[gurps] Re: Volume of nano-feedstock?

[Onno Meyer]

Ben replied to me:
> > I'm looking at a nanofactory starship (guess why ...) and I can't
> > find stats for the volume of nanofeed. The old UTT and the new UT
> > both give costs per pound, but not volumes ...
> 
> That's because (by my reading of Ultra-Tech pp. 91–93) the
> nanofactories transform the feedstock by mass, not by volume. They
> consume elements in the same proportions of those elements as they
> comprise the finished item.

Yes. And volume is completely meaningless if you have the feedstock
on tap. But it starts to matter if you try to build a self-contained unit 
like a starship. Last but not least, the standard feedstock could come 
with an inert "packaging material", say water to move it through pipes,
which isn't calculated in the bill because it is always recycled.

> Figure the mass of one
> item, figure its volume, and then you know the mass:volume of the
> feedstock required *for identical copies of that one item*.

No, since there might be more gaps in the finished product than in 
the feedstock. Without rules, I'll go with the 50 lbs. per cf suggested
by Peter. I just wanted to check if I'm missing any rules.

Thanks
Onno