The time warp we have, vice the time warp we would expect

[Birdco_Space]

Why does Squad inflict upon us the coldly logical mathematical progression of timewarps (x5, x10, x50,x100, x1000, x10000), when a much more natural and humanistic progression is available?  (x6 (1/10 min per second), x30 (1/2 min per second), x60 (1 min per second), x 360 (1 hour per second), x2160 (1 kerbal day per second), and x15120 (1 kerbal week per second)).  That would make it so much easer to anticipate how many seconds I can hold a time warp before I send Jeb catapulting past his maneuver nodes.

 

  I'm also waiting for a mod that shows my masses in slugs (or pounds mass), forces in pounds force, temps in degrees Fahrenheit and distances in miles.  I got my engineering degree in the U.S., and all these conversions from metric into the English units I understand makes my head hurt.

 

Spoiler

Seriously, having got my engineering degree in the U.S., I am sometimes amazed on what we accomplished with the units we used, and I frequently screwed up my time conversions to seconds.  Though I may be a bit of a dinosaur, as I had a course on vacuum tubes when I went to college.  However, I still think thermodynamics is taught in English units.  

  

[Magzimum]

When calculating the real-time spent on time-warp is worth your time, you're simply not warping fast enough.

[tomf]

Also what kind of crazy fool doesn't play with kerbal alarm clock?

[Birdco_Space]

33 minutes ago, tomf said:

Also what kind of crazy fool doesn't play with kerbal alarm clock?

KAC only works when you remember to set alarms (or have the mod set them for you).

+1 Vote for KAC being stock.

[Nathair]

More familiar maybe, more natural though? I say we should just (finally!) switch the planet to using decimal time and then KSP's warp will blend seamlessly in.

 

4 hours ago, Birdco_Space said:

  I'm also waiting for a mod that shows my masses in slugs (or pounds mass), forces in pounds force, temps in degrees Fahrenheit and distances in miles.  I got my engineering degree in the U.S., and all these conversions from metric into the English units I understand makes my head hurt.

 

Edited February 8, 2017 by Nathair

[Hotaru]

4 hours ago, Birdco_Space said:

  I'm also waiting for a mod that shows my masses in slugs (or pounds mass), forces in pounds force, temps in degrees Fahrenheit and distances in miles.  I got my engineering degree in the U.S., and all these conversions from metric into the English units I understand makes my head hurt.

 

I think the mod you're after is Speed Unit Changer. Doesn't touch mass, force, or temperature, unfortunately, but can change altitudes and speeds to a variety of different units. Good for people like me who think about space speeds in meters per second, car speeds in miles per hour, and plane speeds in knots.

[regex]

Regarding timewearp, I'd much rather someone at Squad took a good, long look at the timewarp limits around every body and realize just how bad some of those limits are. Why am I not allowed to timewarp at 100,000x when focused on a craft in a stable 75x75km orbit around Kerbin? Why do I have to go to the Tracking Station for that? Ridiculous.

Edited February 8, 2017 by regex

[Sharpy]

10 hours ago, Birdco_Space said:

 I got my engineering degree in the U.S., and all these conversions from metric into the English units I understand makes my head hurt.

 

Shame on your university. If you want to participate in the international scientific/engineering community, you must unlearn these silly units instead of seeking ways to bypass the world standard.

[Ohm is Futile]

11 hours ago, tomf said:

Also what kind of crazy fool doesn't play with kerbal alarm clock?

I don't. I also don't have any intelligent excuse for it beyond being a minimalist at heart and not *really* needing it. 

[Guest]

On 2/8/2017 at 7:49 AM, Birdco_Space said:

I'm also waiting for a mod that shows my masses in slugs (or pounds mass), forces in pounds force, temps in degrees Fahrenheit and distances in miles.  I got my engineering degree in the U.S., and all these conversions from metric into the English units I understand makes my head hurt.

NO.

