Not always. Sometimes it’s:

Level 3 diagnostic: 3

As a heads-up, both image links are dead.

Rubbish. If my phone isn’t so thin that it can double as a knife, it’s not worth buying.

At least part of it might also just be Federation snobbery.

None of the crew on the Enterprise complained of replicated food, and for the most part, the attempts at actual cooking tended to be dismal (Rikers scrambled eggs were inedible to human palates). The only complaint we had was Troi wanting a “real chocolate sundae”, which the computer seemed happy to provide, if it didn’t exceed her nutritional intake guidelines.

The Federation prides real things and real experiences over something they consider fake, and they might consider replicated food to be in that category, even if it is otherwise fine and near-indistinguishable.

We do also know that the computer will remove poisonous substances (like removing the seeds and stems from replicated apple slices) and make as best a balanced nutritional profile it can in what it creates, which might alter the taste a bit, similar to how some healthy-variant recipes aren’t as nice as their counterparts, since they lack the salt and fat for flavour.

Yes. One of the complaints Paris had about the Voyager replicators is that his preferences weren’t synced to the ship yet, so he had to manually pick what variety of tomato soup he wanted (the horror).

The original effects for the Doomsday Machine are nicer and hold up better than their rematered counterparts. It looks more metallic and less plasticky.

Those pattern buffer filters aren’t getting any better over the decades, are they?

To be fair, they are designed to work with all kinds of species, and samples and things. You don’t want it to delete someone’s liver just because they haven’t been on a starship before, or the new plant sample taken from a new planet.

Humans are full of necessary bacteria, and deleting all of that would be quite bad for you. But at the same time, them being in some place they’re not supposed to be is also going to cause problems.

You know, they should not even let the doors on shuttle craft open in dock, and just beam people in and out of them. That’d solve an entire other vector of infection.

What’s more surprising is that they don’t employ the sterilisation/quarantine fields that the older model transporters used to have, where they’d wall off the transport pad, blast them, and then open it up. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to apply to a shuttle before landing.

TOS was very progressive for the '60s, but TNG, VOY, and ENT were significantly less progressive for their time.

It’e also been a trend that’s unfortunately carried over into the newer treks. They barely push the boundaries at all.

DS9 probably only got away with as much as they did because Voyager was commanding most of the attention at the time.

For example, Roddenberry wanted an LGBT character as far back as TOS, but it got vetoed by Berman. That would have been incredible for 1960.

I think he also did it when Frakes wanted the non-binary alien he flirted with in one episode to have a male actor instead of a female one, but that also got vetoed.

I actually don’t mind the space-magic aspects, but I’m also more of a fan of TOS, which leaned into the whole mysticism and space magic more than a lot of the later shows. Not everything has to have a scientific explanation, or at least, not one known to the Federation/viewer. We don’t know how Q abilities work, for example.

Honestly, I’m not sure that the Borg would really take advantage of their abilities. For all their claims about collective technological and biological distinctiveness, we’ve yet to see the Borg actually make use of any of it, besides some vague lip service about suitability of purpose.

We don’t see Borg drones from telepathic species use their telepathic abilities as communication, or weaponise those abilities, for example. They mostly just use their tech and brute force.

It is equally possible that there might be a metaphysical aspect to the abilities of the Vau N’Akat that the Borg are unable to tap, similar to the abilities of the travellers, which also don’t have a replicable technological basis. If the Borg could do that, they would have expanded well outside of Earth in First Contact, given that Wesley once created and created access points to and from a whole universe.

But then when they were trying to find Bartlett, they just waltz right in to his sexual fantasy. You’d figure they’d have a “your commanding officer is looking for you, knows you’re in here, and this is the knocking, so save and exit the program and pull your pants up if you need to.”

They did point out that they would be breaking rules/regulations by entering the holodeck while he was using it, but from what I remember of the episode, he was absent from work, and wasn’t responding to intercom pings, so they went to see him personally.

They did need to use command codes to force entry, so it might not normally be possible for civilians.

Though with holodeck technology, it’s a wonder they even bother exploring the universe. That might be the most unrealistic part of Star Trek.

The Federation values real things, and people would get bored of fakery after a point. It costs you the same to take a trip to Vulcan as it does to walk into your holodeck and simulate a Vulcan sunset.

At least with Riker, we also know that it is a combination of the transport operator splitting Riker across two transport streams instead of the usual one, and a bunch of unique circumstances surrounding an ion storm. It’s only been done twice, from people doing the exact same procedure in exacting circumstances.

