interesting... thx for the details. 4x4x4 seems pretty durned big to me. i wonder how durable the tougher plastics get...? IIRC ppl were trying to make guns with these things from the get go.
ABS is the more durable one most people print with, but it requires a heated surface to print on or it will not stick, if the first layer doesn't stick you get a big ball of spaghetti instead of your object. By the end of the summer Printrbot is supposed to have a headed bed version of the simple out for something like $700. You could add a headed bed to the smaller one, would take about $100 to $150 worth of parts.
Less common plastic I've heard of people using is Nylon, that pushes the limits of the home printers. But just about anything that melts in the 180 to 250 C range is possible.
The gun thing makes headlines but is pointless, these printers are slow, I'd guess it would take several days to print the parts for a gun (took me 12 hours to print a TARDIS that was only 10% filled). And from what I've read you have to print a barrel for each bullet, and you only get one shot then you have to rebuild the gun. A drill press and some blocks of stronger plastic would be way easier...
PKD had an enormous amt of humor in his SF, but harrison definitely had the outright comedy in such stuff as "bill the galactic hero" and the stainless steel rat series. PKD was more of the psychologist and ideas man, harry was a guy who used a lot of hard science and engineering principles.
i read some of foster's star trek novelisations a long time ago. i should see if there's e-editions of the commonwealth stuff.
I looked up Harrison, that stainless steel rat stuff looks interesting.
I think most of Foster's Pip & Flinx series is out in e-book, along with a bunch of others set in the commonwealth (Midworld is a good one out on e-book), the founding of the commonwealth series is pretty good. My favorite book of his is not out in e-book, Sentenced To Prism, I got a Brittish hard cover of it from him signed a few years ago when he was cleaning out his excess inventory. That world is very cool, mix of silicon and carbon based life, lots of neat solar powered lifeforms. He has also done straight up fantasy, his Spellsinger series is just as good as his hard sci-fi stuff. He is known for all the novelizations he has done, but those I don't find as interesting as his other works.
I started reading Discworld a few years ago, got through only about a half dozen of them so far, kind of stalled reading that series, there's just too many of them.... That's a different kind of comedy, not as laugh until it hurts like Adams.
I got hooked on a fantacy series by an unknown guy that was getting nowhere with publishers and decided to go the Amazon e-book route, and is now doing it full time, really interesting stuff. Look up Trevor Cooley, his e-books are $1 to $4.
I had ordered S by JJ Abrams so long ago I was surprised when it arrived, haven't gotten around to starting it yet, I've had several suggestions on different ways to read it, most radical seems to be to remove all the extra stuff that is stuffed into the pages and set them aside, read the main text first ignoring the stuff in the margins, then put all the extra stuff back in and re-read it along with that stuff and the "hand-written" notes in the margins.
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