How could the Dominion War doesn't effect the economy of Federation?

[The Castellan]

Merry Christmas wrote:

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How much food do you have current sitting in your house?

I got at least a month or two worth stored away....dried fruits/veges, beans, grain, protein powders, food bars, etc.

Always good to be prepared, not just for ourselves, but if anything should happen and someone needs help.

[MacLeod]

KamenRiderBlade wrote:

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Or the Federation might be consuming Duranium faster then they can replicate / produce given wartime energy levels.

Ergo getting a outside source is very beneficial to keeping manufacturing / repairs at full capacity.

I think that this is a reasonable explanation, that they couldn't produce it in sufficent quatities to support a wartime footing.

Brainsucker wrote:

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wait, according Memory Alpha, Replicator is :

A replicator was a device that used transporter technology to dematerialize quantities of matter and then rematerialize that matter in another form. It was also capable of inverting its function, thus disposing of leftovers and dishes and storing the bulk material again. (TNG: "Lonely Among Us"; DS9: "Hard Time", "The Ascent"; VOY: "Year of Hell", "Memorial")

So..., don't tell me again that replicator use only deuterium to magically produce anything. Or... Memory Alpha is actually false?

Isn't Deuterium used to power the warp core, to provide the energy that the replicators need?

[Timo]

Supposedly fusion of deuterium doesn't yield enough power to allow a ship to go to warp, but it might yield enough power to replicate stuff. Doesn't mean that fusing a kilogram of deuterium would give enough power to replicate a kilogram of deuterium, though.

But if the replicators could create antideuterium with the same ease they supposedly create deuterium with, then annihilating 1+1 kg of the stuff might well yield enough power to create more than 1+1 kg of the stuff, considering how efficient replicators otherwise appear to be (that is, they seem to do better than E=mcc if a household unit can create enough food and water for survival out of pure energy, or then future households have pretty formidable power sources), and then we have a perpetual motion machine. Hopefully, there are some limitations to that process that negate the drama-ruining potential! (Although it's very difficult to see why antimatter would be any more difficult to replicate than matter, as long as replication involves transmutation of elements - which is certainly appears to do, as per "Night Terrors" and the like.)

Clearly, starships can't "bootstrap" themselves by going to warp to gather high volumes of deuterium with ramscoops so that they can turn that to fuel to go to warp to get more of the stuff, hence the perfectly reasonable yet much-maligned VOY episode "Demon". You have to get deuterium from a naturally or industrially enriched source to make any practical use of it. Where you get antideuterium is never explained, but perhaps by fusing a hundred kilograms of deuterium you get enough power for a doodad that creates a gram of antideuterium, so by sitting next to a deuterium well, you can eventually fill both your matter and antimatter tanks.

Timo Saloniemi

[MacLeod]

From memory ships can use the Bussard collectors to collect hydrogen (of which of course deuterium is an isotope) and they can convert it to anti-dueterium but it's not a cost effective process something like 15 to 1 ratio.

Which in an an emergency the process might allow a ship to limp back at low warp..

[T'Girl]

Brainsucker wrote:

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Well I don't know. Maybe there is no official info about this replicator in STar Trek

There are a few possibilities. One might be that if the plates, glasses and tableware are of a standard size and design, and are in constant use, the replicator system simply transports them out, strips away all biological matter (and anything else) and stores the various physical items for reuse. The replicator never breaks them down into their base components. Unless they are damaged in some fashion.

This would certainly save a considerable amount of energy. But would require a storage area for the items.

Merry Christmas wrote:

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What episode were you referring too?

Still waiting Deks.

[Crazy Eddie]

Strictly speaking, a replicator's basic function is to take an given quantity of matter and reorganize it at the molecular level into a different material of equal mass. It's similar to the workings of the Genesis Device, actually, but on a much smaller scale (and obviously without the need for protomatter).

Since food preparation uses very few variations of the same dishes and glasses, there's probably some sort of standard (and highly pliable) material used for making all of them, and your replicator is probably going to make some sort of annoyed beeping sound or give you a verbal warning if you stick something in there it doesn't recognize (undoubtedly a built-in safety feature to avoid accidents, plus you don't want people to be able to kill their roommates and then chuck the body parts in the replicator for easy disposal).


Also, as for "converting energy into matter," the first references to the holodeck in "Encounter at Farpoint" directly implied that the holodeck didn't actually project holograms, but replicated physical facsimiles of solid objects with "much simpler patterns" than human bodies or living things. The same logic that prevents transporters from being used to crank out an infinite number of copies of, say, Commander Data obviously applies to replicators too: it's ALOT easier to store a kilogram of matter than it is to store 180 gigatons of pure energy.

[Brainsucker]

So, what is exactly replicator then?

But even if Replicator could transform energy into a materialized form (food, weapon, etc), there should be several type of replicators. I think that the government would limit the capability of household level replicator. Or else, a crazy man would replicate nuclear weapon and destroy his neighborhood.

So I think :

Household Replicator could only replicate food
Public Replicator could replicate household items and everyday need
for more important tools or spare part, you'll need industrial replicator

[Crazy Eddie]

Brainsucker wrote:

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So, what is exactly replicator then?

Basically, it's a very creative transporter.

But even if Replicator could transform energy into a materialized form (food, weapon, etc), there should be several type of replicators. I think that the government would limit the capability of household level replicator. Or else, a crazy man would replicate nuclear weapon and destroy his neighborhood.

