I’m not sure how this is any different than drugs. Many illegal drugs can be produced at home with a little bit of effort. But the majority of people don’t bother.
The majority of people have no use for a machine gun. Those that do have a use for it also probably have a way to get one anyway.
I’ve never fired a Glock 18, since they’re illegal in the US, but I have seen quite a few videos of their use. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsXMb0GtS44 for instance.
Sure I am.
I’m not handwaving. You’re pretending that the tolerances are somehow magical. That’s simply not true.
It doesn’t contain the info on the distribution of atoms. You made that up because you have no idea about how rapid prototyping works. This isn’t Star Trek.
The fact that we can craft titanium and alloys now doesn’t suggest that maybe we’ll be a little better in the future?
Selective laser sintering - Wikipedia Please educate yourself, kay?
You really have no idea what we’re talking about in this thread.
Lawls.
Yes it is. It is very difficult and many people who want one won’t take the chance.
It isn’t an improvement. It is a way people will get around having illegal versions of the fully auto schematics. Buy a legal semi-auto schematic and a legal conversion schematic. Get it? Is any of this sinking in?
Getting the schematics will be trivial, as I explained here. Transporting a gun is usually obvious and entails risk of being caught. No one will catch a dude handing you a thumb drive.
Yes. I really do.
Did I say never? I think a phone is much harder than a gun. Because each piece of a gun is made up of one piece of metal (or whatever). A phone has a circut board, lcd screens, a silicon chip and probably has thousands of discrete materials that go into it. I’m surprised you don’t know this.
Jesus dude, read the article on how this works, you are completely off base here. Look at this picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Selective_laser_melting_system_schematic.jpg
No, they make a complete barrel. The thing is produced in powder. You could either do it vertically or horizontally, since the powder media that isn’t sintered is still in place you can make a closed tube. Although you could also just make a ring and build it up entirely.
See above.
Lol.
No, I’ll just fabricate one.
I’m the one debating here. You’re the one showing off your ignorance. Let’s remember that.
I’m not arguing about morality. I’m arguing about how we’re going to deal with this genie. I welcome you to make a useful post if you think you can manage it.
A Glock 18 cannot be controlled without the attached shoulder stock, eh?
Now that you’ve incorrectly asserted that at least twice in this thread, you can admit that you were wrong. That doesn’t come easy for you, I know, but when it comes to facts in this thread you haven’t yet been right so you might as well get it out of the way.
On the spyware issue? It doesn’t report back, but try xeroxing a 20 with a color copier. Last time I tried, it made a perfect copy of the front, but no matter what it did, it wouldn’t print out the back. That kind of spyware is perfectly easily implementable.
This.
Lobohan, what exactly do you think can be accomplished with a fully automatic AK 47 that can’t be done with a semi-auto version of the same rifle? They fire the same round, with the same stopping power, range, ballistics, and magazine capacity. One can burn through a full clip a few seconds quicker than the other. That’s pretty much the only difference.
It might feel cooler with the fully automatic.
Also some people are lazy, think about how many times you’d need to pull the trigger, and burning up ammo doesn’t mean much, you can just print some more.
Look, if you’ve got a fabricator that can make any kind of gun, making an automatic weapon is going to be just about as easy.
Thing is, what is a fully automatic weapon good for? Robbing banks? If you’ve got any kind of gun, you point the gun at the teller, tell them to fill up the bag with money, and you run away. Whether you’ve got a .22 pistol or an AK-47 doesn’t make any difference. I suppose if you’re in a standoff with the police an AK-47 might be better, but if you’re the type of idiot who gets in standoffs with the police you’re probably the kind of idiot who sprays wildly and runs out of ammo.
And besides, as has been pointed out, if you can replicate a machine gun in your living room, why are you robbing banks? What does the bank have that you can’t get from your fabricator?
If your goal is just to masscre a bunch of people Columbine-style, then I suppose a fully automatic weapon will be marginally more effective than a legal semi-automatic firearm. But only marginally. The danger of being able to fabricate a machine gun is only slightly higher than the danger of being able to fabricate any sort of gun.
A gangbanger is likely to harm himself with a full auto weapon.
And, considering the overall accuracy of gangbangers (they miss a LOT) my guess is that they’d pull the trigger once, find they missed 33 shots since 28 of them went through the ceiling, and feel like a moron… Or they’d hit the guy five times, just like they would now.
Sprat and pray, by the way, is way more effective with a semi auto weapon. You simply don’t have enou ammo in anything short of a SAW to do any effective spray and pray. And even with a SAW you’re best off bursting.
Thats really not effectively controlling the gun. He’s not using the sights, he’s pointing from the hip and spraying.
I will say that he did effective prevent the gun from bucking up and hitting himself in the face, though.
No such thing as stopping power. It’s something that fans of the .45 ACP made up in order to justify their butt love for John MOSES Browning.
