>>14251973Printing the tanks is a meme imo but printing 99% of the parts on decent engines is a nice technological capability, also their methalox dual expander cycle engine is kino.
In a real world scenario on Mars or the Moon or wherever that isn't Earth, the production chains will be necessarily very short and the complexity of products will be necessarily very low compared to many products built on Earth to perform the same tasks. Having worked in production before I can tell you that even though a vacuum electrolysis aluminum smelter and foundry setup may be able to produce a very wide selection of different stock dimensions, there will be a much narrower range of dimensions that the machine "likes" to produce, and of those preferred sizes, one or two will run like butter. Practically, this means that on the Moon, engineering projects will be in much less of a sandbox than they are on Earth, because they can't just dream up whatever design they want and find someone willing to produce the building materials they want in the sizes and shapes they need. Engineer is designing a huge drag line excavator for an alumina strip quarry? He's gonna have to figure out how to do it using 100mm x 200mm x 15mm thick aluminum I beams because that's the only size the aluminum production units can pump out on a regular basis at high rates without shitting themselves (made up example but it illustrates what I mean). Not even saying it's going to be a huge barrier to overcome or anything, just that it's going to look a lot more like late 1800's ironworks in terms of design constraints compared to early 21st century modern architecture and design autism where everything has curves and needs to look like an insect.
