[gurps] Tinker's Starship?

[Wyrm]

Onno Meyer wrote:
>> Don't you mean low volume not low mass? The ship has a stored mass of 
>> raw material, making low mass objects is pointless as the total mass of 
>> the ship will not change. Making low volume objects on the other hand 
>> will increase the number of goods one has in inventory at planet fall.
> 
> I thought of low mass and didn't really consider volume. 
> 
> The ship takes off with a certain mass of raw materials and there is no way
> to get more without landing/lighters/skimming. Probably the mass comes in
> relatively high-density forms, from metal bars to plastic pellets. 
> 
> The manufactured products are probably a higher volume, but if nothing 
> else works the ship can manufacture a cargo bubble. For most stardrive 
> rules in GURPS, mass and not volume is the limiting factor.
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Exactly, but mass is not lost by the creation of products in this case. 
A nano factory should produce no waste to dump out of the side of the 
ship. Thus (using a current example) making laptop computers a more 
profitable proposition than making desktop computers. As you will have 
more laptops stored in the same amount of cargo space.

Of course this does not take into account the time to produce a given 
product. Using travel time for building slow (profitable) products will 
make your layovers shorter. More trips, more profit.

The "miniaturization" problems and expenses that makes building laptop 
components more expensive for us should be lost do to nano automated 
assembly.