Why fully printed USV hulls remain difficult

How soon might ships carry printers able to produce complete USV hulls?

The estimate is decades for whole hulls printed aboard ship, with small components and modular elements considered more practical earlier applications.

Warships must withstand hostile damage as well as ordinary sea loads, which raises demands on a printed structure. A monitor-mount analogy illustrates why extra fasteners and redundancy become more valuable at sea. Printing smaller components or elements of modular craft is considered more plausible than printing a complete hull aboard ship. Ship workshops already fabricate replacement parts from stock material, so adding a printer would extend an existing practice. Standard steel hull plating offers less obvious benefit from additive manufacture than a complex replacement component. At the time of the stream, the estimate for complete onboard hull printing was decades.