Hey yall! I’m stoned af and watching star trek on a weekend, naturally. I lost my place since last weekend in TNG season 3, but I knew that I wasn’t far in so I just watched all the intros until I found where I left off. Episode 8 “the price”, Troi gets frustrated with the replicator for wanting a “real” chocolate sundae. This raised a question for me, wouldn’t food replicators be intelligent enough to simulate the process of “the standard” ingredients being processed into the recipe? Like I thought that was the point of being able to say “Earl grey tea, hot”. Like wouldn’t she just have to say “betazoid chocolate sundae” or whatever?
EDIT: SECOND QUESTION: Say you have a family recipe cookbook or whatever and the comfort food is in that cookbook, couldn’t you just say “simulate the process of making the recipe from this cookbook”?
I imaging it is this, combined with memory saving. So each scoop of ice cream is the same scoop (3 scoops in that bowl are the same three scoops.) Maybe even more extreme with the “scoop” being a “replicate this 1 mL of ice cream and apply a scoop shape, where that shape is ‘round’”.
My evidence is that some recipes are simply not in the replicators storage of galaxy class ships. This indicates that it takes both storage and effort to get a recipe into the machine.