>>12478356Well, one definite good thing about Mars is that it does have appreciable gravity to work in, there doesn't need to be an enormous amount of redesigning to work in the Martian environment except that you can remove at least twice as much mass from any piece of equipment without worrying about compromising it's strength on Mars.
Mars' atmosphere is a near-vacuum, it will make any manufacturing processes which prefer low pressure, low reactivity gas environments easier to set up.
For the creation of structures I favor the idea of basalt-plastic printing, although I know it's somewhat unpopular here. I'd want to see just how far you can push the ratio towards basalt and away from plastic without losing the benefits of the method, to minimize how much plastic you'd need to ship to Mars (and how much the colony would need to produce once it has agriculture).
Maybe you could even get a pure basalt printer to work, which would be ideal, you need no extra plastic and all you have to do is pulverize your rock into a fine easy to melt powder, purge it of perchlorates so it's safe to live around, and extrude it as the outer shell for whatever structures you want to build above or bellow ground.
