One of the most immediate ways 3D printing will impact the Navy is through the design and construction of ships, submarines, aircraft, and everything carried on board. As a result, 3D printing holds the possibility of upending both how and where a whole host of items are produced, with effects on the Navy ranging from ship and aircraft design and construction to logistics to the attendant new challenges that will be generated. But as their capabilities have advanced in the past decade, they have increasingly created finished products. Former surface-warfare officer (nuclear) Brian Jaffe, an MIT student and developer of a 3D printing start-up, estimates that these still account for the vast majority of the machines’ usage. Additionally, unlike a traditional assembly line, it can switch from producing wrenches one minute to gaskets the next.Ĭompanies first put 3D printers to use generating rapid prototypes to test designs. The latter might deliver a faithful recreation of a wrench’s one-dimensional image, but a 3D printer can create a metal replica, or even a new wrench. Where the printing press facilitated the diffusion of new ideas, 3D printing combines the Internet’s fast access to information with what The Economist calls the “Third Industrial Revolution.” While the precise method varies by printer, in general 3D printers build up from nothing to a finalized product, typically by spraying a fill material, layer by layer, from nozzle jets not too unlike those in an inkjet printer. Three-dimensional (3D) printing, also known as additive manufacturing, is not just a singular new technology. More than five and a half centuries later, a new type of printing promises to have similarly far-reaching effects on the world’s militaries-specifically, for our purposes here, navies. ![]() The press advanced the professionalization of militaries through the use of written doctrine, while at the same time spreading new ideas that helped to spur the wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It was around 1440 that Johannes Gutenberg unleashed the printing press, an invention that brought exciting new opportunities along with daunting challenges.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |