The military has been salivating over the potential for additive, or 3-D, printing for a number of years. No need for warehouses full of parts or an elaborate logistics system that flies crucial components to forward locations. Theoretically, just take a 3-D printer along on a deployment and any spare parts needed can be whipped up in a matter of hours. Industrial futurists have speculated that entire systems-such as munitions or unmanned aircraft-could be producedusing additive techniques, potentially abolishing the need even for factories. Well, not quite yet. While 3-D is already being used successfully in a wide variety of low-tech applications, there are still a lot of fundamentals to be worked out in order to use it in flight-critical or mission-critical applications.
展开▼
