Here's a cool story about how US Marines saved a staggering amount of money by 3D printing a simple part for a fighter jet - using Blender.
(...) Imagine you’re a US Marine, and instead of fixing a dishwasher or TV remote, you’ve got a $123 million F-35 fighter in the shop. The part you need is a small plastic bumper for the landing gear door, but it’s only available as part of the whole door assembly, which costs $70,000 taxpayer dollars. And lead time to get it shipped from the States is measured in weeks. Can you even entertain the notion of 3D-printing a replacement? It turns out you can, and it looks like there will be more additive manufacturing to come in Corps repair depots around the world.
Marines 3D-Print Part to Repair Multi-Million Dollar Fighter
15 Comments
Blender 3d Rocks!!!
The guys at Lockheed will be less than amused at the loss of profit on that $70,000.
Cool! Now they can kill people for less than half the price! Alternatively, they can use the savings to kill twice as many.
And you get to keep your freedom which enabled companies around the world to be productive, and use blender! @ KLUTZ #KeepFreedomFree
Haha, that's awesome. It serves Lockheed Martin right for trying to scam the government like that.
The Blender community is both global and very diverse. It's certainly not a given that everybody in that community adheres to the ideologies and standards represented by the various armed forces around the world.
While the Blender license permits virtually any use of the software for virtually any purpose, the Blender Institute ought to discourage its software's weaponization by all military establishments regardless of their national origin, even though such a policy couldn't be legally enforced.
As a matter of fact, this sort of moral clause used to be quite common in the early days of free and open software development.
Makes me not want to use Blender any more all of a sudden, considering the atrocities committed by that army.
A military also serves defensive and support roles. This incident happened aboard the USS Wasp, an amphibious assault ship stationed in the Pacific Ocean as part of a patrol in the Indo-China region, probably keeping an eye on Chinese naval activities as part of a U.S. treaty with Taiwan. Prior to that, the Wasp was in the Caribbean and was the first U.S. ship to aid in the relief of islands savaged by Hurricane Irma.
Not exactly atrocities. Military operations often save lives -- it'd be a shame if those operations were curtailed for want of piece of plastic bumper. Or ignorance.
Changing the subject, as much as I love Blender, I note the original dee-oh-dee article makes no mention of the software used to create the bumper replacement. It'd be awesome if Blender was used, though.
Psion, the F35 is a fighter - a weapon, mostly, of attack, hardly likely to be useful in any humanitarian role.
Weapon can help save humans from alien invasion, not always bad. ;)
Well, NOW Blender's career is gonna, erm, rocket up. Are you gonna stop using knives as many people kill with them? Don't be childish and silly. I use Blender for creation, not destruction, and so should you . And let's stick to that ,OK?
What a weird attitude som users seem to have to a serious question, such as weaponizing free and open software.
The Chinese Blender community is a Platinum Sponsor, and I'm not convinced that all its members appreciate the software they support being abused for fixing attack planes in the Indo-China region, like Psion seems to assume.
Nor does eveybody share Michael's unbridled appreciation for their "freedom" being protected by the US military-industrial complex. There may be some inhabitants in Yemen who might disagree, for example.
Lastly, the fact that Blender is being abused by the US military obviously does not impede its functionality as a tool, so there's no reason to stop using it. (And Cícero Moraes has shown several examples of Blender in use to help animals. Also, it's being used for designing prosthetics aso.)
We should, however, give the institute a shoutout to discourage military use of Blender, no matter the political affiliation of the armed forces.
I'm afraid this had to happen some day. It did and there's no stopping that. And anti-militaristic clauses are not gonna work. What consequences could they suffer? Instead, soldiers should be encouraged by the community to use Blender for non-military purposes, too. Some dedicated courses perhaps? Let's show them Blender is so much more than 3D printing it's not meant for anyway and rudimentary modelling. As I assume the modelling of this part wasn't a challenging task.
It was always astonishing and terrifying how people can weponize anything in unexpected and creative ways. In this case it is just another task done with tool we are all using, one more confirmirmation of blenders versatility.
Ya'lls comments are the most confusing thing I've ever seen. Instead of praising some smart engineer who figured out how to save thousands of dollars in resources, used a chunk of Code called Blender that we all know and love, to print a little landing gear stopper. What, do you honestly believe that anything you've looked at hasn't been used by someone in power or anything? "Gasp! Hitler held a kitten! Just proof that Kittens corrupt minds!" "Gasp! I heard that Hitler once ate at my favorite restaurant! That means I'm a step away from becoming him!" "Oh no! Don't you know that some guy released the blueprints of a (nearly useless) 3D printable GUN! How could something made to create amazing objects be used to kill! Get over yourselves guys. This should be good news. Blender is being used creatively to solve problems that couldn't be done before.