Halfblakistan wrote:Laritaia wrote:
any value said idea had was completely invalidated by this
3D printing is not a replicator from Star Trek, it takes a long time to produce even the smallest and simplest of parts and is massively expensive.
people who waffle on about how its going to revolutionize X sector of Y industry/technology by allowing on demand production have no idea what the fuck they're talking about.
3d printing is an incredibly useful tool that truly can speed up the design and development process but this belief that it has some sort of magical power to reduce the time and cost of actual manufacturing is only serving to make people heavily disappointed when they find out what it's actually like.
I totally disagree. People in countries littered with mines (and amputees) are being given [url]printed prosthetics[/url]. A Russian-American company (probably owned by Trump) is experimenting with printed houses. The technology may not be cost-effective in an MT setting, but it would in a PMT or FT setting. I'm not saying it's a panacea, but it could be a useful tool in the militaries of a lot of countries, real and imaginary.
prosthetics are expensive custom made items so the cost and time associated with using 3d printing technologies is not really a change from how it was done previously.
the technology is not going to get faster, it may get moderately cheaper, but it's never going to even approach the cost effectiveness of proper existing production methods
3d printing has already proved useful to irl militaries for sourcing components that are no longer manufactured, it is however not a replacement for traditional manufacturing
And realistically it's never going to be
to put it another way
there is never going to be a box you can install on a carrier which the maintenance crew can go up to, press a button and say "one drone, extra hellfires"
and it then spits out said drone in a period of time that makes such a request viable rather then simply shipping a drone from a supply depot to the ship.
the same is true for practically every sub-component of the drone