FXD can be printed at the exact same size as FUD.
We've chosen not to offer this as printing time is doubled for FXD. the longer we print the more chances of a printer crash (meaning we have to throw everything away and start over).
Right now we can start a print job in the evening and clean it in the morning and start a new job right away.
I'm not sure if I understand this correctly.
Because GHQ offers cast metals and resin model kits, that aren't 3D printed, at a lower cost and higher quality, Shapeways has to drop the prices for FUD because the quality is lower than their non 3D printed parts?
By all means, I would love to see my FUD trains go from $80 to $40 because other companies sell resin trains at a lower price.
But this isn't really realistic, 3D printing is expensive and just because other technologies provide a better quality at a lower price.
That would mean Shapeways will lose money on printing FUD and if we lose money....
The pricing for FUD was created back in 2010.
We had a vendor that was willing to do a trial for us on their FUD printer, we sent them a bunch of models and they would provide a price.
To keep the pricing simple we just used the cm3 of used printing material.
This is indeed a fundamental problem, all other factors of 3D printing FUD wasn't included and while we got away with making a bit of money on most models (we are a company in the end that need to survive) we also ended up losing a lot of money on other people their models.
so yes, the repricing will fix a fundamental problem we created ourselves when launching FUD back in 2010 by creating a pricing that didn't reflect the actual costs (Which we got to learn over the years when we started printing FUD ourselves in Ehv and LIC)
Ps. if you really want it, I could ask the product team if we can change the max bounding box for FXD