>>Speaking of memory capacities... It's amusing to watch early episodes of "Star Trek:The Next Generation" and hear them talk about "kiloquads" of memory (and it seems to be an awful lot of capacity -- in the episode "11001001" some aliens "borrow" the Enterprise so that they can use its computers as backup storage for their computer system on their planet -- which was going to be kocked out by an electromagnetic pulse from a nearby supernova)... A number of years later, by the time "Star Trek: Deep Space 9" and "Star Trek: Voyager" start, common computer capacities are quoted to be "gigaquads". By the end of the run of "Star Trek: Voyager" they're talking about "billions of teraquads" (which brings up the question -- how did they manage to upgrade the ship's computers anyway? It's not as if they could've gone to nearest starbase for upgrade).
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>The replicator.... :o)

...must have worked overtime... considering that it takes a few seconds to produce a glass of water.

But that's the weird SF opera technology, everything works at the "speed of plot" (by words of Straczinsky). Light travels 0.2 seconds from object A to object B, regardless of their distance, if fired from a weapon. I counted the frames. Photon torpedos are about ten times slower than light.