Replicator

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Replicators

One of the more useful technologies provided by the Confederacy, the versions delivered to human beings tended to be "early generation" by requiring more computer power on top of being relatively power hungry.

Replicators are the closest to using Drexlerian Nanotechnology to assemble the patterns provided. All replicator technology requires that each atom being delivered be provided from storage, though these will use "stocked" molecules wherever possible. It is believed that quantum-scale replication is possible.

Replicating something from the atoms "up" requires much more time while using stocked organics (which vary from race to race) can be done far more quickly.

A food replicator will, wherever possible, try to assemble stocked organics in order to minimize the wait when a request is made.

Replicators are closely coupled to waste processing and acts as a reclamation system. This reclamation system is coupled to the other environmental controls since water and carbon dioxide - as well as other organic molecules exhaled by living organisms - are useful feedstock for the replicator system.

   It is 'canon' that replicators require either an actual item to duplicate or a stored 'template' to follow.  Most stories have new colonists told this.  However, there are a couple of stories that show that the AIs can in fact create a completely new item.  Discussion on this can be found at 'Canon Schisms'.

Replicators And Intellectual Property

See Main Article Intellectual Property

The AIs that control the replicators can deny the reproduction of copyrighted material, and apparently have a great concern about such. Most of the AI intellectual property concerns tend to involve music, recordings of performances, movies and other media.

Comments and Expansion for Authors

(Mainly quoting Brooke here)

They do not transmute elements. Instead, they manipulate atoms and molecules the way you'd manipulate a set of lego blocks to build things from a stored "template". So you need a supply of the elements used in the item. And yes, for some things which isotope of the element is used in a patrticular position will matter.

So they can build molecules if necessary, but it's "easier" to build a lot of things (mostly organic materials like food)) if you already have a supply of the required molecules. It'll take a lot less energy to assemble some food out of the right (or close to right) protiens, fats and sugars than building the molecules from raw elements (which will need to be seperated out from whatever you are using for feedstock).

Heck, it's easier to feed in raw organic stuff, and break it down to (say) amino acids and build up the protiens from those than to start with carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen.

One of the big reasons for growing food is that it gives "higher quality" feedstock". But a more important one is that *we* can control the growth of food (once set up) without the AIs. If the AIs are in a dispute with the humans, they can (and have threatened to at least once) quit running the replicators.

If we have decent farming, and animal raising on a terraformed world, if something happens to the AIs we can still eat.

Even if they are working, if you order a McDonalds $5 meal from the replicator, it will be *exactly* the same as the last one you ordered. That gets old. With real food, you can have dishes that there aren't templates for and you can create new templates by "scanning" it.

And as noted, it's a lot more efficient to feed the replicator plant and animal matter instead of it having to grab oxygen and nitrogen from the air, hydrogen from water, and carbon from dirt. To say nothing of the sulfur and other elememnts found in foods.

(And yes, especially on ships, the food is mostly made by breaking down the sewage and other garbage into molecules or farther and then building them back up into food)

The thing about growing the food though can be more of a morale issue.

Which will the marines prefer? A replicator BLT with replicator bread, bacon flavor sticks, tomato flavor slabs, lettuce substitute vegetable sheets and repli-mayo(tm)? OR a BLT with bread made from actual flour, Mayo made from real eggs and corn oil, sliced Beefsteak tomatos, Lettuce that his concubine just washed and places on the bread, and bacon from the colony's tiny supply of real pigs.

Manufacturing

Humans took to replicators like ducks to water. It was humanity who took the technology and formed the first post-scarcity culture within the Confederacy because the use of replication technology coupled with Von Neumann machines allowed whole asteroids (at first) and then planetary crusts to be disassembled and manufactured into ships.

Nanotechnology is not much use, by itself, but, when coupled with macroscale devices in multiple tiers (later named ""Scalable Nanotechnology", allows manufacturing anything on a large scale almost trivial, as long as the feedstock (raw materials input) are reasonably close to the desired product.

The first steps were used to digest asteroids, then moons, and finally rocky planets, into purer raw materials (metals, diamond, etc), which, with some additional steps, were then delivered to massively parallel replicators to form the structural parts along with the "bits and pieces" of starships.

By the 7th year pre-Sa'arm contact, humanity was already able to manufacture GMUs as well as the smaller ships needed.Planned priduction of GTUs and GOUs was suspended due to the huge amount of materials needed. (Per Thinker)

Replicator Capacity

Replicator Class	Power	Weight	Per Day	Per Hour	Per Minute
Appliance Size	11 kW	600 lb	150 lb	6.25 lb	1.6 oz
Machine Shop	258 kW	6.9 t	3600 lb	150 lb	2.5 lb
Industrial	7.4 MW	194 t	54 t	2.25 t	75 lb
Factory	196 MW	4600 t	1440 t	60 t	1 t

Replicator Class	Size (feet)	Appliance	Machine Shop	Industrial	Factory
Appliance Size	2.5 x 2.33 x 6.5	4 days	3 months	>7 years	504 years
Machine Shop	12 x 12 x 6	4 hours	3.83 days	180 days	7 years
Industrial	50 x 50 x 10	8 minutes	3 hours	3.59 days	3 months
Factory	200 x 200 x 14	18 seconds	6.9 minutes	3.23 hours	3.19 days

Assuming a standard pod is 54t, an industrial unit produces 1/day and a factory produces 26/day.

GMU, General Manufacturing Unit (1km self-propelled sphere)
GTU, General Transport Unit
GOU, General Offensive Unit

The GMU is a 1km sphere that process material and manufactures
The GTU is 20km sphere that acts as a transporter for anything crammed into it
The GOU is 20km sphere that is best described as a battlestar

Most of that comes from Just Jack's Hot In The City -I'm coming at this from a different perspective:

I assumed one Kilo class ship feeding the colony, this ship travels from the colony to Earth in 2 weeks, makes a pickup and comes back in 4 weeks. It dumps it's pods and then reloads with the pods manufactured at the colony.

So the colony needs to produce 1000 pods in 6 weeks - assuming no time lost for the pickup or drop off - so:

1000 pods / 42 days = 23.8 pods per day required.

Given 24 hours a day (let's keep things simple) means that the GMU produces 1 pod per hour.

(Someday this will be a navigation template.  It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links.  Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))