Star Trek: Why not use a giant replicator to create Starships?

And why not try to study and duplicate the transporter accident that turned Picard and everybody with him into little kids? They stumble on the Fountain of Youth and it never occurs to anybody there would be a demand for this?!

Was there a shortage of Constitution-class starships, though? In “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” Kirk mentioned that there were a dozen ships of the Enterprise’s class. As the flagship, the Enterprise was considered to be the pride of Starfleet and the ship most desirable to secure a position on. That doesn’t necessarily imply that it was the only one of its type in Starfleet. There were more ships shown on the show. “The Ultimate Computer” showed at least four CC starships gathered at one coordinate in space.

Y’know, I would really like to see where in any of the canon it says that a replicator works without needing energy or basic material to build the thing it’s replicating, because I’ve never seen it.

Voyager’s replicator rations imply that the use of the machines is limited. We just never see that on the Enterprise because they’re never really strapped for supplies. We just see Picard make his tea, and presumably he’d be responsible enough not to use resources on pleasure if they could be better used for other things.

As for the various transporter-clones and what not, all of those look like freak accidents, one-offs that can’t reliably be duplicated. Sure, trying to transport Picard up through this planet’s wacky atmospheric plasma discharge might clone him…or you might lose your awesome Diplo-General for no gain. Plus, if you have a hundred Picards, you lose some of what makes him special. Who cares if Picard is overseeing your peace conference, he oversees all of them. Who cares if you’re facing the mighty Picard in battle, everyone’s fought him, and your first class in Battle-School is Picard-Busting 101.

Also, Latinum can’t be replicated. Gold is just the shiny convenient carrying-medium of the stuff.

Use e=mc^2 and calculate the energy required to replicate one glass of water. If that kind of energy was readily available phasers and photon torpedoes are just silly. You can vaporize enemy ships easily with that kind of power. The ST universe has more than a few flaws with regards to physics.

It doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to figure that an Enterprise-class ship, which is 4.5 million metrics tons and is large enough to support 1000-1200 people regularly and is also extremely complex internally even if you don’t account for moving parts, is vast orders of magnitude more difficult/expensive to replicate all at once. That’s in addition to the likelihood of a margin of error at that scale.

It seems far more likely that they would replicate one part at a time and assemble it part by part. (Or at least, several parts at a time. Not like they have to do it all from one personal replicator.) Less of a straight power draw and easier to spot problems during construction, rather than having to discover and track them down in a pre-replicated ship.

Voyager had gel-packs that couldn’t be replicated. There are lots of hints that replicated food is noticeably inferior to the real stuff, and other items too (Jadzia Dax tried to pass a replicated Klingon candle off as the genuine item, and Worf’s mom was not amused). I could imagine circuits that needed latinum components. For lots of small stuff, I’m sure it is indeed replicated.

Ah, but notice the specificity necessary: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” needs to be ordered with a British accent.

I have a question if I may: Do the replicators merely re-arrange atoms from a “library” on board? It can’t really create matter, simply move it and re-arrange it, isn’t that the technology?

In other words, there’s a gigantic supply of building blocks for tea, grey, earl.

There was one specific episode of TNG where Pulaski was infected with a rapid aging virus and they used a sample of uninfected DNA to reprogram the transporter to restore her.

There’s your fountain of youth there. Take a DNA sample from everyone at birth (or when they turn 21 or whatever) and derive the transporter program from it. Then, whenever someone gets older than they like, just run the program, take a transporter trip and bam, back to 21 again.

Which series? In TOS they used transporters whenever possible, and the rare occasions when they used the shuttles were when they needed to send someone on detached duty (Metamorphosis, for a start) or local conditions rendered the use of transporters inadvisable (The Galileo Seven). Otherwise it was transporters all the way - and, of course, if there had been shuttlecraft available at the time, The Enemy Within would have been a lot less dramatic.

Heck, remember those spores from the original series that not only gave you a feeeling of utter bliss, but let you regenerate organs and kept you in perfect health?

Cultivate those fuckers! If somebody gets sick, spore them up, let them bliss out for a week to recover from whatever ails them, then get 'em mad (or sad) and they’ll shake them off and get back to work.

Hence the suggestion to study them, so you can develop the technology to the point where it is consistently repeatable. Of course you don’t experiment by transporting Picard; you start with small quantities of inanimate matter, then move up to progressively larger pieces, then you try planaria, frogs, rats, and dogs, then apes, then human volunteers, and then selected humans like Picard, never moving on to the next stage until you’ve got all the bugs worked out of each previous stage.

And the replicators work best when starting with something similar to what you’re trying to make. Replicated food is made from a mass of undistinguished organic molecules that they carry stocks of. In an emergency, the replicator feedstock can itself be eaten directly, though it’s not very appealing.

I’m shocked and appalled.

The transporter didn’t build Thomas out of nothing. The stream hit the equivalent of a beam splitter.

In other cases, such as the relic Scotty reappearing after a century or so and the crowd on board Voyager hiding from the eee-vil ship-searchers, the transporter’s buffer, a.k.a. RAM disk, a.k.a. flash drive, simply stored/stashed/cashed them. It didn’t create them.

Boothby would not be amused. It’s like asking whether Og can create a rock too heavy for him/her to lift or why Data, having an intelligence second only to that of Og and the Q, cannot use contractions. It simply is not cricket.

They sort-of did in an episode of Stargate Atlantis (The Tao of Rodney) where they used a machine to replicate Rodney’s pre-affected-by-an-Ancient-machine DNA and transport him back to himself

Which probably would make no sense if I was to say it out loud…

Anyway, Trek replicators basically can only replicate what the writer wants it to replicate ha ha!

Then there’s that problem of replicating something that has multiple parts and what not, like in Terminator 2 when John wonders why the T-1000 doesn’t turn himself into a bomb? While you might have a replicator large enough to replicate the hull of a starship, what about the interior? Are the walls, floors, ceilings and doors all made from the same material? Then you’ve got your windows, viewscreens, carpets…

Yeah, but …
The Q fellas keep on changing things anyways.

As do the Organians, the Metrons, that one guy in TNG that killed all those peoples, the Krenim, etc…

All we are is ug-a-ly bags of mostly water!

There isn’t really an explanation that isn’t a fanwank. They created replicators because it would look cool on the show and when the show lasted longer than a season realized the logical implications of having introduced matter-replicating machines, so you have to throw in all kinds of ex post facto rules. They had to do similar things with Troi’s ESP abilities, the holodeck, and Data’s superhuman characteristics.

This isn’t unique to Star Trek or anything; Harry Potter’s full of it. Star Wars has it. All fantasy and sci-fi has Ex Post Facto rules on magical powers. Hell, “Fairly Oddparents” wouldn’t work at all without the ten million ex post facto rules and the unspoken assumption that Timmy Turner is retarded.

By comparison, I’m endlessly irritated by how Enterprise is referred to as a “flagship.” Gah!

Yeah, that just shows the writers have never been in the Navy, and have no real interest in researching anything about the Navy.

I believe that Roddenberry was a US Army Air Corps pilot who flew in WW2 and decorated with a DFC. He may not have been aware of the Navy traditions. However, I think he was thinking more along the lines of a futuristic Coast Guard more than a Navy.

But, StarFleet is not a military organization! Science, diplomacy, and exploration are its function.

And peace keeping. With big guns. And lots of photon torpedos. And even Space Marines. But it ISN’T military! :stuck_out_tongue:

That was early TNG Roddenberry wussiness, btw. YMMV

Did he forget about Captain Duncil? General Order 24? Court martial? All sorts of other TOS military refs?