reminder: there are bigger challenges for a colony than how you make structures. Growing food, producing air, recycling sewage, and other basic things are more important. Sure, they make for cool looking CG and art, but that's about it.
>>11806645you need to haul shit from earth no matter what. You ain't printing a goddamn airlock any time soon on mars and liquid airlocks are impractical. A bunch of other equipment cannot be printed too. What matters is exactly how much mass you save compared to other alternatives. Mass trades or GTFO.
>>11806648parts of starship are probably additively manufactured. There are places where it makes sense to use additive manufacturing. You can make really complicated structures for rocket engines that are difficult to make any other way. Additive manufacturing is also a great choice for producing parts you don't need too many of. It is very rare to mass produce anything in aerospace, because all in all, we don't make as many rockets/planes as ford does cars. But there can be pretty big strength benefits to using regular rolled steel.
>>11806665you can print fucking ceramics, we can damn well print heatshields. Ablative heatshields can also be made from plastics and thermoset resins. Printed ceramics are more interesting though because we can make complicated parts that can withstand high temperatures. This might be useful for hypersonic vehicles. Here's the real red pill with additive manufacturing ceramics, you can do absolute witchcraft and make ceramics that are flexible rather than brittle. Pic related. 50% elastic compressive strain in ceramics shouldn't be possible, but it is with additive manufacturing. But yeah, there are benefits to just using stainless steel sheets. Additive manufacturing's just another manufacturing technique, we'll use it where it makes sense. Although the tech for making alumina microlattices is pretty fucking exciting. As now we can now make structures with ceramics and metals.
