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I think in retrospect you can use the former eastern bloc as a metric for how this can go. They built a whole semiconductor industry from scratch and were never
by hughrr 5y ago
I think in retrospect you can use the former eastern bloc as a metric for how this can go. They built a whole semiconductor industry from scratch and were never financially competitive. Parts were significantly more expensive and generally less reliable than the western made ones. You’d be doing the same as them but with less budget and fewer customers.
The risk really is entirely that we single source parts.
A few years back I designed something using only generic multi sourced parts and it was large and inferior. So there’s trade offs everywhere.
- FeepingCreature 5y agoIf you, for instance, only 3D printed plastic parts you could find in stores, you'd also find that your prints were generally significantly more expensive and less reliable. The upside is the ability to get anything you want at any time, as long as it's sufficiently far from the cutting edge, whether production setup for it exists or not. The point here would not be to replace traditional manufacturing but to augment it by acting as a backstop for total supply failure.