Let’s say I decide I’ve had enough with this whole Federation business and that humanity would be better represented by a Starfleet that follows my particular ideology. Assuming I could get enough people for crew and support, why can’t I start my own Starfleet?
I could replicate ship parts until I have a couple vessels. Go to new worlds and present myself as the official first contact of humanity. I could fly to Vulcan or Bajor and tell them no actually my organization represents humanity.
What’s going to stop me?
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- Extreme amounts of energy needed for large items, but it seems like Earth has transporter quotas, so presumably they enforce energy budgets (based on DS9 Sisko using his transporter budget)
- Not all materials like latinum can be replicated
- Materials like dilithium are seemingly not viable to replicate, probably due to it being an incredibly wasteful process
- Many dilithium byproducts are unstable controlled substances, so at some point Starfleet would interfere to prevent the creation of trilithium or other unstable substances.
- I don’t know if you need antimatter, but I don’t think you could replicate it. You could replicate the machinery needed to produce it though.
- The Federation does have industrial replicators but they seem to be treated as controlled assets they rarely give out or provide access to. So they might meddle if you start building these.
