Let’s say I decide I’ve had enough with this whole Federation business and that humanity would be better represented by a Starfleet that follows my particular ideology. Assuming I could get enough people for crew and support, why can’t I start my own Starfleet?
I could replicate ship parts until I have a couple vessels. Go to new worlds and present myself as the official first contact of humanity. I could fly to Vulcan or Bajor and tell them no actually my organization represents humanity.
What’s going to stop me?
ah yes, the SovCit Federation
Most structural starship components would require large industrial replicators.
These seem to always be centrally located and powered.
What someone can do with a small home model would be quite different.
I’ll just replicate the parts to build an industrial replicator : forehead:
Controlled technology and not easily built from scratch even by Starfleet engineers.
The Relaunch novelverse expanded the concept and importance of industrial replicators. When Voyager returned to the Delta Quadrant, she led an small ‘Full Circle’ fleet that included a large engineering ship that did have industrial replicators large enough to reconstruct ships when severely damaged.
Lowere Decks and Prodigy have brought industrial replicators into onscreen canon.
Prodigy gave the Protostar prototype ship an industrial replicator large enough to construct shuttles. Lower Decks has shown the Cerritos and other ships tasked with delivering and bringing online very large industrial replicators on planets seeking Federation support.
Raw material, I would imagine. I don’t remember exactly how replicators work in the Star Trek universe, but they either rely on energy, a raw base material, or both. You can’t create something out of nothing so you would need a significant supply chain to produce your fleet.
If it were that easy, every rogue organization in the galaxy would have already done it before you.
Yep, raw material and a net energy loss.
The Federation might have both in abundance, but I highly doubt that much energy consumption is allowed.
a net energy loss
Like… some energy just gets destroyed in the process? How does that work?
The Laws of Thermodynamics say you will always lose some energy to heat when energy is used to affect a change. I have to imagine this would be particularly so when energy is converted to matter since that’s very involved, but I’m not a physicist so I can’t confirm that.
Come to think of it, this means that industrial replication plants and shipyards would likely be incredibly hot places, due to the inevitable loss to heat in replicating massive components.
My understanding is that replicators restructure atoms. In which case an asteroid would be plenty of material for a ship, even if some of it is lost in the process.
OK cool, now if only you had a ship to go get the asteroid so you could make a ship. My last point still stands though, if it were really that easy…
Sisko built a ship that could travel between planets and it didn’t even have an engine…
Could I replicate charged batteries, then plug them in? Or would it take more energy to make the battery than you could get out of it? After all a battery is just a chemical reaction.
Nothing. Nick Locarno basically did that, and it ended TREMENDOUSLY WELL. 😉
Granted it was only one ship; the rest were mutinies.
- Extreme amounts of energy needed for large items, but it seems like Earth has transporter quotas, so presumably they enforce energy budgets (based on DS9 Sisko using his transporter budget)
- Not all materials like latinum can be replicated
- Materials like dilithium are seemingly not viable to replicate, probably due to it being an incredibly wasteful process
- Many dilithium byproducts are unstable controlled substances, so at some point Starfleet would interfere to prevent the creation of trilithium or other unstable substances.
- I don’t know if you need antimatter, but I don’t think you could replicate it. You could replicate the machinery needed to produce it though.
- The Federation does have industrial replicators but they seem to be treated as controlled assets they rarely give out or provide access to. So they might meddle if you start building these.
