Suggestion: Replicator rules

[Akios]

Roberts Rules of Replicators

1. Replicators do not create matter from energy.

Big misconception on the part of most people. Replicators don't draw energy from the ship's engine to create matter. Simple thought model: if you take half a pound of matter and half a pound of antimatter and bring them together, it releases a hellacious amount of energy. However, if you take all that energy and run it into a replicator, you get one pound of matter, whether a hamburger or a ball. It just doesn't work--a ship would go through its entire store of antimatter in a matter of weeks or less.

Instead, what happens is this (and is described in the TNG Technical Manual): All a replicator does is convert matter from one form to another using transporter-like technology. It can take a wooden ball and turn it into a hamburger, or vice-versa. This is an energy-intensive process; the only places that have replicators are those places that use huge amounts of energy, like a starbase or starship. Compared to the energy it takes to propel a ship at warp, the energy used by a replicator (or even a lot of replicators) is negligible, and recycling a fixed amount of matter makes more sense on a starship than hauling around the equivalent amount of supplies which would need to be replaced every time the ship visited a planet or station.

A starship has storage tanks of raw matter to be used for replication. This raw matter has been described as a kind of "average glop" that statistically uses the least energy to be converted, whether you make a tennis racket or a plate of sushi. When someone uses a replicator, the glop is "beamed up", sent through the same kind of conduits that route transporter patterns out of the ship, and then converted into whatever you requested at the replicator. When you recycle something, the process is reversed.

2. Replicators cannot replicate anything living.

This has been stated as canon. One excellent example is in the Enterprise episode "Dead Stop" when Phlox realized that Mayweather's corpse had to be a manufactured duplicate, because microorganisms that should still have been alive in the corpse were also dead. The corpse was replicated.

(It's my theory that this is the real reason why replicated food tastes "off". People who are used to eating fresh food are used to eating food that is at least partially still alive at the cellular level. However, IMO, most simm players complain way too much about replicated food. In general, most replicated food should be good enough that, unless you have a gourmet's educated palate, you shouldn't be able to tell the difference.)

Yes, there have been two exceptions within canon: In the DS9 episode "Babel", a replicator was sabotaged to manufacture an aphasia virus. This would suggest that virii are borderline cases, but should not be seen as a general exception. Also, in TNG "Ethics", Worf's spinal cord was replaced with tissue replicated using a "genitronic replicator". Simple enough--a genitronic replicator is not a standard replicator. It is an experimental device designed to replicate living tissue. As such, it's not in general use (yet).

So, it's not okay to hack the ship's computer to have the replicators suddenly start spewing forth real, living tribbles. (That doesn't mean that you couldn't have the replicators spew simulated, robotic tribbles capable of manufacturing replicas of themselves and "breeding", though.)

This includes simple things, like seeds, or blood cells. (CMOs take note--24th century Trek medicine uses synthetic blood, not replicated blood. It is possible to replicate things like graft material, as long as the graft material is non-living, such as a calcium lattice for bone grafts.)

3. Replicators cannot replicate antimatter.

Straight from the Star Trek TNG-DS9 canon. If Voyager ever violated this rule, I don't want to hear about it.

(IMO, the self-replicating mines used in DS9 were a huge violation of this rule, but at least they were clever. The unanswered questions that make them a huge plot hole are: where did the power come from for them to replicate themselves, and where did the raw material come from? It would seem that the the person who invented them [cough-Berman-cough] had the same misconceptions about replicators as most people. I would say that, in general, it is a bad idea to replicate power sources, but it has been done. For example, the antipersonnel weapon that appeared in the replicator when the anti-bajoran-revolt system was accidentally activated.)

4. Replicators cannot replicate latinum.

That's the reason the Ferengi use it as the basis of their currency, dummy! It's one of those substances that cannot be artificially manufactured by any technology in the known universe.

5. There are many other things that cannot be replicated.

Plasma conduits may be one of those things, or maybe there's something about their construction that makes it take a lot of energy to replicate tham. Anyway, there are a number of episodes of the different series where they say "the conduit was manufactured on planet yadda-yadda". Maybe something about their properties that allows them to conduct energy plasma makes the replicators hiccup.

Certain medicines may also fall in the "can't be replicated" category--we still have ships going to Planet A to pick up medical supplies urgently needed on Planet Z.