There are many battlegrounds between magic and technology. On the battlefield of healing, technology is severely disadvantaged. The disadvantage is in the fact that if you want to heal yourself you have to keep healing salves on you. This is understandable but can also be inconvenient for some who may be in some rough areas like deep caverns. The idea of packing enough salves to last the whole trip is just stupendous. How is an adventurer supposed to loot a crypt if he is stockpiled with healing salves. This is a problem that is unheard of to mages, their biggest issue is they may have to stop and wait a few minutes until they are ready to heal again. This is why I would suggest to bring balance to the battle between magic and technology via stacking salves. If salves were stackable such as gold, bullets, fuel, or arrows then it would be easy to collect the needed amount for a long journey without the difficulties of space conservation. Now I ask how difficult would it be to accomplish such a mission?
Its true that being able to stack salves and any other potion would be ideal, however I always saw it as a challenge. I wouldn't just wander into a dungeon with a bag full of salves I'd put more time into the planning phase of my battles and exploration.
The character that pursues even a layman's grasp in the Herbology discipline can make five slots worth of salve from four slots worth of components. I believe this carries with it a weight economy in addition to the obvious space economy. This may be only less inconvenient than not having to carry any item at all, but it doesn't seem to skew the balance of the game. [EDIT - grammar]
If one was going to do stacking salves, I would set a low cap to the stacks (ie: four or five per stack), to keep from being too unbalanced...
Jayna's full inventory of herb components was always more than enough in terms of healing in my games, so I never did really need to worry about healing while playing a techie. But if you want stacked salves, they're already in the game. They're called bandages.
Stacking Salves is a good idea. I solved the problem in Arcanum 1 by hacking into the bandages proto and changing its number per package from 10 to 100. Pretty much equalized the two healing philosophies for me.
I figured so. It would be nice though, especially for selling them when you make them in mass quantities. Did that in the Vormantown module. I went through the woods and collected all the ingredients then made too much to carry back. Took several trips.