Seriously. I want to know what kind of starship designer or half-baked engineer would have access to replication technlogy (actually fabrication technology, but that’s another rant*) and didn’t build it into every facet of the ship.
regenerating hullplating? cool. Regenerating critical structure? Awesome. Brig cells that seal off and have no exit because they’re contained in six walls? klingons belt buckles need not apply. Need to isolate a contagion? yeah. Seal them off behind a bulkhead.
Intruders? make it so the only way you can move about the ship is your transporter system.
Fuel shortage? Well. you know you could have powered your ship with a singularity core, right? any old asteroid is fuel.
and you know what the best part is? all of that comes with the inherent ability to specialize. Analyze damage when regrowing hull and increase the hull plating thickness where you get hit. analyze wear and tear on components, and upgrade the ones that wear out the fastest. Do you spend your time sprinting from crisis to crisis? tweak the performance of the warp drive for sprints.
You need a new starship? fire a photon torpedo with a replication warhad into an asteroid. New base? bigger astroid.
*you want replicators? THIS IS HOW YOU GET REPLICATORS. replicators are things that make more of themselves. fabricators are things that make more of other things, and maybe also themselves.
Per the technical manuals, there are large industrial replicators in the engineering areas. They don’t have the detail to reproduce complex molecules like food, but they can manufacture large forms of homogenous materials like metals. If they have to make new hull plates, I assume they use the industrial replicators to manufacture the parts, then a cargo transporter to beam the part into its location, though it probably still needs human technicians to bolt it in.
The replicators are not built directly into the hull of the ship because they’re delicate equipment.
The replicators are not built directly into the hull of the ship because they’re delicate equipment.
If they’re connected into an array (which I’m pretty sure is part of what makes a replicator ‘industrial’,) then any single component of that array would be very easy to replace. You know the episode where they first encounter the borg and they pump the cube full of photon torpedos only for it to “regenerate”?
this is how the borg do that. (and lets be honest, they already have these systems on the ship, so any danger to a ship going rogue or somehow being used against them is still just as real.)
True, but we also know that the Borg have more advanced tech than the Federation, including nanoprobes/nanobots, which presumably would help in sealing re-fabricated parts together vs. having a technician weld them together. We also know from scenes inside Borg ships that the drones start moving around when repairs are needed, I assume performing some kind of labor related to the repairs.
Basically I don’t think replicator/transporter technology can solve the whole problem by itself, even for the Borg.
I think the general explanation is that not just everything can be replicated and also that they require a huge amount of power and maintenance. They also do consume basic materials I believe.
In that sense it makes sense that you only have a few. They’re not in every inch for the same reason that not every inch of car interior hides an airbag system.
The limit on what can be replicated seems more vague and changes. But at least i think you cant replicate a replicator directly.
Its definitely more a fabricator then a replicator as i understand it in function.
You actually make me think of something else. The holographic technology.
We know holographic environments have full physical collision and can be deadly.
What is stopping someone from making a huge holographic ship projected from a tiny drone.
Then you can actually change the entire interior on the fly and easily get rid of invaders, be immune to many attacks.
But then again the system is its own weak point, one issue and the ship is gone, probably works best with a holographic crew.
To my understanding, holodecks aren’t really physical- it’s over laying force fields with holographic projections to cheese reality.
That said, La Sirena was basically one big giant holodeck inside.
As for “only having a few”, on the D, those things are everywhere- everyone’s quarters, every conference room, probably every office. Every toilette, too.
The rant by janeway in year of hell, about her pocket watch being a hypo, suggests that replicators aren’t restricted to needing a supply of every element used rather than having a “pattern” (aka design file) that gets called for whatever is being used. (Imagine a repository of files that contains “steel” or “tritanium” and 37 varieties of tomato soup. It’d just be an extra parameter in the parametric design file.
Which, yeah. e=mc^2 (+ineffeciencies) would suggest massive energy consumption- though it’s likely they have some sort of dense, stable material that serves as feedstock.
Interestingly, the antimatter reactors used as the warp core would consume about the same amount of mass, so if we assume similar inefficiencies (I have no idea what these would be like, and neither do the writers,) using replicators as a power bank would be about the same as using an antimatter warp core…
(Remember my comment about singularities for energy storage? It’s all just asteroids. Or, uh, extra hull plating…)
I always laugh at how little surveillance and security systems they have compared to us modern day too.
Like, there is zero fucking way the ship AI wouldn’t know exactly where everyone is on the military ship at all times and recognize if anyone is doing something funny, or if there’s someone extra on board, someone missing.
