
Can't remember the episode but it was either season 4-5 of TNG I watched last wee Ricker tells someone to use the Food slot in the quarters he was assigned.
I just figured that there was a guy cooking meals on the other side of the food slots, and he just took your order and whipped it up and slid it through the slot. Kinda like the little dwarves the banks hire to sit in the ATMs and count out your money, or the guy who lives in the roof of my garage and raises/lowers my door when I press the button. Yeah.
Major difference? On screen, at least, food slots require computer cassettes and they do their work behind little doors. Replicators work by voice command and are all sparkly. What I want to know is -- which produces food with better taste?
Unquestionably, the replicators of the TNG-and-later era. Unless you have a taste for celery and multicolored cubes of, uh, something edible. The crew's mess in Trek TOS was never clearly defined. In "Charlie X," Kirk tells a cook (the voice of Gene Roddenberry!) to make fake Thanksgiving turkey out of synthetic meat loaf. TMOST says nothing about the Enterprise having the capacity to synthesize or replicate food from basic matter, only that food can be stored in "garden-fresh condition" almost indefinitely. As for those slots in the wall, I figure they must have been the terminal points of an elaborate dumbwaiter system, as needlessly complicated as that seems. Otherwise, instead of tribbles emerging alive and happily purring on Kirk's food tray, they would have been chemically broken down and processed. Mmmmm . . . tribble-flavored coffee.
If the device is good enough to synthesize convincing celery, then it's obviously not technical limitations that cause it to create multicolored cubes instead of roast beef. And even if the celery is grown yet the ship lacks facilities to grow bovines for beef, this doesn't mean the "something edible" would taste subpar. Apparently, the multicolored cubes are haute cuisine for the day, as they are served to diplomatic bigwigs in "Journey to Babel". Unless, as said, the tribbles were simply waiting in the food slots for the food to be delivered. The delivery could then take place by arbitrary means: dumbwaiter, mini-transporter, on-the-spot nanoassembly, midget cooks, whatever. Timo Saloniemi
I think we should all just be happy that Tribbles are apparently not carnivorous. I think it's pretty much assumed that even the original 1701 has some pretty impressive recycling. Waste has got to be made into food again -- either via conventional growth of vegetables, or molecular conversion. Otherwise, we'd be making waste dumps all the time. And taking on tons of groceries at every stop. For a ship meant to be away from humanity for at least weeks at a time? Foraging would become a primary mission. We'll never know the answer, but I think the TOS Enterprise had food replicators. It seems a simple technology, once you have transporters. On the other hand, it does seem awfully energy-intensive. ("I want a hamburger. Let's convert some molecules just for me and then have it beamed to this station.")
Remember the near-apocalyptic Enterprise-D from Parallels? Turns out it wasn't because of the Borg after all.
If the tribbles were in the food slots and the food was delivered via transporter or replication, isn't it too too convenient that the tribbles end up ON the food rather than the plates and food materializing overlapping them?
The former is a much more primitive version that operates on breaking down matter into basics and reassembles it into something else (depending on the order you give it)... think of a much more refined version of recycling technology. Replicators were said to convert energy into matter. Probably by reconfiguring particles of EPS energy on a sub-atomic scale using transporters which in effect materializes it into solid form. We've seen this explained on-screen, and I really don't care how mini-nucleosyntesis is energy intense because we are talking about an extremely powerful energy source in the first place that allows a ship to travel at FTL speeds, and is used to power loads of other energy intense technologies (such as weapons and shields). I would surmise transforming energy by rearranging it's particles into another (solid) form would be within their capabilities (as was explained).
No, they're said to convert stores of matter into other forms based on stored molecular patterns. Like the transporter, only instead of sending something from one end to another, you put in enough matter of the various necessary elements and in the proper quantities as input and get whatever it is you want back as output.
...OTOH, a Galaxy class starship does possess the means to create/transmute elements in quantity, as said in "Night Terrors". Whether this is done by replicators or other onboard tech is unknown, though. Timo Saloniemi
Not on-screen. On-screen dialogue repeatedly states that 'replicators turn energy into matter' (it doesn't get simpler than that). Holodecks were said on Voyager to 'change energy into matter and back again like replicators'. Furthermore, replicators were stated to be BASED on transporter tech. Translation - it means that the technology incorporates certain functions, but it's not a transporter for all intense and purposes. Transporters work on the principle of converting matter into energy and back into matter (only reasonable since you put a live humanoid in there or matter for transport to another location). Also... remember that one episode where Picard was turned into energy when an alien entity merged with him? And then when his consciousness came back to the Enterprise, the transporters rematerialized him into solid matter. I doubt that the Enterprise would have enough matter to replicate a human being. Star-ships are supplied with virtually endless amounts of energy so long as the war-core has sufficient anti-matter reserves. A similar thing would be with creation of second Riker.