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The 3D Printed Homes of the Future Are Giant Eggs on Mars:
It doesn’t get much more futuristic than living on Mars—and guess what? There’s a 3D printed home for that, too. In fact, there are a few; last year saw the conclusion of a contest held by NASA called the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge.
[...] The top prize ($500,000) went to AI Space Factory, a New York-based architecture and construction technologies company focused on building for space exploration. Their dual-shell, four-level design is called Marsha, and unlike Martian habitats we’ve seen on the big screen or read about in sci-fi novels, it’s neither a dome nor an underground bunker. In fact, it sits fully above ground and it looks like a cross between a hive and a giant egg.
The team chose the hive-egg shape very deliberately, saying that it’s not only optimized to handle the pressure and temperature demands of the Martian atmosphere, but building it with a 3D printer will be easier because the printer won’t have to move around as much as it would to build a structure with a larger footprint. That means less risk of errors and a faster building speed.
The building material would combine basalt fiber and bioplastics made from plants grown on Mars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Friday July 10 2020, @08:16PM (1 child)
Not sure I can accept your arguments, but though they're on topic, they don't really address my question.
That said, I can see rounded external walls as a pressure containment mechanism. But I don't see the problem with getting an extrusion mechanism to print rectangular walls. Even the first large scale extrusion printers could print linear walls. Rounded clothes racks are quite doable, but replacing the rod becomes a whole lot harder. With couches, better to produce a bunch of small pieces that can be fitted together into a roundish couch. As I said, each specific problem is soluble. But solving them all at the same time becomes intractable. It's likely to cause more problems than it solves.
However, my question was really a lot more general than this specific case. It covers Chicago's World's Fair http://www.chicagomag.com/real-estate/January-2019/Restoring-the-1933-Worlds-Fair-House-of-Tomorrow/, [chicagomag.com] and others. (Not as many as I thought, though, from a quick google.) I've seen a few and they've all been unsatisfactory, from the campus building at UC Berkeley (well, the chemistry lecture hall worked pretty well, but the office building was a real problem), to a couple that people were living in. They're ok if all you want to do is camp out, and I presume the Mongols worked out the problems with their Yurts, but they don't work well if you've got lots of stuff...and that includes things like computers an printers. (Perhaps it would work better with portable computers and WiFi. I've never seen that tried. That's a version of the "cut it in lots of small pieces and fit them in" solution.)
That said, I've lived for awhile in a Geodesic Dome. A Quonset hut worked better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut [wikipedia.org] And there were environmental reasons for the design of radomes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radome [wikipedia.org] But those reasons don't make them good to live in. Basically, when you use rounded living areas, you may be more efficiently enclosing the area, but you need a lot more area (or volume) to compensate for the problems that it causes.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 10 2020, @09:23PM
I'm only thinking about the Mars habitat case. The first ones are going to have to be very sparse. I don't expect multiple couch pieces. Just something practical to sit on.
On Earth I think round homes are probably a bad idea, generally. Rectangular rooms seem to solve a lot of problems. If other shapes worked generally, we would see more of them. But we don't. Or only in more expensive houses with lots of space to waste.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.