Replicaitors and raw food stalk

[DarthPooky]

Ok so one thing that I always wonderd about Star Trek and replicaitors is the hole raw food stock ( I know technical manual ) in that some trekies and writers seem to think that replicaitors seem to make farming obsilite ( and by that I mean feeding the general population and the market for real food that there is in Star Trek). Now I always considered that farming and raising animals for meat would still be a thing for example if you were to order a loaf of bred from a replicaitor that the replicaitor would get the grain from a cargo container and get the Yeast from another and so on or is it a matter of taking the basic elements that are stored in cargo containers like carbon and what ever other elements go in the food. So what do you guys think what is the raw food stock and dose replicaitors make farming obsilite. And I'm sorry for any bad grammar I'm typing on my phone.

[Lord Revan]

the "raw stock" isn't food per se but rather organic slurry that contains all you need, so for example to make a bread you don't need bread just all materials that to make bread and the computer does the rest, oh and replicators are specialized transporters.

As for making farming pointless, not really, sure you might not need farm things in the core planets or larger colonies, you'll need to farm (or at least know how to) in smaller and/or newer colonies

[Elheru Aran]

...oy. Well I'll do you a favor and put aside the bad grammar and spelling for the moment.

Replicators require a certain sort of raw stock to work. What that stock is has never been particularly elaborated in detail, but presumably for metallic objects it's some form of metal dust, for food it's likely various protein, carbohydrate, glucose, etc pastes that are recombined in various programmed manners via a fancy miniature transporter. This raw stock has to come from somewhere; they can't just replicate it, after all, because what is *that* replicator getting it from?

So presumably there are industrial farms (with a psychologist for every hundred animals, this is the Federation after all) cranking out large stocks of meat and produce. Which then invokes the question of why the hell they don't just stockpile barrels of frozen steaks-- they do seem to have various forms of stasis after all-- but I suppose replicator goop is a little more efficient as it would fill up an entire space without gaps like whole foodstuffs might.

[Batman]

Impossible to say for certain without knowing a lot more about how the replicator works. 'Replicator goop' may be more compact to store, more flexible in what you can turn it into (turn steak into burger-easy, steak-into-chicken-not so much), more energy-efficient, we just don't know enough.

[bilateralrope]

I wonder how much of the replicator stock comes from the ships sewage system.

[Batman]

Hell at least a lot of it is going to be organic

[Purple]

Why not turn steak into chicken though? I mean, it's all the same thing chemically. I can perfectly imagine the replicators only needing the basic components like carbon, water etc. and assembling the rest on a chemical level. Not the subatomic level or strait from energy, but on the atomic level combining carbon and hydrogen and various other things to create these complex molecular structures.

[Batman]

If they do that, what's the advantage of stacking up frozen steaks over just having the raw elements at hand?

[Purple]

If they do that, what's the advantage of stacking up frozen steaks over just having the raw elements at hand?

None. Which is why I imagine said slur basically being a generic mix of ingredients in a paste form. The easiest way to get it is probably to grind down whole animals and plants, even the parts we don't eat and just combine them into a paste which the replicator than disassembles and resembles on a molecular level.

[Darmalus]

So presumably there are industrial farms (with a psychologist for every hundred animals, this is the Federation after all) cranking out large stocks of meat and produce. Which then invokes the question of why the hell they don't just stockpile barrels of frozen steaks-- they do seem to have various forms of stasis after all-- but I suppose replicator goop is a little more efficient as it would fill up an entire space without gaps like whole foodstuffs might.

It's probably easier/more efficient to have a big tub of "Generic Flavorless Protein Slurry" and smaller containers of "Beef" "Chicken" "Pork" or "Centari Meat Apple" flavorings and additives that can be mixed together later by the computer as needed. That way everyone can have anything they please but Star Fleet Logistics only needs to deliver a few things.

[Lord Revan]

depending on the details you might not even need "flavoring" as the flavor of a food largely comes from how the proteins are arranged in the food. also "generic slurry" is probably easier to make so that it lasts for ages.

[Tribble]

Interesting, I always thought they just directly converted energy into matter, like they do on the holodeck. If I remember correctly people have eaten/drunk things on the holodeck, and there wouldn't be any real point in doing that if it wasn't real food and it disappeared from their stomach the moment they left.

[Batman]

Why the hell would it being real physical food require it being created from energy? Maybe they just, you know, 'replicate' it?

[biostem]

Replicators either tap into a store of basic compounds, (like maybe carbohydrates, proteins, sugars, fats, etc), and just "reformat" them into the form the end user specifies, or they tap into some sort of even more simplistic supply - like maybe keeping a supply of atoms or molecules.

I do not think we have ever seen an example of something replicated purely from energy, and even in the case of transporters, they either needed to locate the person's "energy pattern" to rematerialize them, (I'm thinking of that episode where Picard teleported out of the ship as energy-only), or you need some technobabble event that can some how duplicate the pattern, (where Riker was duplicated, with 1 version rematerializing on the ship, and other on the planet).

We never see anyone, for instance, transport some rare substance, store the pattern, then use some trick to duplicate it - there's something about the original energy/matter that you need in order to reform something.

[Darmalus]

I don't know much about flavor chemistry, so I'll take you word for it. If that is so, then I think that arranging those proteins, fats and so forth may actually be at the limits of shipboard replicator resolution, either from mechanical precision limits or replicator program limits.

