It is only through deduction and speculation that some of us think that gold-pressed latinum might be unreplicable. But no such thing has ever been claimed on screen, and it is difficult to understand how there could exist a problem with replicating that stuff. I mean, it somehow came to be originally, right? And replication is a manufacturing means that can do everything that other means can, and usually more, by definition.
Few thoughts:
It may be that latinum requires an amount of power to replicate which is equivalent in cost to the value assigned that amount of latinum by the cultures that trade in it; in fact, it may have this characteristic *by definition* and may not be notable in any other respect.
I think a lot of onscreen references can be taken as support for the idea that dilithium is not replicable in a practical sense. Ditto for antimatter, but that is somewhat easier to understand.
Anything can *be* replicated, but some things will suffer from the errors more than others and hence would become worthless or nearly worthless when replicated in comparison to the real thing.
I don't believe a replicator can create, say, a sarium krellide power cell with a full charge. It might be able to create a cell or battery that you could then charge up, but create it with a charge already? Even if it could, it would be at a net energy loss.
Industrial replicators are probably capable of many things the small shipboard varieties are not, even though the computers working the shipboard process are probably near the top of the line available anywhere. In order to do what they do, industrial replicators may be fed large-scale amounts of raw materials in a much closer state to that which is meant as a final product, meaning that economies of scale and materials availability come into play in a recognizable way.
For example, if the
Enterprise needed duranium to repair a hull breach, it may be so inefficient to tell the replicator to rearrange waste material from the crew members into robust duranium that there are few circumstances in which this is worth doing. However, if large-scale replicators at a starship construction facility were fed duranium ore and told to produce half of it as some sort of "sheet" duranium and the other half as extruded duranium foam, that might be well within its capabilities and efficient enough that it has a worthwhile speed and convenience advantage over processing the materials in some less exotic manner.
The replicators are very advanced, but clearly limited in what they can do. The future of the Trek universe certainly looks bright when one imagines the capabilities of future replicators, though!
