this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Yeah this feels like a critique from someone who’s never watched Star Trek.
The bit about the food is pretty funny. Like sure, a few times people have mentioned liking some non-replicated food better, but in general it seems like it’s about as good as the real thing and you can get ANYTHING you want anywhere you have a replicator without needing the skills of a chef.
Then there’s Voyager where the crew prefers to use their limited replicator rations rather than eat the slop Neelix makes lol. Actually, that’s something that never made sense to me: Why were they so limited on replicator usage? Doesn’t it just convert energy into matter from the reactor powerful enough to power a warp drive? In general I find it kind of silly when they turn off the lights and stuff to “conserve power” when there’s trouble. Like the lights are drawing any meaningful amount of power compared to warping the fabric of time and space.
I mean, converting energy into matte, when you could be using said energy to get home does seem a bit wasteful.
Replicating 1 gram of matter from energy takes 90 TJ, so replicating a sugarcube would be roughly the power of a 50 megaton nuclear bomb.
Yeah I guess. Although I guess the question is how much energy does warp drive use or how much energy does the engine output given some amount of dilithium or whatever? No real way to know since it's sci-fi. As far as I know the only physics we have on this is that paper that showed you'd need negative energy to make warp happen. Which is obviously not super helpful for figuring out what it would be in the hypothetical world of Star Trek where they found some way to make it physically possible.
I just imagine that their energy production has to be absolutely insane for warp travel to not only be feasible, but a fairly common thing more akin to launching a boat than a NASA mission.
You bring up a good point however, its basically a generator, and it needs fuel. So even if its not much energy saved, saving any was crucial for them when they never knew where they could next get dylythium.
So even though leaving the lights on only costs a couple cents day, well if you're traveling for 10 years, those couple bits of energy add up. Especially considering they did have a decent sized crew and children on top of it!
Not to mention that this was written in the 80s and 90s. Lighting was signficiantly more of the average person's energy bill before LEDs so it made sense to the audience back then.
They were conserving energy because it was hard for them to find the crystals they need. That said the lights are bound to be nothing compared to converting energy to matter or maintaining a warp field.