Many characters with refined tastes claim they can tell the difference between replicated and real food, which would make sense if replicators could only get the proper proportions and arrangements mostly correct due to "molecular pixelation". It would also mesh well with the "rare, important medicine" plots, since if you don't already have the correct substance in stock and can't make it out of hamburger molecules you would need to fall back on a more specialized facility somewhere else.

[FTeik]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned "Soylent Green" as base-slurry for the food-replicators.

Also there have been numerous episodes, where the Federation had to mine or conduct trade to get things the replicators couldn't assemble.

Holodecks also don't create matter from energy. The illusion of matter is created by forcefield-effects.

[Batman]

If it's just forcefields how come you can throw snowballs out of the holodeck?

[Lord Revan]

If it's just forcefields how come you can throw snowballs out of the holodeck?

well while it's not outright said it's implied that some things are replicated to make the experience more real.

[Elheru Aran]

If it's just forcefields how come you can throw snowballs out of the holodeck?

well while it's not outright said it's implied that some things are replicated to make the experience more real.

See Picard firing real bullets in First Contact, as well. Normally there's a safety protocol in the holodeck to prevent such things, of course...

It does demonstrate extraordinary precision and strength when it comes to replicators, though. They're able to materialize objects wherever someone 'picks up' something... whatever it is... unless it's cheaper to make a 'solid' hologram with force-fields. Hmmm.

[Purple]

My guess would be that when creating a scene everything is just a solid hologram with nothing being replicated. However, everything that is in the room is also pre-rendered into a sort of buffer of transporter patterns. And when you reach for something the system replicates it as needed.

[Elheru Aran]

My guess would be that when creating a scene everything is just a solid hologram with nothing being replicated. However, everything that is in the room is also pre-rendered into a sort of buffer of transporter patterns. And when you reach for something the system replicates it as needed.

Not a bad notion. But it does bring into question some set pieces like the ship in Generations. When Worf and Troi got dropped into the water, were they actually dropped or did the holodeck pull a quick visual distortion to make it *look* like they were dropped, and... replicate a bunch of water around them? Or were the people on the 'ship' actually walking a forcefield-deck in midair, in a really big holodeck? Consider that it was a ~50+ ft small sailing ship they were on... how do you think they walked from 'end to end' of that ship, when the various holodecks we have seen are not much bigger than 10 or 20 ft square?

It's a complicated proposition, that's for sure.

[Me2005]

My guess would be that when creating a scene everything is just a solid hologram with nothing being replicated. However, everything that is in the room is also pre-rendered into a sort of buffer of transporter patterns. And when you reach for something the system replicates it as needed.

Not a bad notion. But it does bring into question some set pieces like the ship in Generations. When Worf and Troi got dropped into the water, were they actually dropped or did the holodeck pull a quick visual distortion to make it *look* like they were dropped, and... replicate a bunch of water around them? Or were the people on the 'ship' actually walking a forcefield-deck in midair, in a really big holodeck? Consider that it was a ~50+ ft small sailing ship they were on... how do you think they walked from 'end to end' of that ship, when the various holodecks we have seen are not much bigger than 10 or 20 ft square?

It's a complicated proposition, that's for sure.

The way the holo deck is portrayed and the way it'd have to work in real life are two very different things. Each 'player' in the holo-scene would need to be on a pad that allowed them to move in every direction. The view from their pad would be different from the view on every other pad - If I'm standing on one end of the ship, I see you standing on the bow, and you see me standing on the bridge, but we're really right next to each other in a smallish room. Everyone walking in and then independently walking around the scene in different directions wouldn't be possible.

Interesting, I always thought they just directly converted energy into matter, like they do on the holodeck. If I remember correctly people have eaten/drunk things on the holodeck, and there wouldn't be any real point in doing that if it wasn't real food and it disappeared from their stomach the moment they left.

I've waffled between thinking this and thinking they used generic chemical stock. Chemical stock would require less energy to create the food, but it'd require you to carry the mass around which might be less efficient. Using pure energy would just drain power from the main reactor; though it'd be an exorbitant cost for such a mundane thing.

[Lord Revan]

The thing is that a GCS is huge, so storage space shouldn't be a problem, but "power from the main reactor" means "fuel consumption" and to convert energy into matter you need alot of energy (e=mc2 after all so m=e/c2 at 100% efficiency, realistically it would be er=(e*l)/c2 where "l" is the loss due to inefficiencies in the process), oh and since the fuel is 50% anti-matter it would take more room then a similar amount of "raw stock".

And even the Defiant is quite large and it's considered "short range" by starfleet IIRC.

[Borgholio]

If it's pure energy replication, then you're talking about converting matter to energy in the warp core, then converting energy back into matter at the replicator. Even in ST, nothing is 100% efficient. So you're talking about energy loss both ways when it would be far more efficient to simply reorganize existing matter than do a bunch of conversions back and forth.

Then there's the incident in Voyager during the "Year of Hell" episode, where Janeway tells Chakotay to recycle a pocket watch into the replicator. You wouldn't be able to get any energy out of the pocket watch if you simply disassemble it, and converting it to energy would be basically an atomic bomb (which we never see happen when objects are de-replicated). So the only conclusion I can come up with is that she wanted him to recycle it so the materials can be put back into storage for use elsewhere.

[FaxModem1]

She referred to the pocketwatch as a 'pair of boots, hot meal, or hypospray'. So it clearly was not going to be turned into disassembled components for a pocketwatch. There's also what seems to be the process of what they do after meals, as Molly was instructed by Keiko in "Hard Time" to put her plate of leftover food in the replicator so it would take it and recycle it/throw it away/turn it into gold/whatever.