So many little star trek conundrums would’ve been solved in the first 5 minutes with the right security system that detected and isolated the threat before it had a chance to even do damage. It is well within their capabilities, it could summon force fields wherever the fuck it wants, fabricate the right material to cancel any issues. It could summon force fields around someone as soon as they pull out a phaser in an unexpected non hostile situation, ffs
It does ruin a lot of episodes and plots if you take these technologies to their logical end. It’s a lot of work to write “hard” scifi and you kinda have to guess at how a lot of stuff will be used, think of the most common sense utilities it would be awesome for, and if you don’t want that in your story… Fabricate a good reason ahead of time why it doesn’t work that well. Oh no Zero Point Energy can’t be manufactured at small scale so of course you only see it in large ships, small ships can’t warp, faster than light comm isnt possible on a handheld device, this shield doesn’t work for some rare energy weapons, etc
Like. That one episode where the orions snuck into a diplomacy thingy disguised as an andorians. I bet a simple airport backscatter scanner would have noticed the dangly bits were odd.
But even if it’s not hard sci, a coherent universe is better than one that flops around. Like when you’re doing world building a moment needs to be taken to consider what your stereotypical DnD party would do with it.
I mean, my party would absolutely weaponize the shit out of self sealing stem bolts.
Edit- imagine dr McCoy being like “sir, the computer flagged something in your embarkation scan…. Why don’t you come on down and we’ll deal with those janky balls”
(The transporters disassemble and reassemble stuff at the molecular level, surely there’s a way to check if they’re andorian, right?!)
It essentially took the Borg from the future to realize this. Oh yeah we simulated replicators about 400 years ago maybe we should like use that technology? Big hulking deck plates whenever you need it.
Yet the borg from Voyages time can not understanding the concept of really thick metal.
Miles O’Brien needs to suffer more, the gods Emissary decided, so he made sure that no other ship had access to this technology. Wait, scrap that - I said “no ship”, forget that other word in between them…
Computer just post this entire log entry. Wait, no DELETE it, I meant DELETE it!!! Recall it back, dammit recall it back NOW!!!
Isn’t that what ships are like in Discovery after it goes to the 31st century or whatever? (IDK, I find it hard to watch so I’ve only made it a few episodes in to season 3.)
“Dude, what happens on the lower decks stays on the lower decks!”
“Apparently not.”
“What do you mean?”
“apparently, we just flushed the entire colony of space spores into life support. Welcome to USS Discotheque”
Seriously. I want to know what kind of starship designer or half-baked engineer would have access to replication technlogy (actually fabrication technology, but that’s another rant*) and didn’t build it into every facet of the ship.
regenerating hullplating? cool. Regenerating critical structure? Awesome. Brig cells that seal off and have no exit because they’re contained in six walls? klingons belt buckles need not apply. Need to isolate a contagion? yeah. Seal them off behind a bulkhead.
Intruders? make it so the only way you can move about the ship is your transporter system.
Fuel shortage? Well. you know you could have powered your ship with a singularity core, right? any old asteroid is fuel.
and you know what the best part is? all of that comes with the inherent ability to specialize. Analyze damage when regrowing hull and increase the hull plating thickness where you get hit. analyze wear and tear on components, and upgrade the ones that wear out the fastest. Do you spend your time sprinting from crisis to crisis? tweak the performance of the warp drive for sprints.
You need a new starship? fire a photon torpedo with a replication warhad into an asteroid. New base? bigger astroid.
*you want replicators? THIS IS HOW YOU GET REPLICATORS. replicators are things that make more of themselves. fabricators are things that make more of other things, and maybe also themselves.
“My ship is saturated in replicators”
Star Trek: 😎
Stargate: 😱
Imagine the M5 computer getting access to a replicator. the stargate cross over you didn’t know you wanted.
Per the technical manuals, there are large industrial replicators in the engineering areas. They don’t have the detail to reproduce complex molecules like food, but they can manufacture large forms of homogenous materials like metals. If they have to make new hull plates, I assume they use the industrial replicators to manufacture the parts, then a cargo transporter to beam the part into its location, though it probably still needs human technicians to bolt it in.
The replicators are not built directly into the hull of the ship because they’re delicate equipment.
That’s an easy fix, just patch the output of the replicator to the pattern buffer of the transporter, and voilà self repairing ship.
If they’re connected into an array (which I’m pretty sure is part of what makes a replicator ‘industrial’,) then any single component of that array would be very easy to replace. You know the episode where they first encounter the borg and they pump the cube full of photon torpedos only for it to “regenerate”?
this is how the borg do that. (and lets be honest, they already have these systems on the ship, so any danger to a ship going rogue or somehow being used against them is still just as real.)
True, but we also know that the Borg have more advanced tech than the Federation, including nanoprobes/nanobots, which presumably would help in sealing re-fabricated parts together vs. having a technician weld them together. We also know from scenes inside Borg ships that the drones start moving around when repairs are needed, I assume performing some kind of labor related to the repairs.
Basically I don’t think replicator/transporter technology can solve the whole problem by itself, even for the Borg.
