I believe that if you retain essentially the same characters, even if you change the names it's still a
violation of copyright.

Why not just start from scratch, and invent your own story?

Replicators are ubiquitous in reality but just not universal. There is nearly anything used by humans which is not replicated. Even the universal type replicator of Star Trek would need replenishing of matter to replicate from and thus need some sources of matter which may have a cost in, at least, machinery to obtain it.

On the replicator: An interesting concept. If it can replicate anything, then you only have to build one replicator, ever. That makes it a von Neumann machine, if it can replicate without intervention. A note: in Clarke's 2001 series, the Monolith (or Stargate or Zagadka, etc.) was also one.
I enjoy Star Trek, but have always found the liberalism annoying. The no-money system is a complete joke. Sure replicators can make things, but how are you going to pay people to work? Never mind, in a totally Communist system, you just tell them TO work.

A replicator, should one be ever created, will completely destroy our society and everyone in it. It is no different than winning giant lottery - and we all know how that ends. It is so typical of the extremely shallow elites who live is the clouds and never have to work for a living to think that Utopia can be achieved through abundance. That is why they're so gun-ho on redistribution - once abundance is achieved, Utopia is automatically here. Only they kind of believe in it, but not completely, so they redistribute other people's stuff, not theirs, just in case... Marx, who never worked a day in his life, Lenin, with the same work record, Bernie, who couldn't be made to work even for a few months in a kibbutz, Obama, who never held a job. These are the self-proclaimed intellectuals with their replicator pipe-dreams, never realizing that it is this lottery-winning replicator that will be the destruction of the society.

Having grown up with Star Trek, I feel compelled to chime in with a few MAJOR gaffes which we MUST rely on the theatrical 'suspension of disbelief' to digest any of the episodes' deeper or should I say underlying, cultural implications.

The Replicator: It would be the single most transformative technological element that is for all intents and purposed simply glossed over.

Replicator technology would completely invalidate many of the precepts of commerce as a means to alleviate scarcity and need. The transformation that even a SINGLE replicator would introduce to a planet as so overwhelming that even my creative mind cannot grasp all the implications.

In the right hands, even one replicator salvaged from say a crashed spaceship, or a time travelling accident -- changes the world forever.

Transporter technology: It like the replicator would be so unimaginable transformative, that we would be incapable of recognizing a post transporter civilization. It could exist right under our noses and we as a pre-transporter civilization could be kept ignorant of its very existence!

All the more conventional technologies like warp drive, shuttlecraft, anti-gravity, and all the weapons and medical advances are the only conventionalizations that we, in our current unenlightened state can latch onto. They are all utterly unimportant when compared to either transporter or replicator technologies with regard to their potential.

Simply put with either a single replicator or a single transporter, it is possible to accomplish anything from enlightening an entire planet into a spacefaring civilization, or to enslave or destroy an entire planetary population with equal ease.

No other Star Trek technology(1) is capable of such enormous transformations. Even the occasional flirtations with time travel, fall short of the ability to control specific outcomes, other than a restoration to the 'original' timeline.

Footnote:
(1) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clark

It was because of the embrace of socialism that Star Trek got away with the Ferengi being portrayed as Nazi cartoon Jews, with big ears and noses. Ironic that Quark, played by the Jewish actor Armin Shimerman, became one of the most popular characters with an oblivious fandom of DS9. The ST establishment failed completely to create capitalist villains, falling back on autocrats, tyrants, and the fascist Romulans.

I met Gene Rodenberry when he came to JPL to get a scientific perspective and to borrow the Voyager mock up for "Startrek the motion picture". His insistence on scientific plausibility and logic was very "Randian". He appreciated the fact that his ideas had stimulated much discussion of potential technologies such as warp drive, the transporter, photon torpedoes and the tricorder. The fliphone is a Startrek technology that has come and gone. He was quite a guy.

I wouldn't have guessed this in a century, as the Star Trek Genre was based around a socialistic one-universe society that eschewed money and personal gain. I still remember (quite vividly) the episode where they found a ship from the 21st century, brought them back from their suspended animation, and the crew were aghast - almost embarrassed - over the one guy's desire to know how his stocks had fared, and how he should, by now, be wealthy enough to buy this starship"...

To me, it's hard to reconcile that to an Ayn Randian ideal society... but then again, entertainment and philosophy would, at times, make strange bedfellows.

I wonder whether Ayn Rand would have approved of the direction the Star Trek franchise took after Roddenberry's death. For that matter, I wonder whether either creator understood the other.

Star Trek embraced pure communism as an economic ideal. The Ferengi were obvious caricatures of capitalists, and in fact little more than gangsters. Roddenberry, while alive, never had the ship return to Earth. But his successors made plain: the Federation would have a completely creditless economy, based on the pseudo-abundance of the ubiquitous "replicators."

I myself started to create a series to pick up 17 years after Deep Space Nine left off (and fifteen years after Voyager left off). In it, the New Economy would start to creak, colonists would flock to the Gamma Quadrant, and suddenly the Federation would impose Townshend-like Acts on Gamma Quadrant colonies. With the result that the Niners and the Voyagers, facing a crisis of conscience, would lead a Gamma Quadrant War for Independence, to parallel the American War for Independence. In this scenario, the Dominion War becomes the French-Indian/Seven Years' War, with all the economic stress that war laid on the British Empire, pushing them to promulgate those Intolerable Acts to begin with.

I don't expect the rightsholders of Star Trek ever to agree to this. So I am prepared to change all the names, and even substitute an autistic savant for the self-aware android automaton ("Data") the franchise features. I believe, furthermore, that the Federation would suffer an Atlas Shrugged-style collapse, and fall under a dictatorship by the then-current clone of George Soros.

the influence of Ayn Rand never ceases to astound me!!

Thought that was a fact. What ain't a fact is either lore or BS.
Perfect strangers call me on the phone and lie all the time. So I hang up on them.

I didn't either! Yeoman Rand named after Ayn Rand, wow!

So happy my favorite SciFi is not orthogonal to, and perhap consistent with, my favorite philosopher.

Thanks Mike!

Does that make it "lore"?

Thanks for this new data. (Star Trek speak).
I can clearly see why Spock would be Ayn Rand's favorite character.

Thank you. I did not know this.

Jan

And Armin Shimerman did a fine job as the villain of Atlas Shrugged I as well.