Yes, they do, if you want them to be more dangerous to the guy in front of the barrel than they are to the guy behind it. The wrong metallic composition and fine structure is rather important if you’re building a device that’s supposed to contain and direct a series of small explosions.
It was on tipic – by pointing out that the requirements of the OP (a replicator capable of generating a specified structure to the molecular level) are such that a wide range of other effects (instant production of just about any substance) would inherently follow it, and would swamp the specific issues raised in the OP.
If we’re talking about Alien Space Bat technology that is capable of producing the sort of precision metallic fine structure required for an automatic weapon that is more likely to kill its target than its wielder, but is somehow incable of producing much simpler configurations of matter like tp or batteries, there is no point even attempting to work out logical ramifications. Whatever results, results, because A Wizard Did It.
Some clarification: I am pretty libertarian in my outlook on guns, and I don’t think having automatic weapons be available (with proper oversight) would be a bad thing. However I realise a lot of people disagree; the point of my OP was to ask what happens when it suddenly becomes nearly impossible to prohibit something when those prohibitions are easily bypassed. Do we change our attitudes towards making things illegal, or do we endlessly try to make the square peg of technology fit into the round hole of what we think should be allowed?
I did not envision a true molecular duplicator, more like the 3D layer printing machines. As far as the whole debate on whether this allows you to control the tempering of the metal produced adequately, that depends on the technical details of just how the printer bonds the source metal into a solid object. The objection raised is that this is impossible, that the only two ways to achieve this are bulk thermal processing of the material from a molten state, or atom-by-atom manipulation. Let’s say for purposes of discussion that laser sintering or whatever can produce solid metal objects of the necessary quality.
So substitute marijuana for machine gun, and we’d have the same thread?
If you don’t mind, I’d alter that a bit…
A polymer with a sufficiently high melting point and able to take the stresses of acting as a barrel for a firearm is discovered, and it’s relatively cheap. It’s stronger than steal in every way (in fact, new skyscrapers are being built out of it, it’s cheaper, lighter and stronger than steel), and is the basis for all new fabricator technology™. The entire gun, with the exception of the magazine spring and possibly the recoil spring (for handguns) can be home made.
Trigger group, firing pin, barrel, receiver, all polymer, all based in *nft™ *and all easily home made – with the right schematics.
They can do tool steel and titanium now. The can do alloys now. It isn’t Star Trek technology. It would just require a bit more than we can do now. I don’t actually know that we couldn’t do it today, can we get a materials scientist in the house?
You need to read up on how current day fabricators work. The molecular structure thing is silly.
It wouldn’t require wizardry.
They aren’t the same. And if you were approaching the thread in something other than a blind, ideological rage you’d appreciate that.
As I say, they can currently create steel and titanium and alloys. No reason to need a magic polymer.
Lobohan, all SLS does is fuse pre-existing macroscopic grains of metal, at the surface of those grains (And even then the result is pretty porous as metal solids go). It’s like silver granulation on a smaller scale. This is not the same as machining from a solid, and then further annealing and tempering the result for strength combined with flexibility. What you’re describing, even with updated tech, would have the *shape *of a barrel, sure (and I agree Blake is wrong about having to do 2 halves), but it wouldn’t have the physical properties of a machined barrel. SLS and other 3D printing techs simply *don’t *produce the intergrown crystal structures in steel (martensite, cementite, pearlite, etc) that contribute to its strength, never mind multiple metals in one piece.
The only way to 3D-print the needed crystal structures would be molecule by molecule, like Blake said. And if you can do that, yes, you can print your own drugs, TVs, jewels, ho-bots… there’d be no need for gangbanging.
I’m not the one that’s angry or calling people irrational.
And, since you’re back, please respond to me earlier question about what, exactly, you think can be done with a fully automatic AK 47, but cannot be done with a semi automatic version of the same rifle?
Actually, the current steel and titanium isn’t strong enough to make a sword, much less make a container than can hold the kind of explosions that go on in gun barrels, and it’s unlikely that our current technology will progress into one that could reasonably soon.
On the other hand, polymers are easy to work with and fabricate (layer by layer) and can be strong enough and have high enough melting points (theoretically, at least) to be used as selective fire rifle chambers. And since polymers lend themselves to be fabricated much more quickly and easily than metals, it’s easier to presume the development of a new polymer that that uses current fabrication technologies than it is new fabrication technologies.
Also, your response has shown that you’re not interested in furthering the debate, you’re interested in being right. I put forth a (semi)plausible way that both parties could agree to the premise of the OP and have a discussion about it, without either side conceding ground on whether or not the fabricator would have to be magical, and instead of using it and moving on with the discussion at hand you’ve shot it down as if it were nonsensical.
The military is looking to sintered ceramic gun barrels.
And coupled with hot isostatic pressing it is currently producing quality metals. http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/9812/das-9812.html
