The Glade 4.0

I'm all in favor of patient privacy, but...I really wanna know how someone loses 75% of their skull and lives to tell about it.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

The first I heard of 3D printing was Figureprints, which allowed me to get a figure of my WoW character which is currently standing proudly on my mantle gathering dust in the corner of the dining room.

Ooh, Figureprints does renders of Minecraft worlds now too!

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I first heard about it a couple of years ago in a thread on this board.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

The reverse process actually. Milling and lathing take a solid block of matter and remove bits. 3d printing assembles bits into a solid whole. Think more like tiny building blocks or Legos.

Call it what it is, automated Minecraft.

I'm aware of how it's working. The issue is the input-output. Diamondeye read the word "printer" and thought, "Paper goes in, letter to Mom comes out." That didn't translate well to the 3D analogy. If he thinks, "Plastic goes in, track for my model train comes out," it's easier to see how that machine makes gun parts.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

"Human Cells go in, body parts come out"

kinda blew my mind...

Mmm, sort of. Most 3d printing systems use STL. The process is additive, but it's not really rasterized in the sense of voxels. Rather, the model is sliced in one direction, but each slice is an irregular triangular network.

Beyond that, it really is a printing process rather than some kind of assembly. There are a bunch of different processes, but they broadly break down into rheological processes that are at least vaguely similar to conventional ink printing processes, and powder + fusion/binding processes that are conceptually similar to laser or electrostatic printing.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

That makes more sense.

Can it combine more than one material? For example, the train tracks would have plastic ties but nickel-steel rails. Could it make that?

Also, with the gun, would the entire gun be made of resin, or metal, or what? Would it be strong enough to take the pressure of firing? What are the limits of this thing in terms of complexity, or materials that need to be created under high temperatures or something like that?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm sure it varies widely with model, assembly method, generation etc

I don't really know, and it seems to be a technology that's advancing pretty quickly. The ones available for commercial purchase only work with plastic. Someone used one of those commercial printers to make a plastic receiver for an AR-15 and attached it to an otherwise normal rifle. It worked for a few shots and then something broke. It's still under testing, but this isn't some theoretical pipe dream. It's shooting bullets as we speak.

As for your tracks, the printer you could purchase today can only make the plastic ties. The expensive *** industrial printer available to the manufacturer could work with the full track the way your color printer mixes multiple colors of ink. Such a printer would first produce the plastic ties, then switch barrels to lay out the track. Once the track is down, it would switch barrels back to plastic to finish the ties off.

Now, the switching of "ink" could be a manual process whereby you print the tracking plastic, put it back in with metal "ink" to print the rails on top of the track, and then put it back in again to print fasteners down to hold the track. It could also be an automatic process where the printed has multiple "inks" that it's swapping in and out on the fly to print in one seamless process. That will depend greatly on the printer's cost, and when it was made during the development of this technology.

However, within ten years, we'll have advanced this technology to the point where you could afford to buy one that works with metals and print your own train track. He'll, you could even print your own trains. Of course, that's ten years in which someone scared of guns can pass laws against owning printers that make metal parts, or preventing retailers from selling the metal ink.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

So far it's only been that someone has printed the lower receiver, not the full gun. Here's a link to the guy who's been doing it, and his current iteration has survived over 600 rounds.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013 ... 00-rounds/

This part was interesting.

I think I saw at one point that you could get a unit that would grind up certain of your plastic recycled stuff, heat that up and then press it into a filament. The filament then goes into your 3d printer to be extruded for making stuff. I love the idea of taking my recycleds, and instead of paying someone to haul it off each month, having the ability to, say, print off new coat hangers.

Man, I could save a ton of money if I could print track!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I have limited knowledge of powder metallurgy fabrication. While printable AR parts sounds interesting, I have to wonder how that jives with the massive body of knowledge that exists for metallurgy and best design and manufacturing practices of firearms. The current "tier 1" standard of must-have features for a go-to-war AR, AK, 308 etc. rifle is derived from a huge working history of millions of different rifles deployed in combat and training environments. In other words, the current mil-spec package for something like an AR pattern rifle has a proven track record that particle assembly methods are going to have to live up to.

On the other hand, the potential for this seems to far overshadow improvised, stolen or other obtained weapons even if they only obtain a fraction of the functional reliability of normal production weapons.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Yes, but at the moment you could buy a lot of track for what a 3D Printer costs. So it'd take you a while to recoup your original investment.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

In that same vein, however, you could also create your own train cars. Locomotive shells would also be possible, although you'd need to supply your own motors. Scenery would also be possible. Instead of slapping putty on cardboard, just print your mountains.

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That'd have to be a pretty big printer. My mountain is about 5'x3'x1'6" overall. I had been wondering about the locomotive though.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

For large items, you'd need to create in sections, sure. The chamber of any 3D printer is only so large, but as long as you plan it correctly, there's no reason you couldn't assemble whatever you make into the appropriate end result. And mountains are, I am guessing, the largest potential scenery item, right? Buildings and trees and whatnot would be much simpler to create. Of course, a 3D printer may still not be feasible, it would all depend on how much you expect to shell out on the hobby over your interest lifetime.

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Yes, the mountain is easily the largest. For things like trees it would be incredibly handy, although you don't want a whole bunch of completely identical trees.

Right now it'd simply be totally impractical and expensive to buy one, but down the road when I have a larger layout, more time to spend on it, and the technology is better and the price down it might be different.

The really costly thing is the locomotives; steam locomotives in particular are incredibly expensive. HO is good in that regard as it's large enough that making tiny motors and parts doesn't drive the cost up as much as N or Z but large amounts of material and weight don't drive the cost up either as in O. Still, you're looking at over a hundred dollars, minimum for a steam engine and a good one is a lot more. The Monster in my GG&N thread cost me $370 and that version doesn't have digital command or sound installed; it would have been about $500 with it installed. It's a fine piece of machinery though; there is a huge difference in the smoothness and performance of it compared to the older 'toy' diesels I was using from kid's train sets, or even the 2-8-0 that I got from E-bay, and a massive difference in pulling power.

Really large and popular articulateds like Union Pacific Big Boys and Challengers can cost upwards of $1,200, as can 2-8-8-4s from the major Eastern railroads. The Allegheny I have is easily in that class, but there were a lot fewer Alleghenies; only the C&O and Virginian used them, and the latter in very small numbers. They don't have quite the broad modelling appeal of more common large articulateds, nor the fame factor of the Big Boy. Those more famous and popular types can probably be found for over $2,000 for some models.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Terrain features are pretty commonly used in a lot of different hobbies. There are probably lots of different trees, mountains, and such already posted on the internet somewhere. Get some terrain that somebody printed for Warhammer and co-opt it for your train set. I'm sure you don't have to worry about identical trees. Shoot, randomized trees seems like the sort of thing that's pretty easy for a programmer to pull off.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Yeah, there is an endless supply of that stuff. The mountain pretty much has to be custom-built to the table and track it goes over, but all the smaller stuff is widely available. Mostly, I haven't got that far yet. I've already been using some of the black grit used for making ash-covered battlefields to fill hoppers with coal.

Heaven forbid you spill that **** though.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Someone could write a software program to generate a 'mountain' in whatever dimensions you need, then slice it up into whatever size pieces your 'printer' driver requires.

Snap it all together like a lego set, apply the finish of your choice.

BTW, I saw this on an episode of "How do they do it?" on the science channel a few days ago.



If I ever find myself in Europe, I would love to check this place out.