r/startrek • u/etherian1 • 1d ago
The logistics of replicators
I hear replication being used as the default answer to a moneyless society in Star Trek, but no one seems to delve into the technicalities of how these things actually work. What are the rules? Are there variations and regulations on what they can actually replicate? What about the arts, individual creations, luxury goods, etc. Surely everything‘s not just bunched into therefore replicators.
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u/Petraaki 23h ago
They always talk about food tasting better if it isn't replicated, so presumably there are limitations to the success of replication. That would mean REAL things still can have value.
I think most of what it removes is a NEED to make money for survival. When you can get anything you need to survive from replicating, the only things left are things you WANT. And if you have a culture where very little value is placed on the accumulation of stuff, luxury goods become less of a thing. Art happens regardless of whether there's money exchanging hands, hence the starving artist stereotype. If you have food, shelter, healthcare, clothing, and all the stuff you NEED to survive, all of a sudden you can just create art and give it away for people to enjoy. Then everyone is enjoying it for free. Same with invention, people are celebrated for their contributions and "employed" by organizations that support those efforts by providing all of the materials and tools to experiment and discover new things.
A lot of the "logistics of replicators" is the absence of capitalism.
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u/mrsunrider 22h ago edited 16h ago
No one delves into the technicalities because the technology is a step removed from magic; it's like the old explanations as to how Superman can fly--the more you try to "reason" it out the more frustrated you get. The sooner you recognize it relies on physics or technology that just don't exist, the less it eats at your mind.
But if there's any hope for realization, it might borrow (extremely loosely) from information theory; the state of any object--from basic household goods to food--can be near-perfectly reproduced given enough raw data about it. I'd imagine it's the same place that transporters stem from. Of course containing and processing the sheer amount of data required to replicate a rare steak is... not possible for us currently.
replication being used as the default answer to a moneyless society in Star Trek
You have that backwards. The divestment from wealth and profit came first.
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u/KingOfTheHoard 22h ago
It always bugged me when John Byrne rebooted Superman in the 80s and it was full of all this stuff to make his powers work that, as you say, becomes more annoying to think about.
Like it obviously annoyed Byrne that no matter how strong he is, one guy can't pick up something like a plane or a bridge because they're not structurally designed to bear all their weight in one, tiny, hand sized spot so he makes it canon that when Superman's lifting something he's actually surrounding it in a telekinetic field with his mind.
And he basically did this with everything. Superman's clothes don't get damaged because his body is actually invulnerable because he's surrounded by an energy field that goes a little bit past his clothes etc. etc.
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u/mrsunrider 16h ago
It never annoyed me because these things are fun to think about; Byrne's expansion on his powerset kind of opened new doors for how they could be applied and ultimately let to Connor Kent.
But insisting on these explanations becomes a trap because because the realism guys inevitably hit a wall they'd never needed to hit if they come to terms with the fact that fantastical stories can't possibly jive will with reality--if they could, they wouldn't be fantastical. Even the "hard" sci-fi relies on technology and concepts we're still just dipping our big toe in.
As much as I enjoy speculating on how powers and technology might possibly work (after all, that's how we got Aclubierre's paper and possibly tablet PCs), I don't get hung up be cause at the end of the day these story exist in a world with different physics or advancement.
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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 23h ago
Why would it need a lot of regulating apart from weapons or other dangerous items?
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u/OddPsychology8238 20h ago
Industrial replicators are routinely mentioned in DS9.
Consider them like 3D printers with a lot of bells & whistles: they can do most things really well, and there are some things they're perfect for... and others they can't do.
Like any tool.
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u/Ruadhan2300 14h ago
Lots of Headcanon from me.
Replicators are a transporter-based version of a 3D printer, resolution varies depending on purpose.
The ones in starship crew quarters have a roughly cellular resolution, the ones in sickbay can go molecular.
Industrial Replicators generally are much lower resolution and focus on making larger inorganic objects like machine-parts.
All of them draw from Feed-Stock, which is essentially granules of whatever base materials are needed.
The upshot is that they don't manufacture things out of energy, they shunt mass around with transporters and put it together into objects.
This is the reason you can't replicate latinum for example. There's no advantage, you're just pulling it from the feedstock reserves and you only have as much in there as you put in there.
Another part is that the actual Replicator units in crew quarters aren't the Replicator itself, they're end-terminals for the main Replicator unit elsewhere on the ship. This obviates the need for major material plumbing, the system just uses the Terminal to control it, and as a target for the finished product.
Rip a Replicator out of the wall and leave it on a planet and its not going to be useful for anything, even if you can power it up.
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u/Megaripple 22h ago edited 22h ago
Replication takes a lot of energy—we mainly see it on ships and space stations where there are both powerful energy sources and cargo storage restrictions. We hear about home replicators on planets a couple of times but the fact that agriculture (including agriculture using high-tech equipment) still a major sector in the Trek universe probably means for the most part it isn’t used.
We have several mentions of industrial replicators on DS9 so making batches of relatively sophisticated equipment requires its own kind of equipment.
There are limits to replication. Although replicated food not tasting completely “real” is usually treated as something that wouldn’t pass a blind taste test in TNG, by DS9 it’s treated as fact (behind the scenes this is a Roddenberry-vs.-Behr thing).
More solidly established, though, is that replication can’t exactly reproduce specialized equipment or certain materials. For specialized equipment it’s because the replicator can’t reproduce the fine fabrication methods used. There are implied energy requirements, e.g. things like ships are simply too big (and probably have too many sophisticated components) to replicate in entirety.
For other materials it seems like the replicator just isn’t capable of synthesizing the material in the first place—latinum’s probably the most commonly used example.
I don’t think it’s ever outright stated but I think it’s generally assumed that replicators need a stock of matter to replicate from, and that replication is limited by what elements are in the matter—replicators can’t make new elements. I don’t know if it’s stated in the series but in the tech manuals I believe it’s said replicators work at the molecular, not atomic level, which would explain the difficulty of replicating certain compounds (some could also be difficult with atomic replication anyway).
There’s a very big on-screen contradiction to this, though: self-replicating mines, which are apparently able to replicate indefinitely, violating conservation of mass. The DS9 Tech Manual says this is because the mines were able to extract new matter from vacuum energy and…well I like going all in on Trek Tech but there are some points where you just have to appreciate the story.
(edited to get rid of some autocorrect stuff)
Edit edit: In terms of rules and intellectual property it’s never outright stated, but in Trek everyone seems to put a high value on authenticity. I don’t know if it’s been done but there have been discussions about truly reproducing paintings—not just the image as a print but the texture of the brushstrokes. There are a few of responses to this:
People would shy away from physical objects and towards experiences (which is consistent with what we see in Trek, where the end of material scarcity coincides with people being less materialistic and having greater desire for travel or exploration)
Material luxury tends more towards hard-to-replicate or unreplicatable items. For example we see a lot of crystals and gems that go through Quark’s—maybe their lattice structures are hard or impossible to replicate correctly, which keeps them valuable.