Drexlerian nanotech

[Rynn]

IIRC Drexler discussed the point about macroscale objects being made using nanotech methods; the point being that for most purposes, objects would be made from standardised parts which might well have been made elsewhere. This wouldn't quite give the ultimate efficiency that the same sort of object being made atom by atom might result in; but given the enormous design margin (diamondoid is orders of magnitude stronger than steel weight for weight, for example) the result would be good enough.

There is also the point that the standardised parts might well come in a hierarchy of sizes, all the way from the size of large molecules to objects massing tons.

It's a nice idea though I'm not totally convinced by this lego style of goods construction. but along similar lines I imagine that, in OA at least, fab template libraries would contain a vast amount of alternative designs for the same product using different materials. This would be especially useful for field-fabs that exploration probes and colony projects might use. Area lower on carbon as you expected but higher on silicon? There's a near identical design using that material instead.

I imagine that another advantage of nanotech is that parts would be joined together much better than currently. The weak points in today's manufactured objects are often the joints between their parts; nanomanufacturing would result in objects where one really couldn't see the join.

Quite. It's entirely plausible that objects may be chemically bonded into one solid structure. Whether that's by having smart surfaces that expend energy to bond with other surfaces when held together or through tunnelling bots that eat material in front of them and lay down behind (a process similar to bone healing). A lot of OA projects could be quite seamless.