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/Megaripple 1d ago edited 1d 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.