Army 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade 3D printing K9 Genesis UAV.
Printed, components sourced, and fully assembled on base referencing our fully open source wiki, files, & guides.
Soldiers from the Hunter Army Airfield Innovation Center received initial training on the Expeditionary Manufacturing Cell or xCell, 3d-printer system, at Ft. Stewart and then manufactured around 90 unique parts in various quantities.
Army 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade 3D printing K9 Genesis UAV.
Printed, components sourced, and fully assembled on base referencing our fully open source wiki, files, & guides.
Open Source is the future towards breaking the red tape and ensuring our warfighters are equipped 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/esAwIZ7Ias
— Canine Defense Technologies (@K9DefenseTech) October 2, 2025
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Yes. Shipping container *repair*, not assembly, makes more sense. Build foldable, to take up less transportation space to front lines. Connect battery, hard program photograph (no GPS), off they go. boom.
What gigapress would be needed to stamp drone plane/missile/boat bodies? Of course, you need Metallurgical Engineer or person to figure out formulas, stresses, aero dynamics, assembly, and such. Maybe robot assembled in unboxed factory. Ukraine Phoenix missiles cheaper-by-the-dozen every day?
An alternative being epoxies (no reflect radar). More likely for low-and-slow prop drones. Like old Lockheed YO-3A, but need to launch better.
I am not sure I see the use in a shipping container whose express purpose is to print drones.
It is never going to build them in sufficient numbers and some things like batteries and motors are not printable.
It would probably be much better to fill the container with preassembled drones .
Good call. The shipping container thing is like a “defense spending whistle”.
I agree. The virtue of 3D printing is small run hardware customization, but there is little use for that with military drones – rather, they call for very conventional extreme standardization, iterative improvement and mass production. The flexibility of drones is in swapping out standardized mass produced components – and software.
The important parts, the electronics, motors, batteries, payloads (sensor, explosive) are not printable. The parts that ARE printable might as well be standardized and mass produced more cheaply by injection mold or whatever.