#self-replicating metas

How to adjust that format when someone wants to edit a pattern. People usually aren’t looking to pluck individual atoms from one pile to another, and depending on the object polygons might not be the easiest primitives either (someone editing a garment wouldn’t want to nudge a bunch of tiny triangles to adjust thread tension). CAD primitives work in some cases but they’re mostly designed around subtractive manufacturing. Even 3D printing tools are optimized for fewer materials and layer-by-layer construction.

How to facilitate someone “zooming in” to mess with the crystal structure of a material, then going back to working on large macro-scale shapes. How many in-between levels of fidelity to simulate and store between those zoom levels. How to handle materials that have a smooth gradient from one material to another, so there’s no sharp dividing line where we can assume there’s a bunch of identical molecules.

How many background calculations to run. In addition to the basic physics, do we predict failure points? Replicator energy consumption? Can someone zip bomb a replicator by replicating something that seems simple but actually consumes an ever-increasing amount of power?

Tribbles are, presumably, carbon-based life forms

In order to produce this much biomass, far in excess of the matter they consume, they must be pulling some of that carbon from the air

Your padd’s screen has no microscopic flaws that will crack first. Your clothing has no weaving-in or backstitching, there’s nowhere it can begin to unravel. The foam in your shoes has perfectly spaced air bubbles, with no thinner cell walls that will wear out early. The knobs on your drawers are contiguous with the wood and won’t come loose over time. Nothing has to be detachable in order to be customizable, you can beam a section away if you want to replace it later.

Because I bet there are a lot of holodeck programs where those marks are present “for historical accuracy” but they’re in the wrong spots/don’t make physical sense. When you’re used to making things in replicators, you’re not thinking about the in-between steps in making an object. It all materializes at the same time. But with older manufacturing methods, things had to be made in a specific order. People would see these marks on old items and try to reproduce them, but wouldn’t understand the logic behind them.

Every thread has to have a beginning and end. Yes, all of them. Why are the parting lines on this plastic intersecting each other, what shape was the mold?? No, that wood grain won’t do a sharp 90 degree turn without a cut. How tf did they clamp that together while the glue dried!

For example. You know how you can make holographic chocolate by pouring it into molds with specific groove patterns? A replicator could do that to cloth, by selectively smoothing and thickening individual fibers.

We could design a boiled wool coat with patches that flash in the light like butterfly wings, because the felt has been precisely embossed with those very very tiny ridges. With no hard edge between the matte and shiny areas, just a smooth gradient from flat grey wool to subtle abalone-shell iridescence to vibrant, shifting colors.

But we could do even wilder stuff than this. Let’s go back to holographic chocolate for a second: it’s called holographic, but why? Where’s the hologram? It just looks kind of rainbow-y.

The answer, shockingly, is that we actually can stamp a 3D hologram into chocolate, but the diffraction pattern required to do that is a lot more complicated, so it doesn’t transfer as well. Luckily, we aren’t stamping the design into a surface. We’re materializing it directly.

So we could make a set of fleece footie pajamas etched with a holographic skeleton THAT LOOKS LIKE A SKELETON FROM ALL VIEWING ANGLES. We could make a t-shirt with an entire goddamn aquarium “inside”, with holographic fish that swim around as the viewer moves. We could make wacky eye-melting nonsense, 3D geometries that fold and warp and knot around themselves at the slightest breeze.

All with no electronics, no exotic materials. Just bumps on cloth.

Cotton, linen, and even wool can be shiny. Shine is related to how long and thin the underlying fibers are. Any time there’s thicker fibers or a break in the fibers, it casts shadows and scatters light, creating a more matte finish. Longer, thinner fibers lie flatter, bouncing light straight back to the source, creating a more reflective surface.

The problem, of course, is that long, thin fibers are difficult to handle without breaking them. Even after you sort out all the staples that got cut short during shearing/harvesting, the long staples have to survive the rest of the processing and weaving. This is why we assume shiny fabric must be synthetic (or silk). These fibers begin as long continuous strands and are strong enough to stay unbroken as machines move them around.

We can make shiny cotton, it’s just difficult and expensive. And the shine draws attention to any stains, runs, fuzzing, and other tiny defects, so even though longer-staple fabrics are technically stronger, they start to look shabby if they aren’t maintained very carefully. So we usually save this difficult and expensive process for bedsheets and formalwear, where we can benefit from the increased quality without having to maintain its flawless appearance over daily wear.

Both of these problems are solved by replicators. A replicator isn’t manipulating very long, very fine staples and trying not to break them, it can just materialize them into their final positions. And if those fine fibers get damaged or stained, just pop that corner into a replicator and it’s good as new.