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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
Posts: 16320
Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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 Posted: Wed Nov 27, 2024 2:45 pm Post subject: Fabrication & Materials in the SWU |
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In the interest of keeping the Uglies thread on topic, I’m spinning this off into a new topic.
| FVBonura wrote: | | Considering their size, I doubt they are using 3-D printers on a devastator. You wouldn’t need that much room which is the whole point of using 3-D printers for component fabrication and even architectural fabrication at the upper end. 3-D printers take up very little space relative to other manufacturing processes. |
I was thinking more along the lines of vastly upsized machines using the same premise as a 3D printer, using powdered or atomized base material to build the individual parts and pieces needed to assemble whatever the Devastator is building at that moment.
| Quote: | | I would go so far to say that a sessile manufacturing facility would work even more efficiently than a manufacturing facility that has to travel interstellar and deal with reentry. |
I agree. My thinking is that the main advantage would be the vastly shortened supply and logistics loop that’s also less vulnerable to interstellar interdiction. The facilities producing spares and other needed matériels would actually be in system and taking production orders from the on-site officers, not having to transmit them to sector or oversector command and wait for the next supply convoy.
As a related aside, i just had a chance to speak with a family acquaintance who’s a tech rep for a joint replacement company, and he told me something that blew my mind. Apparently, the technology currently exists to 3D Print titanium joint replacements. They use scans to model the patient’s joint in 3D, then print it using titanium powder that is then laser-welded into place. The main bottleneck at this point is (naturally) the insurance companies.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
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FVBonura
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 24 Nov 2005
Posts: 137
Location: Central PA
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| Posted: Wed Nov 27, 2024 3:05 pm Post subject: |
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Exactly, we are advancing in technology faster than the Star Wars Galaxy.
You have to think in the mind of Tom Veitch back in the early 90s 30 years ago (man I’m old) and you have to think about how they envisioned future manufacturing processes. If we take a short step sideways and look at Star Trek from the early 90s and their replicator technology, you can see that the actual nuts and bolts of additive manufacturing or subtractive manufacturing were not articulated. You simply asked for something and it magically appeared on the platter. A world devastator is essentially doing the same thing on a mile long scale.
If you look at other franchisees from the same time period like X-Men, the Sentinel Master Mold simply plugged into a manufacturing facility and retooled for manufacturing robots instead of automobiles. Although I am no fan of the prequel trilogy you also can see that George Lucas even in 2002 could not envision additive or subtractive manufacturing in the scene where battle droids are being built on an assembly line. Again we see fabrication techniques that are more orthodox as we might see in Detroit.
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
Posts: 16320
Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2024 6:03 pm Post subject: |
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Re manufacturing, even Trek replicators couldn’t build complex devices past a certain level (source: the Replicators section of the ST:TNG technical manual), thus why they still had shipyards and drydocks. So you could still have mass-scale 3D printing of individual parts in SW, but past a certain level, the individual pieces would still need to be slotted into a more conventional assembly line, ala AotC.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
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jtanzer
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 01 Mar 2023
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| Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2024 7:34 pm Post subject: |
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TLDR; It really depends on what you want to do and the materials involved. Traditional manufacturing excels at strong, durable, mass-produced parts using a wide range of materials. Additive manufacturing works best with certain types of plastics for rapid prototyping and hobby work.
Personally, I don't think that additive manufacturing will replace traditional methods. The reason why is that additive manufacturing creates layer lines, which require either specialized post-processing techniques (which may involve adding more material) or a good understanding of how to avoid them. As both I and FVBonura can attest, you do not want layer lines in an engine block. Additionally products made with additive techniques simply aren't as strong because of the way the material is deposited. I've seen resin minis arrive broken despite being packed in bubble wrap.
That's not to say that additive manufacturing isn't useful, however it may end up being used alongside or in support of more traditional manufacturing techniques. It's already being used for rapid prototyping, and for certain components it may actually be more useful, however there are a lot of areas it comes up short in. The layer lines, for example, are perfect places for bacteria to live in (which is a non-starter for food and medical applications), and the Square-Cube law, even more than usual, takes issue with it. You're also limited in build size, making larger prints a problem. It also doesn't have mass producibility that traditional manufacturing techniques allow. If you're in the business of making plastic minis, injection molding allows you produce multiple, reasonable quality sprues that are identical and still have a wide range of customization on each sprue. With additive manufacturing, you can't do that. You have to know exactly what you want before you start printing.
Sauce:
3D Printing Engineer Reacts
Could Advanced 3D Printing Supersede Traditional Machining in the Next Decade?
Additive vs Traditional Manufacturing
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2024 10:47 pm Post subject: |
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Fair points, but IMO, the technological level of the SWU will be a major factor. We know from Han Solo at Stars End that molecular bonding is relatively common (IIRC, Han’s main reaction to Stars End being entirely composed of molecularly bonded armor was how much it would cost due to its size), and presumably if you’re bonding individual molecules together, layer lines will be nonexistent, with the main obstacle being the size of the object being “printed”.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
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jtanzer
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 01 Mar 2023
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| Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2024 12:53 am Post subject: Re: Fabrication & Materials in the SWU |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: | | I was thinking more along the lines of vastly upsized machines using the same premise as a 3D printer, using powdered or atomized base material to build the individual parts and pieces needed to assemble whatever the Devastator is building at that moment. |
This creates a number of other problems, such as distribution of the material, time required, etc, but I'll roll with it for now.
[qoute="CRMcNeill"]As a related aside, i just had a chance to speak with a family acquaintance who’s a tech rep for a joint replacement company, and he told me something that blew my mind. Apparently, the technology currently exists to 3D Print titanium joint replacements. They use scans to model the patient’s joint in 3D, then print it using titanium powder that is then laser-welded into place. The main bottleneck at this point is (naturally) the insurance companies.[/quote]
The insurance companies don't want to pay because it's more expensive with higher risk. They are for-profit buisnesses, after all.
| CRMcNeill wrote: | | Fair points, but IMO, the technological level of the SWU will be a major factor. We know from Han Solo at Stars End that molecular bonding is relatively common (IIRC, Han’s main reaction to Stars End being entirely composed of molecularly bonded armor was how much it would cost due to its size), and presumably if you’re bonding individual molecules together, layer lines will be nonexistent, with the main obstacle being the size of the object being “printed”. |
If it's expensive, I wouldn't exactly call it common. As a result, I don't think that the process you describe is in common use throughout the galaxy. We can also infer from Han's reaction that normal, mass produced armor isn't produced that way. In fact, I would argue that the World Devastators and the industrial droids mentioned in the other thread are exceptions, rather than the rule when in comes to manufacturing in the SW universe.
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
Posts: 16320
Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2024 7:18 pm Post subject: Re: Fabrication & Materials in the SWU |
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| jtanzer wrote: | | If it's expensive, I wouldn't exactly call it common. |
The impression I got was that it was mainly hugely expensive because they built an entire prison tower out of a single piece of molecularly bonded armor.
I tend to agree that normal armor isn’t molecularly bonded, but what molecular bonding does do is increase the strength of the base material. If that’s the case, it’s not implausible that lesser methods can be used to build “normal” metals, alloys or other materials via manipulation of strong nuclear energy forces.
Ultimately, though, this will be up to individual interpretation and inference from the limited in-universe evidence available, so YMMV.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index
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