I mean: I'm sure microscopic transcription errors occur, because no technology is flawless, but yeah: every cubic micron is functionally identical. It is called a "replicator" and not "best effortinator".
That wasn't my point though. "Real" food is not uniform like that, but you would save an awful lot of storage space that way.
HELLO EMERGENCY RATIONS! All the vitamins, minerals, proteins and amino acids any number of living bodies need for prolonged periods of stress and exertion. I heard bashir made a better one, but he isn't sharing.
Emergency rations have to keep and be edible at room temperature, and they're usually designed for eating without utensils as well aren't they? There are constraints on the design beyond the ones that would normally apply to replicator food. But the replicator can also theoretically produce things that we couldn't dream of by any present-day methods. I would be very surprised if the food
wasn't significantly healthier than its traditional equivalents. I mean, why not, when you can?
And again, I have no doubt that a process like this, designing food from the proteins up, could result in fully convincing imitations of all kinds of foods. Again, I think the Impossible Burger is a natural illustration here. It's a chemistry challenge to convincingly disguise one kind of food as a completely different other one, and it is convincing as a mediocre version of the thing it's imitating. Imagine what you could do when you can assemble the molecules in place. You could probably generate a convincingly mediocre rendition of almost
anything, right?
In fact, I imagine replicator food partly gets its bad rap in Star Trek for some unearned reasons. Relative scarcity and invested effort tend to raise the perceived value of things. "Real" food takes a lot of work, so the things that distinguish it are probably going to largely be perceived as valuable.
We know that the replicators have base, stock meals programmed in. Smaller ships probably have less options as the computer cores would be less powerful/less active memory. I mean, that point alone drove caused a conversation that drove sisko into farming his own food. But It also kind of seems like you can affect the recipe in process by stating specific changes. specifying the temperature of the water in the glass, or adding ice, or a twist of something. I want to say you can do more: but my only reference for this is an old TOS book, and I wouldn't necessarily qualify it as viable canon. A lot of those old books were written in the same spirit as the original series; which is to say: no set standard. We know that when the replicators MALFUNCTION they can mix the recipes (tea and sausages, anyone?) or even leave bits out, like the glass of water with no glass. Maybe on the ships of the line: the replicator is more like a "build a bear" in that you have ludicrous amount of say over what you're making (because why not write a new "recipe" on the fly since all the individual ingredients are already in there anyway?) but most people are just happy to crank out the standard stuff cause it's faster, easier and more convinient? It's not like we get a huge swath of example of how picky people are in their quarters when they eat alone, most of the food time we get to see are social moments which are inevitably interrupted by something.
Altering the "recipes" on the fly is also similar to the holdoeck, which is used in several cases to visualize and narrow in a specific object or scene by talking to the computer to adjust and modify the projection. From my perspective, I think that's part of the benefit of designing replicator patterns the way I think they do. If you add eggs, sausage, and cheese to a biscuit/scone, it's just tapping a series of preexisting subroutines, and the cheese routine is smart enough to melt the cheese onto the egg.
I don't think the computer has the ability to distinguish those parts on the fly in a real object, such that you could set a plate of shepherd's pie on the transporter pad and deconstruct it into a plate of normal food. In fact I think the transporter is very limited in terms of what it can distinguish, except when the plot demands it to be able to disable weapons or screen for pathogens or implant secret sleeper agent DNA. Otherwise it would appear in way more than just one highly experimental medical procedure.
I realize that it's probably an artifact of the audio/visual genre: but it's a very functional and powerful argument in favour of the right to repair. In a society with no worry about waste: why NOT just make interchangeable units when something breaks? I mean, it's how we basically do things NOW: the skills and tools to fix a broken something are become (at least in north america and europe.) quite rare when all you need to do is pull a few wires, and pop a few screws and you're back on your way in a few minutes (once the new unit comes in anyway.).
I think the whys and why nots have answers though. Right to repair assumes a power imbalance of economics and fabrication technology between the producer and the consumer, as well as a calculus of material waste and environmental impacts. Taking your tractor to the dealer or your phone to the wireless store means you're on the hook for whatever contractual rules and costs they want to impose, and it means that if the material cost of creating a new item is less than the labor cost of repair, they're happy to produce any amount of e-waste and resource extraction demand as long as they optimize for their own costs. There's no incentive to recycling if it's cheaper to dig up more alumin(i)um and lithium instead, and demanufacturing is a costly and incomplete process. But if instead you're taking a PADD to the replimat and they can recycle it into a brand new one instantly with no strings attached, or maybe you can even do it yourself in your own replicator at home, the whole calculus changes. In essence, things can be reparable and modifiable already when they're not made of user accessible parts.
And to be clear, none of this is realistic, replicators
are magic, and this economy would never exist in the real world, but it does in the fictional one and it has implications. Maybe it's good that user serviceability is still represented the way it is for that reason.
As for the why not: The same reason companies don't prioritize user serviceability in consumer electronics today, and "imagine that, but everywhere." You can make a phone thinner by gluing it together and a laptop lighter by soldering the RAM onto the board. Now imagine a technology where casings don't have to have seams at all, and everything can be fused into place. Everything is unibody, everything is waterproof, and there are no manufacturing limitations related to assembly. Until something breaks, every device is going to be more compact, efficient, and reliable than its user serviceable counterpart, and when something does break, you can stick it in the microwave.
It's a very different calculus.
But if you're already at that point: why are you putting people on starships at all? Wouldn't smaller, semi intelligent or at least remote operated drones be far safer and more effective, at least within the bounds of the federations subspace network? I get that the people and their interactions are the point of the show, and technobabble and literally waving a light over something makes for more dramatic content... but I would also kinda like to see the shredder that can chew on starships whole.
I think it's the Human Spirit. Star Trek technology as envisioned in TNG should be on the other side of a singularity. Not necessarily the Kurzweil one, though something like it is certainly possible.
It bothers me a little when the crew steals an Enterprise - maybe the original, maybe the D, whatever - and can run it with a bridge crew of five people and one engineer. What are the other two hundred to one thousand people doing? The only things it seems that the computer can't do by itself per bridge commands are repairing the ship, repairing people in sickbay, flying the ship fancy, and repelling boarders. The ship's computer can even be a star player in discovering technobabble solutions to problems, with the right search questions. There are handwaves about people wanting to be out there doing the exploring, but a lot of them end up dying of catastrophic workstation failure or being compromised on deck six in the process. There's certainly a possible read of that situation that's pretty dystopian, like the technologies exist for most or all of these jobs to be automated away but people just want to feel useful.
(I think the real narrative solution to this problem would be to involve more crew members in more ship functions, and say that it takes a room of a couple dozen people to operate the shields or something, but it's still very difficult to really explain why it would. Or you could be Deep Space Nine, and have a grubby old station built with slave labor and your only combat ship is
designed for a bridge crew of seven people, one doctor, and one engineer. But not every show can be Deep Space Nine. I've even thought about recently that you could just make DS9 mobile, and have a city ship (maybe USS Nog shaped, maybe a glass pizza, etc.) with a Defiant-style combat escort or two, which would give you a much more plausible arrangement for the sort of thing the Enterprise D was meant to be and do. But that'd probably feel too much like BSG, because we expect a "the ship" in these shows, not a small fleet.)
Edited because I had an "exceeds" where I meant the opposite.