Actually, the limitations are probably more fundamental than that. With the base material used by replicators, there'd be a pretty limited range of substances you could replicate, and most of those would be edible. This seems to be the case even with industrial replicators, hence we've seen terrorists go to somewhat extraordinary lengths to obtain random devices and substances (Tahna Los almost getting his ass shot off to steal an antimatter converter and later buying bilitrium from the Klingons) in order to physically assemble weapons of mass destruction. Clearly Tahna's smart enough and motivated enough to hack a replicator somewhere to remove its safety protocols (because EVERYONE in the 24th century apparently possesses advanced hacking skills) so it's probably more of a physical limitation than a regulatory one.

Household Replicator could only replicate food
Public Replicator could replicate household items and everyday need
for more important tools or spare part, you'll need industrial replicator

Very true, but even then the limits are based more on the matter source than any artificial limit. This would also imply there are certain food items replicators simply cannot make because they require substances that aren't in the edible/household matter stock.

An interesting question for our encyclopedic fans: how often have we seen replicators being used to make metallic objects? I can only recall this happening once, when Chakotay used it to make a watch for Janeway's birthday.

[robau]

Silverware?

[brian577]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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An interesting question for our encyclopedic fans: how often have we seen replicators being used to make metallic objects? I can only recall this happening once, when Chakotay used it to make a watch for Janeway's birthday.

Data's Day, replicators were being used to create wedding gifts, if I remember correctly one of the choices was a
pair of metal candle holders

[Brainsucker]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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Basically, it's a very creative transporter.

Actually, the limitations are probably more fundamental than that. With the base material used by replicators, there'd be a pretty limited range of substances you could replicate, and most of those would be edible. This seems to be the case even with industrial replicators, hence we've seen terrorists go to somewhat extraordinary lengths to obtain random devices and substances (Tahna Los almost getting his ass shot off to steal an antimatter converter and later buying bilitrium from the Klingons) in order to physically assemble weapons of mass destruction. Clearly Tahna's smart enough and motivated enough to hack a replicator somewhere to remove its safety protocols (because EVERYONE in the 24th century apparently possesses advanced hacking skills) so it's probably more of a physical limitation than a regulatory one.

Very true, but even then the limits are based more on the matter source than any artificial limit. This would also imply there are certain food items replicators simply cannot make because they require substances that aren't in the edible/household matter stock.

An interesting question for our encyclopedic fans: how often have we seen replicators being used to make metallic objects? I can only recall this happening once, when Chakotay used it to make a watch for Janeway's birthday.

I like this type of Replicator, rather than replicator convert everything from a simple energy. Plus it is more logical if replicator is actually an alchemy table that convert one substance to another substance. For example, They can create water by converting Oxygen and Hydrogen. So as long the substance is absence, they couldn't make it. Like you won't be able to create a nuclear bomb if you don't have uranium or plutonium. So maybe Chakotay could make a watch because Voyager has the raw material, like silver in her storage. And you need protein if you want to create food.

[Crazy Eddie]

^ Actually I think Chakotay probably used a bit of alchemy to transmute some lighter elements (namely carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc) into heavier ones (copper, zinc, silicon, lead) probably by using one of the industrial replicators that was still operational. If he was fusing these atoms together from much lighter elements, then that 5oz pocket watch really would have been equivalent to a 12oz meal for anyone else on the ship, which would really explain why Janeway was so pissed at him for it.

Janeway talks about it like energy was the problem, which is sort of bullshit: if replicators could convert matter directly into energy, she could replace that watch just by scraping a couple handfuls of random broken debris off the floor of the bridge and chucking it into the nearest replicator chute. More likely, the replicators can only materialize/dematerialize a limited range of fairly simple substances, and even something as complicated as a pocket watch might actually require some assembly of replicated PARTS rather than pulling a finished product out of the slot.

[Timo]

From memory ships can use the Bussard collectors to collect hydrogen

Which, funnily enough, is just backstage doubletalk and not really part of the onscreen reality of Star Trek. There are two things these things are known to be capable of doing: venting out hydrogen, and scooping up random dirt from a dense nebula. For all we know, they can only work efficiently in dense nebulae, or perhaps underwater, and will achieve nothing in the thin mists of interstellar space. Or perhaps they are only intended to remove gaseous obstacles from the path of the ship, and can do nothing with the collected gas except vent it out again?

even something as complicated as a pocket watch might actually require some assembly of replicated PARTS rather than pulling a finished product out of the slot

Possibly so. But our heroes and villains seem to get fully functional weapons out of replicators easily enough. Perhaps the projectile rifle from "Field of Fire" did require some assembly we didn't witness - but the multi-phaser ordered up by Gul Dukat's defense program in "Civil Defense" emerged quite ready to fire...

Timo Saloniemi

[T'Girl]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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Janeway talks about it like energy was the problem

The way I see it, recycling the watch would have used energy, not produced it.

My thought is that in the situation the ship was in, it would have been bad form for the First Officer to be giving the Captain anything. Even something replicated months earlier. She ordered him to recycle it for the sake of appearances.

If recycling could have resulted in the creation of power/energy (as mentioned above) Janeway could have order a mass of metal equal to the watch be recycled. The books would have balanced.

She wanted the watch itself gone.