As for the energy conversion, they state several times that's how the replicators work. Yes, you could argue it might be safer and possibly easier to just vaporize a fuel supply into instant energy than to use the antimatter reaction, but you have to realize that even carrying the densest material they could, they would run out of it real fast with the energy requirements they need. The Matter/Antimatter reaction lasts a long, long, long, long time, and you can store far more antimatter.
I never heard mention that the replicators make mass from energy and it certainly wouldn't make sense. I don't know if you understand just how much energy a gram of matter equates to. No way they work like that; they wouldn't be used except for dire necessities if they did.
Jawohl. Even if you did do that (for some, indiscernible, unfathomable reason) what you would have is ~40% of the mass in the form of gamma radiation. Not healthy for flowers or other living things.
The part about getting more energy from a matter/anti-matter reaction than a simple conversion of matter to energy is incorrect. The amount would be exactly the same.
Nein. Actually, far less. Antimatter reactors are lossy. As implied above, ~60% is lost to neutrinos, which are useless little creatures.
The energy contained within any given amount of matter is obviously equal to its rest mass, but the actual conversion process is not efficient (at least ideally efficient; it's hella efficient compared to the relativistic mass released in chemical reactions, which is miniscule, or released by fusion which is like ~1%, iirc).
Phasers do not turn mass into energy. If the mass of a person were turned into energy, the result would be an explosion equivalent to thousands of nuclear bombs.
Tell that to Voyager writers, who think antiprotons
cure people.
T'Girl said:
Most likely there are big bins in the Enterprise that hold basic organic and inorganic base stock for use by the replicator. If your request a juicy ribeye steak, the replicator will use a transporter "like" effect to assemble water, fat and proteins into the meat. Assemble calcium, phosphorus, sodium, and minerals into the bone. Of course it's also possible that what the replicator simply dishes up a replica of a piece of meat that has no relationship to anything that was bovine muscle tissue.
Something I wonder, but would never care to make a study of to prove it, is whether genuinely novel items are often replicated. If not, one might be able to suppose that your "Earl Grey, hot" is queued up somewhere in bulk matter storage, and the transporter part of the cycle is actually de minimis, simply a method of making it available, removing impurities, and heating to specification--while the
actual production of the requested item is done with more orthodox nanotechnology (a bioreactor of some type). Even odd foods need not be considered novel items, if the ingredients are ready (e.g., no one has ever ordered a peanut butter and banana sandwich, but hundreds of people have ordered peanut butter and hundreds of others have enjoyed bananas, and presumably yet others have felt the delights of bread and mayonnaise).
This would get rid of a lot of the BS involving the replicator. It would still involve the BS of the transporter, but that's a nigh-on insoluble problem.
On a final note, we should make
no mistake--replicators aren't often counted as such (even by the silly crews when dealing with "real" nanites), but they are
absolutely nanotechnology. Nearly perfected nanotechnology, in fact.
)
