Were they not referenced in “Enemy Within” and/or “Naked Time”?
Correct; Kirk’s crew was living on reconstituted food. Which raises the question of why their replicator capabilities were so limited. Clearly it’s not just a matter of transporter technology.
As far as I can tell, deliberately making copies with only transporter technology never worked. If you put one item in, you get one item out. Transporters have a “matter stream” which contains the original matter that must be reconstituted. And, most of the time, it seems impossible to store a pattern for any extended period, so just dumping similar matter in doesn’t seem to be possible, either.
Couldn’t they have just loaded the pattern on a flash drive or SD card? Or burned it onto a CD/DVD? I can understand magnetic media corrupting over time.
ST:TOS Transporters transported matter. Think of them as a car: you got into it and went to where your destination, but you were not in two places at once.
They were also of limited range. A hundred thousand miles or so, and that’s just peanuts to space. There may also have been a size limit.
So if you wanted to transport a shipload of grain to a planet, you’d need to get the ship there to begin with.
It wasn’t until ST:TNG that replicators had been developed. Kirk when he says “replicate 100 flintlocks” is using the word to mean “make replicas,” something we can do even today. He can’t be talking about replication as it meant in SG:TNG because it hadn’t been developed. Scotty could get the materials to build them by beaming up the natural resources of the planet, much like they did originally.
As for the poisoned wheat: there was clearly a virus. The virus either killed the wheat, or the infection remained as the wheat sprouted.
You make things far too difficult.
To elaborate, it would likely have been a retrovirus–a virus that integrates itself into the host’s genome. That would result in the virus being present in all plants grown from the grain. For maximum nefariousness, its primary activity could be dormant in the plants, perhaps for lack of a key amino acid, resulting in a perfectly healthy crop. Then, when an animal that has the necessary chemical makeup eats the grain, it becomes infected, and the virus begins producing a protein that accumulates in the walls of the digestive tract, interfering with nutrient absorption, until the animal dies.
Range of the TOS transporter was 30,000 kilometers [Spock in “Obsession”] or 16,000 miles [Whitfield’s TMoST, quoting the original series Writers’ Guide].
Would the size of an object be limited by that of the transporter chamber? According to the OS Writers’ Guide, there were several large transporters at different locations throughout the Enterprise to be used in abandoning ship (and, one would presume, transporting cargo).
Possible, but I believe McCoy said the inert matter accumulated in the bloodstream.
…And then refine the metal, cast it, cure and shape the wood, machine the metal parts, and put everything together…
They must have had one helluva machine shop for Scotty to tinker in! 
Which raises another question: Without replicator technology, how the hell could they have “manufactured a ton” of precious gemstones on board the Enterprise [“Catspaw”]? Beam the heavy elements out of space and run them through great big steam presses? 
I always wondered how the hell those instant dumbwaiters worked. Like an automat, maybe, with the cooks filling bowls of chicken soup 24/7?
He doesn’t quite actually say that; he said it “turned into” inert matter in the bloodstream:
He didn’t say that it accumulated there, though it’s easy to infer that. (It’s probably what the writer meant, but fortunately they were vague enough in their biobabble to leave a loophole.) The second part of the quote describes symptoms that are not consistent with a buildup in the bloodstream, which would cause cardiovascular symptoms, not starvation. Since the obvious inference doesn’t make sense, we’re left to conclude that the virus dumps its inert product into the bloodstream, from which it accumulates somewhere it could reasonably cause the symptoms described–like the intestinal walls.
Allowing for Bones dumbing the explanation down for Kirk, I think my explanation is plausible. The “more the organism eats” part might be taken to imply that the virus requires something from the quadrotriticale to continue producing the protein, so that it will only kill you if you keep eating the grain. Since it’s the only grain that will grow on the planet, it’s probably a staple food. Just rendering it unsafe to eat might be enough to cause the colony to fail without killing everyone–which might risk drawing the attention of the Organians.
