Dram discussion.

[Ice Burst]

This game is great, I love it to death, but I must ask;

How much- In a measurement sense- Is a "Dram" of liquid comparatively to other liquid measurements such as gallons?

My guess is that a single dram is half a gallon. I'm sure its explained in game but I'm curious just how much damn water I'm giving to those dromad traders.

[newtant]

I always thought this game was talking about the Whisky dram.

One dram, in Whisky terms, is always equal to one glass more than I should have, and one glass less than I want to have.

Jokes aside, according to Google one dram of liquid is 1/16 of an ounce, or 0,000976563 US gallons. A sip, basically.

[Ice Burst]

Alright. Thank you for clearing that up.

A sip of apple cider is worth more than 50 sips of fresh water. Damn cider, you 'spensive

[Kode-Man]

Na man you just suck at negotiation.
I find a knife to the faces gets you lots of stuff for free.

[newtant]

One could measure 'knives to faces' in drams of steel. If one wanted to count them, that is.

[cranky corvid]

In the game, one dram of water weights 1/4 of an in-game pound, or - assuming equivalency with the modern-day measurement - 113,4 grams. An US gallon equals 3,785 litres, or kilograms of water, so an in-game dram would equal 0,02996 US gallons (or 1/33,38 of an US gallon).

[Fenix-Venix]

So waterskin can hold 6.5-7 litres?
Remembering some westerns, I saw there waterskins of the same water volume.

[Rystar]

Thank you for this insightful thread, I'm reading a book now where someone offered a dram of whiskey- and I didn't need to look the word up!

[Ryan Dorkoski]

I think 1 dram = 1/4 cup water. This is a reasonable 'sip' of liquid.

This way, a stack of 64 is an even gallon, which kind of makes sense weight-wise.

[Robert Gravel]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dram_(unit)#Unit_of_volume

Here's the empiric measurement of drams.
newtant was close with his 1/16, but it really is 1/8th of an fluid ounce.
On that, we can say indeed that a dram is about a sip.
Also, depending on the US or the Imperial system, a Waterskin roughly contains something from 227.31ml to 236.59ml, meaning that it would be something short of a full glass of water.

...Since Qud is basically the future environment of Australia and given how much drams we drink a day in this game, I'd say this "one sip" is probably thrice the IRL measurements!

[Akninirith]

In olden days, it was apparently also a rule-of-thumb approximation to equivocate a dram with a teaspoon. In other cases, the dram is, if you will pardon the beating-worthy pun, a quite fluid concept in the plethora of definitions it boasts.

Perhaps the most informative comparison of measure one can use is the relatively subjective one familiar to most Qud residents. Namely, a dram is approximately a fifth of the maximum water volume that a human(like) physiology can ingest assuming that the person in question has no present fluid deficit of which to speak.

Those with a knowledge of gastric physiology, or at least those with familiarity of the stomach's content boundaries, probably have a more specific grasp of how much this equals in practical terms.

[Diatribe]

An empty waterskin weighs 1 lb in the game. A waterskin full with 64 drams of water weighs 17 lbs, therefore, we can conclude in the game that 16 lbs of water equals 64 drams. (We will ignore that all liquids seems to have the same weight, because it's a game.)

Using the above and a handy online tool, I came up with the following measurements:

A dram of water is 0.03 of a gallon (US), 0.48 cups (US), or 6.92 cubic inches. (rounded)

In metric we get 0.1134 drams per liter.