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Mark wrote:With a replicator, you COULD do serious damage even if banning weapons. Replicate some bleach and ammonia seperately, then mix them together. Bad stuff.

Hey, man, hush up, would'ya?

Oh, sorry. Giving away trade secrets.......my bad.

Hell, it'd be quite possible to construct a fairly powerful bomb by using stuff that you could easily get out of a replicator.

Considering Federation replicators are powered by M/AM most of the time I could think of something else that could be turned into a fairly large bomb...

they can at least be used as transporters, see 'visionary'.
A replicator-turned-bomb would be amusing:
''Tea,earl grey, boom!'

Mark wrote:Oh, sorry. Giving away trade secrets.......my bad.

You do know that we're all on the inter-web, right?

Reliant121 wrote:I imagine a simple torch could be amplified in power and output to form an energy weapon?

By "torch" you mean "flashlight?" Well, there are essential differences in a flashlight and a laser - you know, coherent energy and all that. However, many police departments over here have given over batons in favor of double-duty, reinforced and weighted flashlights.

Yeah police around here use metal mag lights instead of batons.

You mean the foot-long ones? Yeh, they definitely count as offensive weapons.

Speaking of foot-long offensive weapons...

Nah. Too predictable.

No insult to you, Tsu, but I'd consider it offensive indeed if you presented that to me.

We have seen and heard of weapons being replicated - Civil Defence was mentioned, but also in Field of Fire O'Brien replicated the TR-116, and in The Mind's Eye they mentioned the Romulans replicating Federation phaser rifles - though admittedly that could be the more literal meaning of "replicated".

I seem to recall Field of Fire mentioning blocks to weapon replication. Lemme check...

SISKO : That doesn't mean our killer couldn't have gotten hold of the rifle's replication patterns.
O'BRIEN : But only Starfleet officers have access to those files.

Some files are restricted, it seems.

But I can't believe this would be an effective thing. For one, surely such blocks can be circumvented or broken. We've seen systems hacked time and time again in Trek. And if all such files were deleted, how hard can it be to produce a replicator pattern for a simple weapon? Hell, the Federation could be smuggling patterns in, or even just transmitting them over open comm channels.

And even if the computer can be set to recognise and refuse anything potentially dangerous like a weapon, surely you could replicate component parts separately and assemble them yourself? I can't imagine even Federation computers could recognise everything that could potentially serve as a weapon component, it would block out the replication of virtually everything.

No, if there are replicators then people can produce weapons with them.

Which means they can't let the public near replicators.

Which means on worlds where food supply seems to be rather heavily dependent on replicators that would be a serious issue.

Why not just build replicators that don't have the necessary schematics and blueprints to make weapons?

I'm sure that it would be an easy process to feed any replicator a hacked pattern or file.