"Onno Meyer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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. Clearly the mass:volume of elements will vary depending on what those elements are, which in turn depends on whatever it is you're asking the nanofactory to produce. There's no simple mass:volume ratio that will be true across different items, because different items require different elements in the feedstock in different proportions. Figure the mass of the finished item, and you figure the mass of the feedstock. 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*. -- \ “If you continue running Windows, your system may become | `\ unstable.” —Microsoft, Windows 95 error message | _o__) | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
