Selective Laser Sintering and Mistborn meth labs

[Walin he/him]

So this title is pretty clickbaity, but also a great description of what I'm trying to say. Kind of like "Net Neutrality" describes the topic, but is misleading on the surface.

When those Scadrians develop rapid prototyping machines, they're going to invent selective laser sintering. Since the powder used in this process doesn't have to have to be as good for Allomantic ratios, and it's powder already I think that street Allomantic suppliers may try these instead of proper Allomantic flakes. Much like people nowadays buy cold medicine and try to isolate the active chemical which can be changed into the active ingredient for meth (very bad idea as it involves high temps and pressures, which is why meth labs explode), people will steal SLS powder from factories, and try to bake out the polymer binding out of it, and sell the left over "metal" (which includes metal and some waste) on the down low.

This comes from me being in Engineering and learning about rapid prototyping right now. Not a super serious theory, so I'm putting a /w on it. (Since /s stands for "The preceding text was sarcastic," I made /w, which means "The preceding text was one of Walin's favorite type of theory, one that is partly a joke and partly a serious thought")

[Fourth Of The Night]

Eh, I don't know that Allomancy or Allomantic Metals will be outlawed, so would there really be the need for this sort of thing? People making Meth from cold medicine happens because the reactants to directly make Meth are highly regulated and Meth itself is banned.

[Kingsdaughter613 she/her]

I think people would do this because certain metals are expensive and hard to come by. So they use this to get the metals cheap, and then sell them to those who can’t afford better. Of course, sometimes you get a bad blend...

[SilverTiger she/her]

Gold and electrum are both pretty expensive, and the Allomantic alloys might be expensive just because they're so precise in the metal percentage, and Allomancers need them. Same goes for Feruchemists, who would also need those expensive metals.

[Chaos he/him]

I read "Selective Laser Sintering" and thought this was a spam post until I read the second half