Would a Federation warship like the Defiant out gun a Star Wars Star Destroyer? Who has a bigger armada? Who has the tactical advantage? Don’t forget that The Federation includes the Klingons, who love warfare and have fast, agile, heavily armed ships, with cloaking devices, and the Vulcans with superior logic and tactical planning.
That’s a good question for me. How exactly do replicator work?
My first response was “they only make any food or drink, except alcohol.” All of this, however, does replicate on dishes. The food is obviously actually nutritious, unless nutrition is coming from pills off screen.
Do the dishes eventually disappear?
If they don’t, and a new dish is being fabricated from air for everyone each meal, wouldn’t the ship eventually just be a horde of dishes?
I dont know any of these details.
Can a replicator make a grenade?
This is answered in the show:
Replicators can make alcohol, they’re just programmed not to. This is for health reasons, because synthahol is considered safer. It’s possible to override that behavior though and make them replicate the real thing.
Similarly, while I don’t think grenades have ever come up, replicators are perfectly capable of replicating weapons, but there are sometimes restrictions on replicating weapons.
In general, replicators can replicate pretty much any “mundane” object. It’s only specific scifi elements they can’t replicate like Dilithium, latinum, etc.
As for dishes, they don’t disappear on their own, anything that’s replicated is a real physical object. It will stick around forever, so you have to “do the dishes” by putting them in the replicator to be broken back down into energy. There’s at least one episode of DS9 where we see someone’s quarters full of dirty plates and their roommate complains about them never putting their plates back in the replicator—even when you have a magic box that literally dematerializes your dirty dishes, sometimes it’s just too much effort.
They work by assembling atoms into their respective molecular structure to produce materials. Think of them as very fast atomic 3d printers. They have devices on-board that break matter (any matter) down into the building blocks for atoms (quarks, electrons, neutrons), and then that resource can be re-assembled in whatever configuration is requested. You can turn poop into whiskey with Federation technology.
in one episode on ds9 the replicators all spawned auto firing phasors that targeted any non cardasian. Yes they can make weapons