We also know that the transporter isn’t a simple clone and kill device, otherwise, their replicators would just utilise the same functionality, and we know that they lack the fine detailed resolution to recreate living matter, or computer chips with it, the result having telltale problems indicative of replication.

Scotty and Voyager would not need to rig up some hyper-complex loop procedure to keep people inside of the transporter otherwise. They could just keep the clone pattern, and put it into normal persistent storage. DS9 shows that that is possible to do that, albeit for a small handful of people per Cardassian space station. The transport accident in TMP would never need to happen, because they could just abort the transport procedure and recreate the clone from the sending transporter.

We also know that the transporter has some error correction capabilities. Scotty seemed reasonably convinced that it might have been possible to recall Lt. Franklin. Geordi disagreed, but more due to the level of pattern degradation, rather than a damaged pattern at all. Though fabricating half a person is almost definitely pushing the limits of those capabilities, it’s not impossible. Those imperfections and errors are implied to be what caused Transporter Psychosis in the early days. There do also seem to be variations in the copies that come out the other end. Both parts of Kirk came out different, as did both copies of Boimler. Riker may have been the same, but we don’t know enough to say for sure.

So, the matter used to reassemble is not the same matter that was disassembled.

Untrue, for the most part. We’re explicitly told that the matter stream is what gets transported, with the constituent matter being converted to energy, moved across, and converted back. Barclay is held at that junction where his matter starts converting to energy, and there’s a real concern that it wouldn’t be possible to hold him in that state for long.

He then doubles his mass by grabbing onto another person, which oughtn’t be possible if the transporter was cloning people, since the other transporter would not have received the pattern to reintegrate with. It’d just squish everything into a double-mass Barclay.

You say that, but the warp core is also pretty nasty stuff. Not only is it full of flesh melting radiation and coolant, but a slight knock will cause it to explode, at least on any ship built in the 24th century.

At least you can not use a transporter. You kind of scuffed if you’re on a warp core powered ship and it suddenly goes up in smoke.

I actually prefer TNG’s settling down with a Poker game, and Picard joining in with a “I didn’t know why I didn’t do this before”. Mainly because it still feels like they’ve not left their time, whereas the camping scene could be anytime from the start of the second millennium.

The only way it could be better is if the show opened with a Poker game.

Cheap sets are a key to the charm of Star Trek. When it gets too CGI-ey you know they’re off base.

Arguably the same for special effects too. TOS is nice in that way, since it feels like the only show that doesn’t go overboard with the pyrotechnics.

Even TNG had support beams, explosions, and an entire welsh quarry rain down from the ceiling, and that just got a bit silly.

Hm, in theory, possibly, but not by doing Scotty’s method, since that was basically constantly redoing the transport over, and over internally, without actually materialising the pattern. DS9 has transport patterns moved into regular computer storage, but the requirements were considerable. 5 people required the combined computer storage capacity of the entire station.

If you can do that, it doesn’t seem impossible to copy the pattern itself using the computer, feed the copy right into the transporter, then materialise the copied pattern. As far as the transporter is concerned, you’re just transporting the same thing a whole bunch, loading the patterns into the buffer from a different device.

You would need more than just a transporter to achieve that, though.

She wasn’t reconstituted, the hair was used as a reference to tweak her pattern. They didn’t just print out a spare Pulaski, leaving the old one on the station.

Riker was split during the process, since the person doing the teleporter thing did an ill-advised/unprecedented thing and basically tried to transport them twice simultaneously, using two transport beams, and reintegrate the patterns later, so that the interference didn’t cause them to lose too much of him, and they had enough to use the pattern repair mechanisms to patch any gaps (more than 50% lost is generally considered unrecoverable).

Part of the interference resulted in one of the transport beams being echoed down to the planet surface, and the transporter presumably did its best to fill in the gaps so that they didn’t just get half a Riker, and they ended up with two whole Rikers instead.

If it was a simple clone -> store -> kill/replicate, Scotty wouldn’t have needed some whole convoluted song and dance to keep someone in the buffer for decades, and Franklin’d not have died.

The Second One. The supernatural parts remain the same (the Vulcans make a big deal out of that, and would have a fit if people were being killed), the exact same matter is moved, and people remain conscious during the process.

In Star Trek, cloning is a much more complex affair, needing to grow the clone and all. If the transporter just copied people, destroying the original, they could just use that instead.

In fairness, the clone being made is more from people abusing the “part of you is missing, so we’ll try and patch that up before putting you back together” function, and happened twice with extremely specific circumstances. You can’t just factory-print people with it.