I’ve been watching the news about 3D printers for a while, and one of the reasons is the very cool ability in Galactic Civilizations III that allows you to print your ship designs with a 3D printer.  Most people think 3D printers aren’t affordable at least for the general consumer, and in most cases they are exactly right.  However, within the next year we should be seeing several consumer-level 3D printers available for just a few hundred dollars or less.

Image via @draginol:

I borrowed that image from Brad’s Twitter feed of a GalCiv 3 ship design printed in a 3D printer.  That’s just a basic print, but the premise of something like this is exciting.

As mentioned above, there’s some affordable 3D printers headed our way soon. 

Here’s a couple I’ve been reading about.

• The Micro from M3D: Pre-orders start at $349
• New Matter MOD-t: Pre-orders starting at $249

With more people using crowdfunding to get their 3D printers to market, and other companies investing in them as well, I think we’ll see a big market for these in the near future.