#MetricMasterRace

#ImperialPeasants

Edited February 9, 2017 by Guest

[Leafbaron]

As an American, naturally I love the units of my measurement system. Other than that there is no argument for it. Metric is vastly easier. there are 1000 mm in a meter. there is 1000 m in a kilometer, etc. 1000 mL in a liter. versus "standard" there are 16 measurements in an inch and 12 inches in a foot and arbitrarily  5280 feet in a mile. 128 oz to a gallon etc...... nothing about it is streamlined. 

[The_Rocketeer]

21 minutes ago, Leafbaron said:

As an American, naturally I love the units of my measurement system. Other than that there is no argument for it. Metric is vastly easier. there are 1000 mm in a meter. there is 1000 m in a kilometer, etc. 1000 mL in a liter. versus "standard" there are 16 measurements in an inch and 12 inches in a foot and arbitrarily  5280 feet in a mile. 128 oz to a gallon etc...... nothing about it is streamlined. 

Except if you don't have a calibrated measure, in which case approximating measurements is a lot easier with imperial units (which is what the English call 'English units'). This is, after all, why weights and measures were invented to start with, not for perfect mathematical accuracy but so that people could understand the size or scale of what someone else was talking about. Knowing an inch is about the length of the last bone in your thumb, or that a yard is a good pace's distance, or a league is a good hour's march in open country, has it's place, which is why I as a Brit know my imperial weights and measures despite as a European having been schooled in the metric system. Personally I tend to use metric for working out and imperial for conversation, tho I'll admit that does confuse the hell out of my wife.

Edit:

Actually there are exceptions here. Temperature, for example, I have simply never understood how a system so utterly arbitrary as Fahrenheit managed to become so prolific. In that at least I consistently prefer Celcius, or at a push Kelvin.

Edited February 8, 2017 by The_Rocketeer

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

6 hours ago, regex said:

Regarding timewearp, I'd much rather someone at Squad took a good, long look at the timewarp limits around every body and realize just how bad some of those limits are. Why am I not allowed to timewarp at 100,000x when focused on a craft in a stable 75x75km orbit around Kerbin? Why do I have to go to the Tracking Station for that? Ridiculous.

Along the same lines, why are we able to timewarp straight into a mountain on the Mun? Timewarp gets enabled at 5000 metres but the highest peaks are above 7000 (and even on an equatorial orbit you're not really safe until you hit 6000 metres.)

[FancyMouse]

And we have

* Gilly under 8km

* Jool under 2Mm after aerobrake (is that fixed in the most recent version, btw?)

[HebaruSan]

14 hours ago, Birdco_Space said:

  I'm also waiting for a mod that shows my masses in slugs (or pounds mass), forces in pounds force, temps in degrees Fahrenheit and distances in miles.  I got my engineering degree in the U.S., and all these conversions from metric into the English units I understand makes my head hurt.

Sadly, by the time I learned how to use Github, I was no longer able to compile this patched KER:

(Yes, "hhd" stands for hogsheads.)

[stibbons]

1 hour ago, The_Rocketeer said:

Except if you don't have a calibrated measure, in which case approximating measurements is a lot easier with imperial units

Only if you don't practice. I neither know nor care how many arbitrary knucklebones are in a farthing, or whatever random lengths folk cooked up over the centuries.

[septemberWaves]

14 hours ago, Birdco_Space said:

I got my engineering degree in the U.S., and all these conversions from metric into the English units I understand makes my head hurt.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but England uses the metric system.

Also, the official definitions of metric measurements are based on physical objects and are in the process of being defined as physical absolutes (e.g. the silicon sphere that's being made to define the mass of a kilogram as the mass of an exact number of silicon atoms), whilst the imperial measurements are officially defined as specific fractions of their metric counterparts.

Edited February 9, 2017 by eloquentJane

[The_Rocketeer]

34 minutes ago, stibbons said:

Only if you don't practice. I neither know nor care how many arbitrary knucklebones are in a farthing, or whatever random lengths folk cooked up over the centuries.

