Nah, that's the Flintstone's variety. In Star Trek, the technology is greatly advanced. Above each replicator port is a series of wire helixes with ham sandwiches and phasers and whatnot tucked in. When the appropriate buttons are depresed, a motor spins the helixes until the selected item falls off. Sometimes the phaser gets hung up on the ham sandwich helix, and you have to give the replicator a kick. A movie projector shows an image of the appropriate item materializing in the port, just to maintain the illusion.

Yee jesteth but hearest now this. I was in Leipzig for a trade fair once back in the days of the USSR and Warsaw Pact and went to the refreshment hall in search of sustenance. At the end of said hall was a bank of vending machine. One putteth one's hard currency in the slot (dollars, deutschmarks, francs or pound sterling only for the humble rouble and ostmark were accepted not) and presseth upon the button that doth indicate thine preference for a sammie. There were clunks and a few seconds later thine sammie slideth down the slot. A little later and being able to look behind the scenes thine interlocutor was able to see a table full of old ladies making sandwiches as the lights that were operated by the buttons came on, wrapping them and sliding them down the ramp.

As a matter of pure technical fairness, they were pretty good sammies although costly.

Unless the kick, of course, causes a negligent discharge of the phaser resulting in a toasted ham sandwich.

This thread reminded me of something.
For Star Trek malcontents..

How about the bring back Star Trek: TNG, that one rocked!!

Replicators are merely devices of the plot, they can or can't replicate items to suit the particular episode. What would be the point of the Ferengi if you can replicate anything you want at will?

As for Star Fleet it's powers and influence are also creatures of the plot, they vary from week to week in TNG.

IN Tos Starfleet was very much an organisation in the background, Enterprise was out on the edge and messages were always a time delay away, no instant video conferences and no officials popping aboard for chats or inquests every few mins.

As for the sensors being blocked, well, TNG sensors are even more variable and at the whim of a particular weeks writer, like the interior of a Tardis.

__________________
All Moderation in Purple
To report a post (even this one) to the moderation team, click the reporting icon in the upper-right corner of the post:
─────────────────────────────────────────────
◄Rules For Posting To This Board ► ◄Forum FAQs ► ◄ Conspiracy Theory Advice ► ◄ Alternate Theory Advice ►

All of which, if true, would be quite irrelevent. However, it isn't true. There is a substantial degree of consistency over (for example) sensor performance even between series. This shouldn't be surprising, every series has style books that determine what can and cannot be done. We actually have Canon information for some of these. For example.

That is a flat canon statement that there are 15525 known substances which are invisible to the sensors of the Enterprise. Thus the extreme sensitivity of the technology to material is laid down. The contents of the list also has some consistency; for example, magnesium carbonate is listed as being a sensor block in two TNG eopisodes and one Voyager episode. It is untrue to say that capabilities vary at whim; it would be more accurate to state that they do so withing some defined (but sadly unavailable) parameters. The significant point here is to make the distinction between consistency and continuity. There is a level of consistency in Star Trek, presumably enforced by the Writer's style book. There is a dispiritingly small level of continuity - developments in one episode are not carried over to others. Thus equipment details seem to have some level of replicability but major story arcs are either forgotten, written off with throw-away lines or simply contradicted without explanation.

However, that is, as I said, irrelevent. The fact is that the Star Trek universe is defined by the Canon; the TV episodes and the films. If there are irrelevencies and inconsistencies they have to be accommodated. The erratic performance of hand phasers is a classic example - they cause humans to vaporize (or be stunned), rocks to explode and have virtually no effect on metals. Rather than just saying that "its the writers whim", that is a phenomena that has to be explained somehow. A series that's created in the Star Trek universe has to explain that peculiar performance so that future episodes can comply with it. Likewise replicators; its meaningless to complain that their limitations depend on a writer's whim. Instead, its necessray to look at the sum of those limitations and come up with an explanation that embraces them.

Just repeating "its the writers whim" or "its all done for dramatic tension" (neither of which is actually true) is simply evading the issue.

I have been writing a sci-fi story since I was 16.
(31 now)
At first, I jumped right into the plot and storyline ... but found it difficult to keep the continuity going without constantly looking to see who said this, or keep track of dates, times, places, etc.

So, recently I abandoned all that and started to write a clearly "factual" bible to cover it all and then write stories as they flesh themselves out of all the "facts."

I thought Star Trek had such a bible.
Do they?

OT: Have you ever tried writing short stories?

They do although I've never seen it; I think the problem is twofold; one is that it hasn't been kept up to date to include additional material ithats become included. The other is that the writers (the worst culprits being B&B) simply ignore it if it gets in the way of "their message" and they are encouraged to do so by B&B.

Frank Herbert was said to keep a card file of ALL his characters for each book. The files were said to be huge--much more information in the files than in the books.

Zelazny would write pre-adventures for his characters--events that took place before the one he was writing about, to establish the character and give them some depth.

No, Star Trek did not have such a bible, or if it did, they didn't inform the actors of it. The actors had to make up their own explanations of how and why things worked when they answered their fan mail.

If so, that is truly appalling. Most TV series have a "bible" thats volumes long and provides all the details necessary for writers to inject consistency into their stories. I'd assumed the ST franchise was the same. If it isn't, its a stunning indictment of Berman and Braga's total incompetence.

