Replicators, just like the holodeck and the transporters convert energy into matter. They don’t need any base matter.
According to stuff like the Star Trek Technical Manual, this is not true.
Transporters work by disassembling you into your constituent particles, transporting those particles to the destination, and then reassembling them. It takes a lot of energy to do that, but officially anyway your particles are the same particles before and after.
Replicator works by transporting base nutrient stocks out of tanks into the replicator terminal, but this time it rearranges the nutrient stocks according to whatever the target recipe is
Perhaps those nutrients are very easily available so it’s not an issue, and the energy required is the bottleneck. At any rate, I don’t think Voyager or anything produced after that ever mentioned it.
According to stuff like the Star Trek Technical Manual, this is not true.
Transporters work by disassembling you into your constituent particles, transporting those particles to the destination, and then reassembling them. It takes a lot of energy to do that, but officially anyway your particles are the same particles before and after.
Replicator works by transporting base nutrient stocks out of tanks into the replicator terminal, but this time it rearranges the nutrient stocks according to whatever the target recipe is
Perhaps those nutrients are very easily available so it’s not an issue, and the energy required is the bottleneck. At any rate, I don’t think Voyager or anything produced after that ever mentioned it.