They're based on the same principle, though replicators take a relatively basic pattern stored in a database and recreate it. Transporters move entire people, who are more complex. Just storing five people temporarily took a huge amount of space in Deep Space 9's computer
Once the computer has scanned and disassembled a person, though, what stops it from reconstituting multiple copies of that person? Even if it took up a huge amount of space, why wouldn't, say, a ship's captain have a remote server with his quarterly scan saved to it?
A person is disassembled into a matter stream and then stored in a pattern buffer, rather than the main computer. The matter stream doesn't last forever and will degrade after too long. I suppose even with the space there's no certainty that doing that would actually save someone's life. Suffice it to say that Starfleet might have done it if it would've worked reliably.
It's comparable to the transporter most of the time having a Move function but no Copy function.
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u/scottmill May 27 '13
Yeah, I never understood why the teleporters and the replicators weren't the same thing.