Comment on Things you feel Star Trek handle poorly? (In general, political, technical, etc, share your opinion)
Malgas@beehaw.org 5 days agoput a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
I may be a little fuzzy on the official version of how replicators work. Do they not need feedstock?
I’ve always kind of assumed that they were basically transporters, pulling raw materials out of storage to be materialized as the requested thing. And the similarity in the special effects for the two seems to support that.
Either way, I can’t help but think that an emplaced continuous-fire beam weapon would be more energy efficient and less prone to failure than a replicator-fed slugthrower.
subverted_per@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
Replicators use a base of neutral material that the system finds easy to use for turning into other stuff. For this kind of specialized application you might use materials close to the end result lowering the energy usage to extend the life of the unit. In DS9 they had self replicating mines that were networked so that the surrounding mines would replicate a detonated mine using the material of the detonated mine.
The real problem is shields. A slugthrower would be completely negated by a personal shield. Against a beam weapon it depends on how much energy it can absorb per second vs. what the beam can shoot.