[gurps] Golem volume

[Troy Guffey]

Troy Guffey wrote:
> What is the volume of a 5foot 9inch man(said to be typical golem
> height)? How different is a 6ft man? And then what are the densitys
> of the materials listed for making golems?   I'm finally interested
> in mass and possibly cost.


I got a very nice reply in the Pyramid NNTP newsgroups. I asked permission 
so I'm passing it on here:

####
Brett Evill <agemegos at gmail.com> wrote:

> What is the volume of a 5foot 9inch man(said to be typical golem height)?
Umm. 5'9" is 1.75m, so typical mass would be about 69 kg. Humans just about 
float in fresh water (muscular men sink if they breathe out), so gross 
density is almost exactly 1 kg/litre. That means that a typical 5.9" man has 
a volume of about 69 litres, which is 18.2 US fluid gallons, 15.7 US dry 
gallons, 15.2 Imperial gallons, or about 4,210 cubic inches.

> How different is a 6ft man?

Typical weight goes as height squared (taller people tend to be that much 
more slender in proportion). 75.4 kg mass / 75.4 litres volume would be 
typical. I'll leave the conversion to mediaeval units to someone else.

Materials:

=Bakelite: 1.36 kg/l

=Bronze: 8.16 kg/l

=Clay: About 1.52 for solid dry clay to 2.0 for wet clay.

=Concrete: 2.2 to 2.4 kg/l.

=Crystal: 2.64, presuming you mean quartz.

=Flesh: About 1.0, including the lungs.

=Garbage: Depends enormously on what garbage it is and how compressed it is.

=Gold: 19.4 kg/l.

=Ice: 0.92 kg/l

=Iron: 7.7 kg/l

=Ivory: 1.84 kg/l.

=Marble: 2.56 kg/l

=Metal-Matrix Composite: 2.7 kg/l

=Origami (paper)(not solid): Too hard to say. It could be nearly all air (0) 
or nearly all paper (1.2 kg/l).

=Plastic: What plastic? I think polythene can go as low as 0.9 kg/l, whereas 
your engineering plastics can get up to 2.5 kg/l.

=Porcelain: 2.4 kg/l.

=Rag: Depends how tightly they are stuffed into the cover.

=Rubber: Crude latex is about 0.92 kg/l. Vulcanised rubber gets up to 1.52 
kg/l.

=Scarecrow (clothes and straw): Depends on how tightly the straw is stuffed 
into the old clothes.

=Silver: 10.5 kg.l

=Steel: 7.7 to 7.8 kg/l, depending on the alloy.

=Stone: Common stone ranges from about 2.3 kg/l for the lightest limestone 
to 2.9 for the denser types of basalt. Ores of heavy metals such as galena 
and wolframite, or even haematite (iron ore) can be even more.

=Tar: 1.15 kg/l

=Titanium: 4.54 kg/l.

=Wax: Paraffin wax about 0.9 kg/l. Beeswax 0.97 kg/l.

=Wood: Varies from about 0.2 kg/l for dry balsa to 1.28 kg/l for dry lignum 
vitae.

Attribution: http://www.reade.com/Particle_Briefings/spec_gra2.html

####

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Troy Guffey
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