Which is why its more surprising this was first announced last year and there's no Proof of Concept demo yet?
But really, I've given up on ink jet printers, and have gone the cheap B&W laser route for anything I need to print at home (In the past year, 2 times, a backup ticket and some paperwork that needed a real signature sent back).
But when I had them, the thing that went bad 99.999% of the time was the cartridges or a clogged nozzle on the head. So the advantage here, on the repairability side not DRM, is the rails and motors?
Also that cutter is going to be a pain, having worked on Lightjet printers, that cutter was nearly all field service issues until the FEs started leaving the "laser" key so lab managers could reset the blade themselves.
Imagine doing AI development in waterfall. You spend weeks writing your prompt, when you think you have it perfect, only then do you submit it to the AI. Then you wait a week or so, and see what it produced, expecting it to be exactly what you wrote.
Or, do you tell it the basic functionality you want, test it out, then add feature after feature that you want, sometimes dropping them and sometimes adding new ones that you thought of as your worked.
I think the most efficient means of delivering so much xrays that kilograms of material can fuse is with the primary stage of an hbomb, which is just an implosion fission bomb. I wouldn't be too worried about this test creating a new weapon.
However... In the early 80s, the SDI initiative aimed to have orbiting satellites that utilized x-ray lasers to shoot down incoming warheads. The theory of these were you had h-bombs in orbit, with long cylinders of a material that would amplify the x-rays from the bomb. You'd point these at the incoming warheads and trigger the bomb and (chefs kiss) you have beams of xrays that would destroy warheads.
One of the major reasons this was skuttled, was that the test they used to find a material they thought amplified xrays was flawed (see below).
With the test-ban treaty, they weren't able to test any other materials. Now we have a facility that tests materials to amplify x-rays...
Sidenote: The test was, explode a bomb in a tunnel, shut the tunnel down with explosives to trap the shockwave, then use the xrays to test materials to withstand x-rays as well as amplify them. Teller thought they had seen amplification and sold the military on the satellite idea. Another scientist, thought it was a secondary thermal effect on Oxygen. There is an interesting story about the back and forth, and the pressure to have another scientist lose his credentials for disagreeing with Teller, that is a good follow on to the Oppenheimer story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
I felt a similar way with the news of the fusion 'breakthrough' around 6 months ago. "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!".
They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.
However, this being a weapons lab, they created the experiment to model the secondary device in an H-Bomb. The secondary is theorized outside the Top Secret world to be a cylindrical tamper of (enriched?) uranium. One hypothesis in the public sphere, is its the primary device's Xrays that cause this to ablate at such a rate and that the inside is compressed to achieve fusion. The purpose of the fusion is primarily for the neutrons it generates, which are used to cause a massive amount of fission in the tamper, producing the majority of the energy. For example, if replace the uranium with another non-fissile material, and you have a "neutron bomb".
The reason the breathless hype annoyed me is that at no point was usable energy the desire of the test. In fact, the test solely was to feed real world data back into the supercomputer models, so that we know how our existing stockpile of weapons would work or even perhaps to find optimizations. We know this mechanism of ablation causing fusion works, we've known for 60+ years, all we're doing is doing it in a lab.
I'm not sure why there is this need to hype these events, like fusion or LK-99 so much. It seems that being a naysayer is reacted to as if the naysayers are explaining a magician's tricks. As if we don't hype these events the public will lose interest, or even our children will drop out of STEM careers.
But really, I've given up on ink jet printers, and have gone the cheap B&W laser route for anything I need to print at home (In the past year, 2 times, a backup ticket and some paperwork that needed a real signature sent back).
But when I had them, the thing that went bad 99.999% of the time was the cartridges or a clogged nozzle on the head. So the advantage here, on the repairability side not DRM, is the rails and motors?
Also that cutter is going to be a pain, having worked on Lightjet printers, that cutter was nearly all field service issues until the FEs started leaving the "laser" key so lab managers could reset the blade themselves.