Additive manufacturing starting to get interesting

[Micael]

We’ve gotten to the point where we’re starting to be able to 3D-print fairly high end and complex structures now, as in the case here with a UAV fuselage. Having the ability to mass produce certain products like these quickly in times of war is likely going to be a crucial capability to have in the near future.

Divergent and Saab Announce Delivery of Fuselages for Vehicle Integration and Flight Testing: Record-Breaking Size for a Laser Powder Bed Fusion Structure

NEWS PROVIDED BY
Divergent Technologies, Inc.
Dec 10, 2025, 03:00 ET
LINKOPING, Sweden and LOS ANGELES, Dec. 10, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Divergent Technologies, Inc. (Divergent) and Saab announced the delivery of initial fuselages for a Saab future product concept of an autonomous aircraft.

Divergent and Saab Announce Delivery of Fuselages for Vehicle Integration and Flight Testing

Record-Breaking Size for a Laser Powder Bed Fusion Structure

The fuselage, jointly designed and manufactured by Saab and Divergent, was developed and realized with no unique tooling or fixturing, instead utilizing Divergent's fully digital, software-defined manufacturing assets. The Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS™) is an end-to-end structural engineering design and manufacturing system leveraging AI-driven design, industrial-rate additive manufacturing, and universal robotic assembly to deliver structures that are faster to develop, higher performance, and lower cost than their conventionally designed and manufactured alternatives.

Watch: Saab x Divergent – Creating Hardware as Software – Intro (YouTube)

The structure will be amongst the largest laser powder bed fusion structures to ever undergo powered flight, marking both a significant technical achievement in demonstrating the absolute scale of Divergent's fixtureless assembly technology while highlighting the continued expansion of Divergent's capabilities to ever more demanding applications. The full structure stretched 15 feet in length and comprised 26 unique printed parts, each joined and bonded in the company's fixtureless robotic assembly cell.

"This collaboration with Saab highlights what becomes possible when ambitious aircraft concepts are paired with an end-to-end, software-defined manufacturing platform," said Lukas Czinger, Co-founder and CEO of Divergent. "By tightly integrating digital design, additive manufacturing, and automated assembly, our teams were able to realize a large-scale fuselage structure aligned with Saab's vision, while moving with a level of speed, flexibility, and structural integration that traditional approaches cannot match."

"Adopting Divergent's additively manufactured and digitally designed structures in this effort has given our joint team unparalleled flexibility in this development process," said Axel Bååthe, head of Saab's Rainforest. "We see digital design and advanced manufacturing as a key enabler of our collaborative success in this project."

Divergent
Divergent has created the world's first end-to-end software-hardware production system for industrial digital manufacturing – the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS™) – allowing customers to design, additively manufacture, and automatically assemble complex structures for automotive, aerospace, and defense applications. DAPS transforms the economics, speed, and scalability of defense vehicle manufacturing by optimizing designs, dematerializing structures, and eliminating upfront capex. For more information, please visit www.divergent3d.com.

Saab
Saab is a leading defence and security company with an enduring mission, to help nations keep their people and society safe. Empowered by its 27,000 talented people, Saab constantly pushes the boundaries of technology to create a safer and more sustainable world. Saab designs, manufactures and maintains advanced systems in aeronautics, weapons, command and control, sensors and underwater systems. Saab is headquartered in Sweden. It has major operations all over the world and is part of the domestic defence capability of several nations.

The Rainforest is Saab's internal startup for transformative innovation, for more information please visit https://thernfrst.io/

[Johnnie Lyle]

The question is whether we can economically maintain said capacity in peacetime such that we don’t have to reinvent it in wartime.

[Pdf27]

The question is whether we can economically maintain said capacity in peacetime such that we don’t have to reinvent it in wartime.

That's SAAB taking advantage of a capacity existing in the civilian economy. Divergent has grown out of the automotive sector, aerospace is just an exploitation opportunity for them.
That being said, I have questions about the decision to go for laser powder bed. That is and always will be a relatively boutique system. I strongly suspect I could have used an alternative route and cast the same geometries by an alternative method at lower cost and with far greater volume production capability.