Wasn't it called a protein synthesizer in the show Enterprise? I recall hearing that term. I sort of got the idea it was not as an advanced piece of tech. as a replicator. Plus they had actual cooks as well.
Question about replicators....
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
Protein resequencer
Perhaps the TOS food slots weren't dumbwaiters but were mini transporters. The food was still processed at a central location and all the silverware and utensils were stored in a similar central location. When the food was ordered at a slot, the meal was compiled and transported to the slot. This would help explain why the tribbles were in the food slots - they were beamed there the same way the forks and plates and trays were beamed there.
In Voyager the replicator technology could work without being tied to a central location. In the VOY episode "State of Flux" the Kazon were given stolen plansfor the Death Star for a Starfleet food replicator. The device was located on the bridge.
In Voyager the replicator technology could work without being tied to a central location. In the VOY episode "State of Flux" the Kazon were given stolen plans
The description for the Food Processors in "Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise" (TMP era) are basically proto-replicators, the food is made elsewhere and transported to the slot with a tray, plates, utensils and the like. It them transports the remains placed back into it someplace to be reprocessed.
From my original viewings in the 1960s on, I have been convinced so firmly that TOS's food stations (I only heard "food slot" in s1 Next Gen by the way) were mini-transporters, not because they were consistent about presenting them this way, they weren't... but because they had to be that.
You ask for a specific meal. It's there immediately. That's enough. We already know for a fact that they have transporters. This is an obvious use to make of transporters, once you have them. I would guess they had replicators years before transporters, just because using them on humans is far more risky.
A food thing is even in the transporter room.
If you want to strain to make them not be replicators, you could start to speculate about inertial dampeners making hand-prepared instantaneous meals zoom to food stations without the slightest trace of spillage, but hell it's the future! Cooks and dumb waiters?!
Writers of ST, especially writers of those mass market popcorn movies, can get ST wrong too, and sometimes you just have to ignore it. I'm talking about Undiscovered Country. And Wrath of Khan with physical torpedoes rather than actual photon (light) torpedoes.
I'm relieved that everyone here knows the food has to be made from something.... in Next Gen I wondered if it could be cosmic rays converted to matter, rather than... physical stuff.
You ask for a specific meal. It's there immediately. That's enough. We already know for a fact that they have transporters. This is an obvious use to make of transporters, once you have them. I would guess they had replicators years before transporters, just because using them on humans is far more risky.
A food thing is even in the transporter room.
If you want to strain to make them not be replicators, you could start to speculate about inertial dampeners making hand-prepared instantaneous meals zoom to food stations without the slightest trace of spillage, but hell it's the future! Cooks and dumb waiters?!
Writers of ST, especially writers of those mass market popcorn movies, can get ST wrong too, and sometimes you just have to ignore it. I'm talking about Undiscovered Country. And Wrath of Khan with physical torpedoes rather than actual photon (light) torpedoes.
I'm relieved that everyone here knows the food has to be made from something.... in Next Gen I wondered if it could be cosmic rays converted to matter, rather than... physical stuff.
This assumes that the explosive payload is not comprised of charged or accelerated photons. By this point I think it's safe to assume that the payloads are in fact charged or accelerated photons, of a highly radioactive nature. The magic technology of photon torpedoes is then not the casing, but the way the payload is exploded.
And the galley in TUC isn't wrong, it just isn't mentioned much. Never seen it before? Well there it is.
Every time there's a conversation about the food from replicators possibly using crew waste as a material source, someone reacts like this, and no offense intended, but it always makes me think they know very little about the actual food cycle on our planet in the present time. Every bit of what you eat *now* (except maybe salt and weird laboratory created stuff like Olestra) has been: parts of plants (probably including different plants than the one it may have came directly from), parts of animals (probably including different animals than the one it may have came directly from, and possibly including humans), plant waste, animal waste (possibly including humans), fungi, and nutrients in dirt.
It's all *also* been stardust.
All the food cycle aboard a space habitat (ship or station) does is speed that process up and do it on a smaller and more visible scale - whether it is using crew waste for the replicator, or cycling urine into potable water on the ISS.
So don't worry. And maybe focus on the stardust.
My reason was not that we didn't see it before.
I am being much more simple and straightforward about photon torpedoes... not only are they named after photons, but they appear to consist of a bright flash of light, and not one emanating out the back of something for propulsion. The thing appears to be a light weapon because it's a discrete lump of light... however improbable that might sound, when you put that
effect together with the name, it indicates another form of light weapon besides phasers, or a variation on phasers.
Sure, it could be something else, but I figure that they were naming these things in ST so that our first impressions would be correct. The viewer has enough to keep track of...
I've never held to the idea that the photon torpedoes were anything other than physical casings carrying an explosive payload made out of something referred to as "photons". The light was pretty much literally a visual nod to the audience so they could be seen against the dark of space.
Yeah....... I never got that.
They are physical torpedoes that you shove into a launcher so do they turn into light when launched?
This description came from "The Making of Star Trek" in 1968, which was written based on communications with the show staff and access to the writer's guides and whatnot, so it can probably be considered at least relatively authoritative on it:
So while not explicitly physical, they were at least meant to be M/AM weapons from the very start, not pure light or anything. And based on the description of how they can be configured or used there it's not a far leap to think of the modern conception as fitting that description.
That's interesting, thanks for that. Still leaves unexplained why they're called that, and why they're so bright when they haven't even exploded yet. I never knew it was matter anti-matter explosions....
The brightness yeah that's kind of a mystery (though I like @Ithekro's theory that it's related to the warp sustainer field, that makes some sense), but the "photon" part of the name I chalk up to what they do: a M/AM reaction produces tons of photons and nothing else, after all. Gamma rays, sure, but those are still photons.
So the mass is converted into light?
Yep; that's exactly what happens in real life in a matter/antimatter reaction, even. When matter and antimatter react under perfect conditions, you get strong gamma ray emission. In practice, you get some neutrino or particle-antiparticle pairs thrown off as well, but not nearly as much as the gamma rays.
That's how PET scanners work, for example; they inject you with a radionuclide that has a lot of positively-charged nuclides, and those nuclides emit positrons to lose the charge and fall back to neutrality. And when those positrons hit an electron in your body, the PET scanner detects the gamma rays emitted by the mutual annihilation, and tracking those emissions lets them form a three-dimensional image of your body from the inside.
Thanks for that.
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