Basically, any material you can squeeze, melt or generate into a powder, you can print.
You cannot make an aircraft without forged components.
We can also cut by heat - heat punch. And we also can cut by cold - extreme cold. When you cut with heat, it makes a mark. With cold, no mark. It depends on the fabric.
After a few years of intensive research, we found a way to use a pulsed laser directed into a nozzle to vaporize any material, allowing for the first time the atoms of any element in the periodic table to be produced cold in a supersonic beam.
Because the high-intensity pulses are short, the laser only damages the area where it's applied. The result is precise, clean cuts that are ideal for transparent materials.
I was quite unable to make any white metal alloy hard enough to be made into powder by my machinery.
Unless we understand a certain material - metal or resin and plastic - understanding the processes that turn it from ore, for example - we can never develop and define form that's appropriate.
I boil the strings so they stretch.
There is enough material in the Kuiper Belt to build anything out there. We could gobble up all the little asteroids, filtering out all the volatile materials, leaving us with bits of rock and using that to make some incredible structures.
