One of the great secrets, or at least unspoken limits of nanotechnology is that even very sophisticated nanotech assemblers can only work with the materials that are available to them. So even free roaming assemblers, not allowed under the rules of nanotech deployment in the Highlands, can only use available materials to assemble an object. Putting a swarm of assemblers on a table made of tin with a plan for a wrench would get you a very well made, and useless, tin wrench. If the plan was for a radio you would get either nothing or a box of tin which did nothing, even though it might consist of a collection of tin parts which would make up a very detailed model of a radio.
It's quite true that a swarm or proper nanotech minifactory provided with a source of organic chemicals, such as a wood table (or its parts) could produce a vast array of chemical compounds, limited only by the amount of trace materials available in the sample. So as well as a wooden wrench, with the correct program of chemical compounds, acids or solvents or adhesives or varieties of nerve gas could be created, or even objects made of plastic. The aforementioned radio would still be beyond the capability of the mini-fact.
So at TL A, while nanotechnology has made mass production of many items obsolete, there are still many things which can best be made by a larger centralized factory utilizing the same nanotechnology but having access to many more elemental constituents of production.
For purposes of interplanetary trade a large amount of shipping will consist of commodities, especially elemental materials and organic feed stocks. Of course nanotech processing plants can more easily separate particular elements from their ores than conventional smelting methods.
Construction plans have to contain specific feedstock requirements to be fed to the nanotech device to permit the assembly of the required product. In some case it would be possible to select from a variety of feedstock types for a specific device. For example device cases made of different materials might be interchangeable without effecting the function of the device. It might be equally as possible to use gold or copper or even platinum for wiring or different kinds of materials as insulation materials. Depending on the materials available the same assemblers might produce two very different but equivalent devices from the same plans.
No nanotech factory will ever be able to produce any object which is larger than its available feedstock. Authorized minifacts allow a certain amount of the the air itself to be used without violating the first rule of nanotechnology use which requires that an externally enforceable material limit be designed in. This means that in fact an object slightly more massive than the available feedstock is possible, provided the mass consists of additional oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen (from suspended water vapor,) or gas trace products.
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