With regard to replicating 100 flintlocks on USS Enterprise during TOS:
As of 2014, humans have access to relatively cheap and somewhat primitive 3-D printers that could quite easily make a gunstock and barrel for a flintlock. Mind you, it wouldn’t be of wood and metal, but a century from now, almost certainly so. Or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.
And what other verb would have been more futuristic in the 1960’s, in this context, than ‘replicate’? ‘Reproduce’ has biological and sexual connotations. ‘Recreate’ is mundane. ‘Synthesize’ sounds good, but ‘replicate’ indicates a certain level of verisimilitude that ‘synthesize’ seems to lack. And, while ‘facsimile’ is quite a good term for a remote copy, the verb ‘facsimilize’ just doesn’t really roll off the tongue.
As suggested by terentii, I think the TOS food dispensers were futuristic versions of an old technology that was successfully employed in the first Automatback in the first decade of the 20th century. The modern version as seen in Japan and elsewhere is a vending machine array dispensing an amazingly large variety of food. Imagine this being used as a mechanism to dispense food asynchronously to hundreds of crew for every meal. An assembly line backloaded by the kitchen crew, and you know that there have to be some, even if they are called ‘sustenance engineers’. The items are stored and then dispensed to the mess hall by user request.
This might be the same seemingly magical routing algorithm that allows a three dimensional matrix of turbolifts to work efficiently without collisions.
Of course, this begs the question as to how a starship is supposed to carry foodstuffs for 430 humanoids. How long is the time between necessary provisioning for such a craft?
But that is another topic entirely.
In the middle of the third season [“Mark of Gideon”], Kirk states that he and his latest squeeze are all alone with enough food to last 400 people for five years. According to the OS Writers’ Guide, such bulk items were stored in the outer sections of the primary hull. Apparently they didn’t replenish their stores very often.
And yes, the dumbwaiters were indeed part of a miniature turbolift system, according to Whitfield (presumably quoting the Writers’ Guide).
For the sake of completeness, I believe the ship’s galley was referenced only in the earliest episodes of TOS [e.g., “Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X”]. I think even then it was on its way out in favor of an automated system.
Thank you for the elucidation!
When I was a 10-year-old kid, I thought long and hard about how a turbolift system would work. I then became fascinated with how train systems were routed.
It must have taken up one helluva lot of space. Those damned wall slots were everywhere!
… And what about McCoy’s SS uniform in “Patterns of Force”? The damned thing was produced less than five minutes after “patching in” the historical computer to the uniforms section. Does the Enterprise really carry around full sets of Nazi regalia (or the material to manufacture them) for just such occasions? :dubious:
Holy Nazi Zombies! :eek:
While watching it as a kid, when 3-D printing was decades in the future, I imagined it as a shop full of automated milling machines, most likely. The flintlocks could be whipped out of raw stock, then either robo-assembled or hand assembled. That’s why they would take a while. And, because they had to pass as real.
McCoy’s SS uniform was probably made of the same material the regular SF uniforms were made out of, a synthetic the ship probably has barrels of raw material for. The color is added during the creation. Whatever unknown process makes the normal uniforms could make any clothes. A close inspection would show that “something was off” in the material and construction (probably no weave-it would look solid, maybe), but they were never intended to stand up to that. As for the insignias, I would imagine now a form of 3-D printing would suffice. just a faster 23rd century version.
No 24th century “I can make it for you wholesale” replicators required. I picture the 23rd century “replicators” turn raw stock into stuff, while the 24th century ones turn energy into stuff, using a form of the transporter tech.
Or maybe there was a sweatshop full of Kohm women slaving away in the lower decks of the engineering hull…
Couldn’t they just reverse the flux of the polarization when transporting the grain to the surface and solve the problem? Or did the tacheyon beams prevent that?
Their technobabble hadn’t reached a sufficiently developed stage yet.