My "bible" sorta wrote most of itself. The setting for the story I'm slowly writing is My D&D world, so it has a complete back history. Each time we decided to roll up new characters, I moved a ahead in history just enough that they couldn't get all buddy-buddy with their old characters. They also found that what thier previous characters had done had become "the" world history (of course with the ambiguity caused by human error and the passage of time [and lack of surviving eyewitnesses]).

__________________
"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

Sorry, i'm a fogey. Star Trek (unqualified) to me means TOS. It may be that the newer series had something more detailed than the writer's guide. Frankly, i'd be somewhat surprised if there were more than 50 pages of information available.

There are the Technical Manuals (namely the TNG one, I've heard the DS9 one is abysmally incompetant and contradicts itself). Of course those aren't canonical but I bet most ST writers have a copy of the TNG manual.. Then there is the ST: Encylodpedia, also by Okuda. I'm trying to find a copy of the DS9 Technical Manual but i've never even seen a copy of it, anywhere.

If I recall correctly, somewhere in the TNG Technical Manual Okuda mentions the writers guide specifically in a footnote. I'm too tired to look through it right now, sorry. -Colt

__________________
Be not afraid of any man no matter what his size; when danger threatens, call on me, and I will equalize.

Anybody remeber the whole "Section 31" DS9 arc with the intimidating unaccountable Gestapo types with black uniforms?

darkhunter: That is *exactly* the best way for me to write mine, also. When I played AD&D while in Korea, "THE" group was using a world originally created under the old Chainmail system (in 1978, I think) - pre Basic. Every time someone left the group, the binder got passed to the next DM. Everything was preserved - original maps, player's names and home addresses, etc. By the time I was lucky enough to join, they were up to 7, 2", 3-ring binders of canon and at least 4 9x12 file boxes of "stuff" - dead characters, unused plot threads, unofficial maps, ...

Colt: I have a copy of "a" DS9 Tech Manual. I say "a" because it came out early on during the show (season 3?) and I had heard that an updated copy would be written to include material regarding The Dominion. Never saw a newer copy, though. As for contradicting itself, well, I have no ready memory of that, as I only bought the thing to get the weapons specs for some fanfic I was writing at the time. I still have not read the DS9-TM cover-to-cover.

I also have (in a box somewhere) the TNG Writer's Guide. It is less than 50 pages long and gives only fundamental information (mostly about the new characters, not "history" or science). I will look for it. The thing I remember most is: each episode (1st season) was to be *exactly* 47 minute long, including the intro and ending credits. That left 13 minutes for commercials - nearly 1/4 of the show's hour time slot.

I've got a copy of the DS9 Tech Manual that was written around late season 6. It got lots of cool pictures and features stuff on the Defiant 8) . I didn't buy it for the text.

at home we have some kind of DS9 technical maual. the next time i go home ill see what it says.

Is that canon from the ST:TNG Tech Manual, or did you just hear that someplace?

I know the Replicators can't create Dilithium, but that's because Dilithium is a 4-dimensional substance (at least according to How Much for Just the Planet?), not because Dilithium is a "mineral".

Heeheehee, How Much For Just The Planet, <snicker> there was good Trek, pure comedy. I gotta get me another copy of that book, the back story about the Federation and Klingon Imperial opinion polls on the Organian Treaty were priceless. A seriously recommended read.

I'm gonna take the ugly route and say there isn't much else that can be done with Star Trek. As of the end of Voyager, the Federation's tech level was getting to the point of Clark's Law, being so far out there that there is no logical explanation for it in terms a modern person could comprehend. Challenges and original ideas were long drained and the obstinance of the production team to keep it on a purely episodic basis, rather than an ongoing story arch has hampered them beyond the point where they can continue to put out meaningful material. If Enterprise tanks, the next series needs to be a full bore reinvention of the wheel in the structure of Star Trek's format.

__________________
The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

We KNOW they can replicate food (the replicators broke down in the first few episodes of Vger; the crew was faced with imminent starvation. Kes mentions something about hydroponics and an unused cargo hold, Janeway says "Do it". There were at least a dozen STUPID things wrong with that exchange, but that's beside the point). We know that food, in order to be nourishing, has to have certain qualities--these require precise manipulation of atoms (ok, there's another explanation. The replicators may not actually create food, they might just mix pre-packaged minerals and carbohydrates and amino acids into a mold and add the proper colors and flavor and texturing ingredients. The term "replicator" is more Federation misinformation. There was a short story, "The Marching Morons" perhaps, where the vast percentage of Earth's population were intellectually challenged (think network executive, or possibly worse). The few competent people put out gee-whizzy stuff (futuristic cars whose speeometer read 200 mph when the cars were going 40), designed to make the maroons think they were (1) clever and (2) living in an advanced society. Maybe the Federation is like that). There was a DS9 episode where a replicator materialized a hand weapon. I don't know that they can't replicate common minerals (i didn't see that episode), but i'm willing to take Stuart's word that in "Firstborn" they were unable to replicate magnesium carbonate.

Just for the heck of it, I don't consider the Technical Manuals canon; only what was in the shows and movies, and whatever material was provided to the writers.