I think the general explanation is that not just everything can be replicated and also that they require a huge amount of power and maintenance. They also do consume basic materials I believe.
In that sense it makes sense that you only have a few. They’re not in every inch for the same reason that not every inch of car interior hides an airbag system.
The limit on what can be replicated seems more vague and changes. But at least i think you cant replicate a replicator directly.
Its definitely more a fabricator then a replicator as i understand it in function.
You actually make me think of something else. The holographic technology.
We know holographic environments have full physical collision and can be deadly.
What is stopping someone from making a huge holographic ship projected from a tiny drone.
Then you can actually change the entire interior on the fly and easily get rid of invaders, be immune to many attacks.
But then again the system is its own weak point, one issue and the ship is gone, probably works best with a holographic crew.
To my understanding, holodecks aren’t really physical- it’s over laying force fields with holographic projections to cheese reality.
That said, La Sirena was basically one big giant holodeck inside.
As for “only having a few”, on the D, those things are everywhere- everyone’s quarters, every conference room, probably every office. Every toilette, too.
The rant by janeway in year of hell, about her pocket watch being a hypo, suggests that replicators aren’t restricted to needing a supply of every element used rather than having a “pattern” (aka design file) that gets called for whatever is being used. (Imagine a repository of files that contains “steel” or “tritanium” and 37 varieties of tomato soup. It’d just be an extra parameter in the parametric design file.
Which, yeah. e=mc^2 (+ineffeciencies) would suggest massive energy consumption- though it’s likely they have some sort of dense, stable material that serves as feedstock.
Interestingly, the antimatter reactors used as the warp core would consume about the same amount of mass, so if we assume similar inefficiencies (I have no idea what these would be like, and neither do the writers,) using replicators as a power bank would be about the same as using an antimatter warp core…
(Remember my comment about singularities for energy storage? It’s all just asteroids. Or, uh, extra hull plating…)
I always laugh at how little surveillance and security systems they have compared to us modern day too.
Like, there is zero fucking way the ship AI wouldn’t know exactly where everyone is on the military ship at all times and recognize if anyone is doing something funny, or if there’s someone extra on board, someone missing.
So many little star trek conundrums would’ve been solved in the first 5 minutes with the right security system that detected and isolated the threat before it had a chance to even do damage. It is well within their capabilities, it could summon force fields wherever the fuck it wants, fabricate the right material to cancel any issues. It could summon force fields around someone as soon as they pull out a phaser in an unexpected non hostile situation, ffs
It does ruin a lot of episodes and plots if you take these technologies to their logical end. It’s a lot of work to write “hard” scifi and you kinda have to guess at how a lot of stuff will be used, think of the most common sense utilities it would be awesome for, and if you don’t want that in your story… Fabricate a good reason ahead of time why it doesn’t work that well. Oh no Zero Point Energy can’t be manufactured at small scale so of course you only see it in large ships, small ships can’t warp, faster than light comm isnt possible on a handheld device, this shield doesn’t work for some rare energy weapons, etc
Right?
Like. That one episode where the orions snuck into a diplomacy thingy disguised as an andorians. I bet a simple airport backscatter scanner would have noticed the dangly bits were odd.
But even if it’s not hard sci, a coherent universe is better than one that flops around. Like when you’re doing world building a moment needs to be taken to consider what your stereotypical DnD party would do with it.
I mean, my party would absolutely weaponize the shit out of self sealing stem bolts.
You mean Orion disguised as an Andorian from “Journey to Babel.”
Yeah that one.
Edit- imagine dr McCoy being like “sir, the computer flagged something in your embarkation scan…. Why don’t you come on down and we’ll deal with those janky balls”
(The transporters disassemble and reassemble stuff at the molecular level, surely there’s a way to check if they’re andorian, right?!)
I’ll have what they’re having
It essentially took the Borg from the future to realize this. Oh yeah we simulated replicators about 400 years ago maybe we should like use that technology? Big hulking deck plates whenever you need it.
Yet the borg from Voyages time can not understanding the concept of really thick metal.
Miles O’Brien needs to suffer more, the
godsEmissary decided, so he made sure that no other ship had access to this technology. Wait, scrap that - I said “no ship”, forget that other word in between them…Computer just post this entire log entry. Wait, no DELETE it, I meant DELETE it!!! Recall it back, dammit recall it back NOW!!!
Isn’t that what ships are like in Discovery after it goes to the 31st century or whatever? (IDK, I find it hard to watch so I’ve only made it a few episodes in to season 3.)
Dunno.
The entire show makes more sense if you assume they’re tripping balls on space spores
Now that’s a Dallas-style ending I could get behind!
“Dude, what happens on the lower decks stays on the lower decks!”
“Apparently not.”
“What do you mean?”
“apparently, we just flushed the entire colony of space spores into life support. Welcome to USS Discotheque”