http://www.sailmakerssupply.com/prod_detail_list/38
http://www.sailrite.com/Ripstop-Nylon-5oz-White-60?sc=46&category=121374
http://www.seattlefabrics.com/marine.html?gclid=CK_opNWj-rgCFcqf4AodhxgA5g#Sailcloth
Nylon is quite stretchy. Polyester is louder and thicker, but with less stretch. Both will need an extra coating of silicone to make them waterproof enough for a tent. This sort-of limits their value as a backpacking material. Typically, you will add another .2-.3oz per yard with a silicone coating(unless you are extreamly carefull with aplication…even and thin,) bringing the weight up to codura or modern silnylon levels (1.2-1.3oz/yd.) Typical ripstop can also be found at .8 and .9oz per yard. Again, these need a coating. Coating Poly will typically require more weight than nylon.
The only truly waterproof material that is lighter than silnylon is cuben. Cuben is non-woven sheets (plastic film) pressed over dacron, carbon, kevlar in it's simplest form. Special adhesives and stitching are recommended for maximum seam strength. This makes construction of anything out of cuben quite expensive compared to just stitching. Joe, at Zpacks, uses a laminated material for packs that avoids this problem. Being a plastic, seam holes will elongate and perhaps fail without the glue. Glueing alone will creep slightly over time and under stress, eventually it will fail. It sort of depends on where you place joints; design is more important to longevity than with silnylon. Cuben also does not stretch much do to the webbed core. For tents/tarps it is important to design some sort of stress relief into the entire tarp to prevent wind hammer and seam stress. Cat cuts, reinforcements at guy lines and other stress points, bungie tieouts, etc are all examples of stress relieving designs/set-ups. Many people use these as smaller solo shelters to avoid the longer center seaming, or, use designs that do not stress the seams and have shorter ones. ZPacks Hexamid solo uses design to help relieve pressure on the seams as an example (.51oz/yd CF.)
Gossamer Gear pretty much gave up looking for good waterproof spinnaker after a couple years of testing and looking. Most people switched to cuben but the extreme price of that stuff sort of froze the market. Also, cuben abraids fairly easily in the lighter grades. The .78 CF stuff is OK, but you don't end up saving a whole heck of a lot. If a 9'x9' tarp is made, 9 yards of fabric is used. With .78oz/yd CF it will weigh about 9-10oz including reinforcements, seams and stitching. A 9×9 sil tarp will weigh about 13-14oz so the savings is 4-5oz. A spinnaker tarp will weigh about 12-13oz after re-coating. The Hexamid Solo (from above) weighs about 16 oz all told, my shaped silnylon tarp weighs about 18oz all told. Not enough real savings to make it worth the price of upgrading.
I can easily pack 5oz of food less for a week out, by using higher density foods. Fritoes (160C/oz) rather than mashed potatoes(100C/oz,) for example. Only for the extreme SUL'er does that stuff make sense. (Of course, some hikers will want other things to bring.) Food weight is my single biggest weight. I will carry about 16 pounds for two weeks. My pack weight for two weeks is <7 pounds.
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