This WAS a kickstarter project, I was involved as the technician in the shadows. Big enough for some lost hair, too small to “china” it.
So it is not mutually exclusive.
I did not get rich on it, the crimping tool gave me blisters, but the experience gained was priceless.
Kickstarter is great when your marketing skills suck (or you just don’t trust them) and/or you want to assess the potential demand before investing the money and time. This is not mutually exclusive with garage shop manufacture; actually, this allows you aiming for lower threshold and gives you better chance of a successful campaign. (But then you can be more successful than expected and the price is your sanity.)
Excellent. I agree that there is a middle ground. I guess the problem is people $eeing dollar $igns whenever they have a bright idea.
And to another criticism that if you don’t kickstarter it, nobody will know about it… I say that is wack as well. There is a HUGE open source movement out there. I use code from GitHub that isn’t mine ALL THE TIME. And there’s Thingiverse and tons and tons of open source places to post your wares.
For example this cockpit thing could be created as a bunch of STLs and then released into the wild among much fanfare and then it is known and disseminated. Why not? Why $$$? I see a few viable alternatives to capitalism to achieve the same end.
If making “hundreds” of an identical product isn’t a big enough number to count as “mass production” then how does the B-32 dominator aircraft fit the bill? All told, only [118][1] of those were ever built.
Or, you know, give a shit and employ your fellow citizens? Why is cost always the only consideration, and never ethics, environmental externalities, or a desire to contribute to your community?
Hey, I’m not justifying it, I’m just explaining the phenomenon. I’d love it if things could be produced in the Us and whenever I can, I try to do that. But most of the world has become addicted to cheap crap from China, and getting them to buy stuff made with fair-wage labor and in environmentally sustainable conditions isn’t easy, especially when the price difference is so high. And that’s really what it comes down to - adding an extra dollar to production cost ends up adding $5 or more to retail price. So little differences in production make a big difference at retail.
Your examples of Chinese factories for hire and the video game market fall within the extremes of scale I mentioned. Such items are still mass produced because they are produced en masse.
Who in the hell is honestly going to buy a lifesize cardboard jet fighter cockpit? This is something the size of a large home appliance, but with the utility of a novelty item. Who is honestly going to find this useful enough to bother with? Millions of people? No, surely not. Hundreds of thousands? Still no. Thousands? Maybe, in the long run. Mere hundreds, or even only dozens? Most likely.
It’s simply not mass production if you only sell 2,581 of the damn things. You couldn’t even call a rare luxury car or other highly expensive niche market durable good “mass produced” if the maker produces and sells so few units.
Sure, the flatpack cardboard construction that this item is based on makes it easy to produce. But that merely means it is a “standardized good”, not a mass produced one.
It could be mass produced, likely without any substantial changes to the production method at all other than scaling the operation up, but that’s irrelevant. The low demand does result in a supply that meets the requirements of scale to be mass production.
And yet the example you provided as an illustration of what “real” mass production looks like is of an assembly line for an aircraft model of which only 300 were ever ordered and only 118 were actually built.
If you’re going to make up some arbitrary cutoff for what counts as “mass production” then at least try to be consistent about it.
x-plane.org has just shy of 300,000 people registered, of which at any time about 2,000 are online.
I’d get one of these if (1) I had time to indulge and (2) somewhere to put it and (3) X-Plane actually delivered - which it does very nearly. Oh and (4) if I had any time.
The stuff these sim creators are putting out now is incredible. Just two or three years ahead of computational power.
I love flying, flightsims are great. I just have no time for them. I’m pretty sure if you poked me into a helicopter I’d be able to fly it within 10 minutes.
