Food replicator produce.
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I couldn't agree more; This doesn't make any sense. How about shoveling all that debris lying around, in a replicator and turning it into anything that was needed?
Thank you for nitpicking lol
There's no hard and fast numbers, all we have are (my) assumptions. Assumption 1 is that under normal operating conditions, shipboard power is more than sufficient spare energy to power replicators and hydroponics are merely an ancillary form of nutrition (for those who prefer fresh to replicated food).
Assumption 2 would be that replicator 'farming' is more inefficient than "traditional" (using 24th century technology) farming on a mass scale. Neither of these need to be mutually contradictory.
lol never thought about that. Perhaps the replicator can only recycle replicated items to begin with? (aside from the corrugated cardboard that i've always assumed was the "raw matter" the replicator started with)
Even so, I get the feeling that most of Voyager was made of replicated material to begin with. It really doesn't make sense to have foundries and steel factories when you can just replicate the stuff in a much more easier and safer way and without all that heat! Ever gone in a foundry? Well, I have and it' s like hell in there. to say nothing about all the toxic gases that are floating around.
But there are frequent referances to mining, and we know that the hulls of the ships are composed of metal. This might go back to what I was saying about growing food.
Mining metal, transporting it oer interstellar distances, refining it, and forming it into starship hull is cheaper than producing the same hull with replicators.
I believe the TNG tech manual said that if the Federation ever gets to the point where they can just replicate starships, they probably won't need starships.
Regardling food. If it takes a dollars worth of materials to make a tunafish sandwitch, or it takes you five dollars to replicate one, then it become a question of economics over convenience.
On many occasions, we see them recycling things back into the replicator. For instance if your pants are torn, you just recycle them, and replicate them anew. Normally the energy loss will be minimal.
If you eat a tuna sandwich and then recycle your body waste then the sandwich will have cost you nearly nothing, maybe just a small amount of energy at most.
In all cases, the energy useage will be reduced the less an item is broken down. If merely reduced to a loose fibrous state and them reassembled into a standard trouser pattern then the cost of energy will be a fraction compared to breaking the garment down in to its basic molecules and then stuck back together again.
Replicating the sandwich would consume power, and reclaiming the resulting waste to be use in replication again would also consume power.
If you take the TNG tech manual into account, the food waste system reclaims 82% (and not 100%).
I've never seen that manual. Where does it come from?
Honestly, I can't even begin to imagine why. I mean, you should quite literally be able to replicate replicators.
Unless -- and despite it never being mentioned to my knowledge, or any logical reason for why it would be -- they're made of 90% latinum, dilithium, or other because-of-plot material that can't be replicated. I mean, sure, you could say that the power source for it would be expensive -- and dilithium-based -- but the replicators themselves should be a dime a dozen.
I think that's a distinction without a difference, beyond the fact that a single officer might have a cap on the amount they can spend at any particular time.
Could be, but even with that it's also likely that part of the output of agricultural activity is to produce the raw bulk material replicators use to make new products.
But you CAN'T replicate replicators, because replicators are made of things that replicators cannot replicate.
Again, this is because replicators don't feed from a source of energy only. They feed from a source of raw material somewhere that they then beam into something like a pattern buffer and reassemble it into a new form. You could replicate a replicator if you had all the components for a replicator... but that's like saying "you could build a car if you had a giant box of car parts." Replicators only take the time and expertise out of that equation, but you still need the parts and the knowledge (e.g. software).
Uhm, no. Replicators magically transform matter from one state into another. You just need a blob of base matter for it to work. It's only limited in that it can't recreate very specific materials like latinum and dilithium. It could, however, turn a lump of lead into a lump of gold, a pair of socks, or a hot meal (and that's being generous to the concept; quite often it's presented as just doing it with energy alone). That's the whole point of it. There's not a stash of X amount of Y materials that it then just assembles on demand like car parts for a car.But you CAN'T replicate replicators, because replicators are made of things that replicators cannot replicate.
Again, this is because replicators don't feed from a source of energy only. They feed from a source of raw material somewhere that they then beam into something like a pattern buffer and reassemble it into a new form. You could replicate a replicator if you had all the components for a replicator... but that's like saying "you could build a car if you had a giant box of car parts." Replicators only take the time and expertise out of that equation, but you still need the parts and the knowledge (e.g. software).
Not sure where you came up with that notion from, actually.
Can it actually convert one element into another element, though? I think most organic consumables consist of Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Carbon, with a few other trace elements. Calcium, Iron, and other nutritional requirements. Perhaps some Silicon for the cups and plates. Maybe the replicators can rebuild molecular structures, but not actually change the number of protons and neutrons in the constituent atoms?
I think it breaks matter down to it's elementary particles and that's why it can make anything as long as there is enough energy left.
Except that to do with every plate of food would take an absurd amount of energy. Breaking down an element to its constituent particles (i.e. severing the molecular bonds) is only one step away from what the warp core does with its precious supply of antimatter. If replicators instead convert an item into energy each time, this is exactly what the warp core does.
If replicators were really this powerful, you could almost do away with the warp reactor altogether!
If replicators were really this powerful, you could almost do away with the warp reactor altogether!
Be that as it may, you have to keep in mind that replicators are the product of the imagination of people who knew very little about science and therefore it's not surprising if some aspects of them don't make much sense. There's no replicators in real life and I don't think that there can ever be. At best we'll come up with elaborate versions of 3 d printers but those will only make devices out of pieces of raw material not out of thin air.
The transporter does essentially that and no one says the transporter could replace the warp core. You're analogy simply doesn't hold (replicated) water.
Just watching VOY:Shattered last night (miserable excuse for an episode, but whatever) Janeway and Chakotay have a discussion involving replicators "burning food". Either the writers are imagining the replicator as basically a high tech oven or, my own theory is that the replicator software includes a sophisticated CAD type program which would, when you request a specific recipe (rather than a pre-programmed option) it will take all the base elements, design them into the right ingredients, and "virtually cook" the food before 'beaming' the completed dish onto the replicator tray.
If the Transporter actually did convert every molecule of your body into energy (which would be a sh*t-ton of energy by the way) then transportees wouldn't be able to move their feet, talk, or grab lost space aliens - yet they do, in numerous different episodes and movies.
Clearly the Transporters operate in a different way than that which is just as well, since otherwise the Transporter would be an absurdly godlike piece of technology, able to duplicate Soonien androids and resurrect the dead with the mere push of a button - all you would need is a saved pattern and the equivalent amount of mass on the pad, ready for atomic rearrangement.
More likely, the Transporter operates by something like phasing its passengers (intact) into a nearby energy realm and then retrieving them at the destination point. This way, casual phrases like "converts you into energy" still hold up as generalised descriptions for the lamen, and a lot of the otherwise associated silliness is avoided.
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