The fabricator is a piece of vital technology that can find its origins in the 3D Printers first created in the late 20th century. 3D printers were a vital part of the early expansion into space starting in the mid 21st century, allowing for easy manufacturing in orbit of a large variety of necessary equipment and components that would otherwise need to be brought from earth at exorbitant cost or produced at moon and asteroid based factories and sent out at lesser but still great cost. Almost all ships and stations had at least some printers.
However, the printers were still limited. While the problem was not as bad as in the early days of the 21st century, printers produced a lot of heat that the craft or facility had to deal with, increasing heat loads and radiator requirements greatly. They also were unable to produce some more complex components, while single material items like hull plates were easy and relatively quick to create, more complex item took significantly longer and some of the most complex items were either flat out impossible, or took up so much printer time it was actually cheaper to ship it from Luna, Ceres, or Titan. Additionally, even the relatively quick to create components took a long time compared to modern fabricators.
The fabricator solved or mitigated all of these problems. The fabricator, instead of the printer nozzles used by 3D printers, operated via electromagnetic fields moving the materials needed into position. This system operates significantly faster than the nozzles and produces far less heat due.
The introduction of the fabricator in 2120 caused a massive expansion in space development equal or even greater than the boom in the first half of the 21st century, only surpassed by the discovery of eezo, an expansion that happened while the fabricator boom was still ongoing. It also caused a number of problems. The independence fabricators gave to individual groups in space allowed for a massive rise in piracy that still plagues humanity into the 2150s, while it also led to a general proliferation of weapons both on and off earth, causing an increase in violence and militarization, both to deal with the increased violence and poorer countries arming their militaries with more powerful equipment as the cost of such armaments fall.
The discovery of the Mars Ruins further expanded human fabricator technology, replacing magnetic fields with precise mass effect fields, allowing for even quicker fabrication. This led to the cost of older fabricators to rapidly fall, with many industrial models being sold to colonization endeavors and pirate groups.
Compared to the Citadel Races, fabricators are one of the only areas where humanity technology matches the standards of the rest of the galaxy, with human fabricators even having superior heat management compared to their turian counterparts.
All Alliance vessels of corvette size and larger have fabricators, with frigates, corvettes, and dreadnoughts have small fabricators that can produce some small components and equipment, while cruisers have expansive fabricators able to constrict far larger equipment and components, even full fighters, though slowly, allowing them to, baring catastrophic damage and when deployed with a He-3 Skimmer, operate independently with only antimatter and food supplied to them (and even then their on board hydroponics facilities satay half the crews nutrition requirements,). New Francis Drake class exploration cruisers have fabricators even larger than other cruisers, allowing them to create automated Outpost packages for deployment in surveyed systems, though they carry some pre-built. Alliance carriers hold the title of containing the largest fabricators ever put on a human spacecraft, capable of producing almost everything a fleet would need and rapidly replacing fighter losses and replenishing munition stores. Carriers are commonly used to support Outpost construction and other Alliance instalions.
