Replicators can indeed recycle matter back into energy according to the Wikipedia article on it. That being said, replicators are highly sophisticated pieces of technology and can’t simply be assembled DIY. Also, I’m pretty confident a replicator has a ton of security safeguards in place to prevent people erasing logs of bodies they are trying to dispose of. And I’m pretty confident most if not all replicators would alert the authorities if someone used an industrial one to vanish a corpse.
Which is a problem - where are the mines getting the energy from to operate?
There’s no prior evidence for “energy from nowhere” in Trek…
well given they’re MINES they’d likely need to have some sort of power source. Thus we could conclude that they’ve managed to produce mines that are semi-self sustaining able to use the power they generate for their explosions to power the replication process. sure it doesn’t work when you apply science to it but at this point thats the type of thing you shrug and say “Clarks third law” to.
Yeah. There are so many logic loopholes in the TV shows tech that I figure any “cannon” for tech like security locks or whatever can be hand waved away to make interesting RPG scenarios and whatnot. Its in the spirit of Trek to hand wave away those things to make an interesting story anyways.
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As I’ve seen quoted elsewhere: “this man gets it!”.
I think you’re spot on - to get the spirit of the series, the priority for science accuracy should be:
- is it fun?
- is it good for the story?
- does it fit previous canon?
- does it make scientific sense?
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