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?
Dilithium mainly
I would assume you might have trouble since most of the planets are part of the federation and they have already communicated with them and so they would be wondering who the heck you are.
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.
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.
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.
Depends on the writer, but they handwave a lot of those problems by the fact that replicators need a lot of energy to work (voyager explicitly said they didn’t have the spare power and used hydroponics and trade to supplement), and a lot of critical components couldn’t be replicated (dilithium, and antimatter containment parts. Also the isolinear computer chips were non-replicatible). I think you’d also struggle with any weapons systems, which might include shields.
Essentially you could build the hull and most of the mechanical parts, but not the critical systems.
Aren’t there some elements that can’t be replicated? That’s why I thought we have dilithium mining and gold pressed latinum. There are probably components you’re not going to be able to synthesize/energize/whatever based on similar limitations.
