/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12770524
>>Did you even watch the videos?
did you read even read what I wrote? The robots didn't put the dirt into the printer and the printer didn't run on its own without human assistant. People had to put stuff into the printer to make it work. Worse yet, the mixing equipment may need to be pressurized...
>>which means we can make the EXACT SAME THING here on earth
lolno. It's hard to figure out regolith properties we care about for mining, construction, and printing like flowability and frictional properties without actual samples of the regolith. For the moon at least we have a bunch of returned regolith, for Mars, we sort of have to guess. Granular material properties depend on
>>other printing
IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING PROCESS! Printing concrete and plastic are totally different things!
>>source?
for making crap at high res, you have to remove supports of some sort
https://www.protolabs.com/services/3d-printing/selective-laser-sintering/
direct metal laser sintering even requires removal of metal supports. Damn, you really do have too much PROONTING on the brain if you don't know about support material.
>>troilite could be reduced to obtain sulfur.
and it's like 1% of regolith. And if you've got iron, why bother with the sulfur? Make stuff out of metal. Now go read "Additive Manufacturing Technologies: 3D Printing, Rapid Prototyping, and Direct Digital Manufacturing"
>>12770543
cause regolith ain't conductive. Lunar free iron has a pretty high concentration though, something like 1% in places IIRC, and you could separate it out easily with a magnet. But lunar regolith is jagged as fuck, so it'd be best to process it into round particles, cause low flowability is bad for EBM. On earth we use a plasma torch for that, but I don't like it for the Moon because of the need to import gases. Perhaps if you use mm-waves you could spherulize a falling stream of free iron particles. Maybe troilite ain't that awful of conductor too