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…)
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…)