Replicators, just like the holodeck and the transporters convert energy into matter. They don’t need any base matter. Voyager did lack things, but what they mainly lacked were sources of long-term energy like dilithium and the Enterprise-D would not intentionally be so far away that they would run out of dilithium. The Enterprise almost never left the Alpha Quadrant of the galaxy. They were pretty much always within at most a month of rescue even if they were totally out of such things. Voyager was initially looking at no resupply for 70 years.
Replicators, just like the holodeck and the transporters convert energy into matter. They don’t need any base matter.
According to stuff like the Star Trek Technical Manual, this is not true.
Transporters work by disassembling you into your constituent particles, transporting those particles to the destination, and then reassembling them. It takes a lot of energy to do that, but officially anyway your particles are the same particles before and after.
Replicator works by transporting base nutrient stocks out of tanks into the replicator terminal, but this time it rearranges the nutrient stocks according to whatever the target recipe is
Perhaps those nutrients are very easily available so it’s not an issue, and the energy required is the bottleneck. At any rate, I don’t think Voyager or anything produced after that ever mentioned it.
I enjoy Star Trek but I honestly don’t know the full deets on whether their matter creators need base matter or make it from energy.
They need matter. Admiral Vance has this exchange with Osyraa in Discovery:
Osyraa: Hmm. It doesn’t quite taste like the real thing, does it?
Vance: I’ve never eaten a real apple.
Osyraa: Well, how sad. Apples are a thing of beauty. You want to talk about oppression, you should start in your own mess hall.
Vance: It’s made of our shit, you know. That’s the base material that we use in our replicators. We deconstruct it to the atomic level and then reform the atoms. It’s pretty good for shit, and we don’t have to commit atrocities for it.
Can you have a shoestring budget in a moneyless society?
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Replicators, just like the holodeck and the transporters convert energy into matter. They don’t need any base matter. Voyager did lack things, but what they mainly lacked were sources of long-term energy like dilithium and the Enterprise-D would not intentionally be so far away that they would run out of dilithium. The Enterprise almost never left the Alpha Quadrant of the galaxy. They were pretty much always within at most a month of rescue even if they were totally out of such things. Voyager was initially looking at no resupply for 70 years.
According to stuff like the Star Trek Technical Manual, this is not true.
Transporters work by disassembling you into your constituent particles, transporting those particles to the destination, and then reassembling them. It takes a lot of energy to do that, but officially anyway your particles are the same particles before and after.
Replicator works by transporting base nutrient stocks out of tanks into the replicator terminal, but this time it rearranges the nutrient stocks according to whatever the target recipe is
Perhaps those nutrients are very easily available so it’s not an issue, and the energy required is the bottleneck. At any rate, I don’t think Voyager or anything produced after that ever mentioned it.
They need matter. Admiral Vance has this exchange with Osyraa in Discovery:
Osyraa: Hmm. It doesn’t quite taste like the real thing, does it?
Vance: I’ve never eaten a real apple.
Osyraa: Well, how sad. Apples are a thing of beauty. You want to talk about oppression, you should start in your own mess hall.
Vance: It’s made of our shit, you know. That’s the base material that we use in our replicators. We deconstruct it to the atomic level and then reform the atoms. It’s pretty good for shit, and we don’t have to commit atrocities for it.
Ask Tasha Yar.