Diegetics

I see myself torrenting 3D models for my fabber 10-20 years from now.

Another thing I can see huge use for is speeding up testing and evaluation. It's a pain in the ass to manufacture a new receiver for a rifle , say, and finish it out only to find something is just a bit off. Modeling things will be significantly faster. Minuscule turning all sorts of fun into reality. Love it

Frankly, I could use one of those fabbers from the future right now. My sister wants to go into the cosmetics and personal hygiene products business and the bottles, jars and whatnot cost as much or more than the product itself because we cannot afford to buy them wholesale. A fabber churning out plastic bottles and jars would be just the thing.

Eventually, yeah.

It'd probably be cheaper to scale up to where you can put down a $ 1000 order for plastic bottles than to try and minifacture them.

Depends on the cost of running a fabber. Right now minifacturing is not an option, of course.

There's got to be some way that large, traditional businesses that are threatened by this stuff can find some regulatory means of supressing it. EPA, consumer protection, second hand vapors, something.

Minifacturing -- I think that's the first time I see this word. Let history know.

As to who'll be threatened, think DHL and Fedex.

What are you going to do the first time little Joey comes to school with a fabbed full auto grenade launcher ? Might want to get out ahead of that little dynamic right now. If we can.

My point exactly. These kids are the leading edge of the implementation of sophisticated technologies. They will both be more creative with it and be less restrained by conventions about it.

Gentlemen , welcome to the seed vs feed war.

Oh , and CD; they can use metal. With increases in the technology ( see my post on sintered ammo ) , the sky is the limit.

CogDee and DoU,

There's a guy at MIT (who is friends with a friend of mine) who has printed a grandfather clock, took it from the printing bay, hang it on a wall, pulled the weight, and watched it start ticking. There are already high-end 3D printers in operation that use metal powders and electron lasers. They're used for printing customized titanium frames. The only recognizable constraint in the Jimmy with grenade launcher scenario is the availability of high explosives. Jimmy will likely go for automatic crossbows and high-pressure airguns, I'd guess.

And if you wanna go for high kinetic impact, there's always the disposable, one-use railgun.The main thing with electromagnetically accelerated projectiles is that the barrel tends to bend in the wake of the projectile, but with a cheap disposable that's ok.
Imagine the toy below, speeded up cca 1000 times, with a nice plasma tail as it overheats the air in its wake, and delivering ...uh... dunno, half a megajoule to the target. Not bad for a hand-weapon.

.

Bet the recoil will be a of a problem, heh.

Or we could just got with good old-fashioned guns. Purchase the ammunition at Wal Mart, have an untraceable fire-arm.

Yeah, but I'm thinking somewhat bigger. Half a megajoule is about the yield of a grenade, except instead of it wastefully spreading in a sphere it is all directed towards a dime-sized target. That's about a thousand times more than a bullet. It'd either go through a body like butter, or if it spreads to cover enough area, rip you in half.

Much more fun than bullets.
A 3 Megajoule platform on a truckbed can probably send a baseball of hypersonic molten metal clean through a tank from a few miles away. The US Navy's already tested a reusable 33 Megajoule platform last year. Methinks a single-fire device with a tenth of the power should be comparatively simple to build.

Gunpowder is an antiquated propellant. Better things coming , I am sure.