With the greatest of respect, your nonchalant ignorance is hardly a virtue. Imperial units are (generally) neither arbitrary nor random, they are based on everyday things that anybody could easily understand and compare. A 'knucklebone' (inch) is a very convenient measure that one carries with them absolutely everywhere they go, which can be readily communicated to someone else and give a reasonably accurate description of length or size.

You benefit from living in an era and culture where precise calibration of weights, lengths and volumes is readily available in the form of tape-measures, digital scales and measuring jugs. In former times, and probably in future times, these things are not so available. Remove them and the metric system immediately collapses, but master the traditional alternative - English/imperial measures - and you have a universal system of proven worth that will last you a lifetime.

Trusting in the metric system doubtless has engineering advantages and blah blah, but they are heavily dependent on the survival of modern culture. Meanwhile, traditional human-based systems may go out of fashion, but they do not go out of date.

[stibbons]

Again, it's only important if you let it be. Once you've actually spent some time estimating metric measurements, then you're good at them, and don't need to care how long your knuckle is any more.

[Nathair]

6 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

With the greatest of respect, your nonchalant ignorance is hardly a virtue. Imperial units are (generally) neither arbitrary nor random, they are based on everyday things that anybody could easily understand and compare. A 'knucklebone' (inch) is a very convenient measure that one carries with them absolutely everywhere they go, which can be readily communicated to someone else and give a reasonably accurate description of length or size.

You benefit from living in an era and culture where precise calibration of weights, lengths and volumes is readily available in the form of tape-measures, digital scales and measuring jugs. In former times, and probably in future times, these things are not so available. Remove them and the metric system immediately collapses, but master the traditional alternative - English/imperial measures - and you have a universal system of proven worth that will last you a lifetime.

Trusting in the metric system doubtless has engineering advantages and blah blah, but they are heavily dependent on the survival of modern culture. Meanwhile, traditional human-based systems may go out of fashion, but they do not go out of date.

That's folksy but I have my doubts. People use what they learn as kids, that becomes comfortable. There is nothing inherently easier or more obvious about weighing 120 pounds rather than 8 1/2 stone or 54 kilos. Nothing especially obvious about a mile or a kilometre or a nautical mile, no inherent bonus to yards over metres, no clear cut winner for the one inch is the length of a thumb joint compared to two centimetres is the width of a finger. The only place I see a clear and obvious winner is in water freezing at 0 and boiling at 100 vs whatever ridiculous numbers we used to use in Frankenheight.

And I say all this as someone who was brought up in Imperial units and lived through metrification.

[HebaruSan]

I suspect that the US lags behind in metric adoption because too many established industries would have to switch over at once. It's one thing to put up all new signs across 4 million miles of roads, but it's another thing to get all the farms, lumberyards, machine shops, etc. to agree to change the units in which they do daily business. And those folks generally won't benefit from metric's advantages; if you sell wood by inches of width and feet of length, you're never going to need to convert those measurements to miles. If you sell cattle feed by the short ton, it would serve no purpose beyond idle curiosity to calculate what those values are in ounces. In most instances, a particular market picks one unit and sticks to it, so ease of convertibility is irrelevant.

[regex]

I'm doing my best to thoroughly confuse my child by mixing unit systems as much as possible. Once I find out what they're teaching at school I'll exclusively use the other at home.

[Nathair]

1 hour ago, HebaruSan said:

I suspect that the US lags behind in metric adoption because too many established industries would have to switch over at once. It's one thing to put up all new signs across 4 million miles of roads, but it's another thing to get all the farms, lumberyards, machine shops, etc. to agree to change the units in which they do daily business

Do you not think there were lumberyards, machine shops or highways in other countries when they switched?

I think the major difference is in America's particular flavour of union. A tradition of the importance of state's rights makes it difficult for federally mandating something like national metrification and doing it one state at a time would be pretty awkward. There's also a national trend towards patriotism<->tradition (founding fathers etc.) that resists "cultural" changes like this.  

...and so the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost.

52 minutes ago, regex said:

I'm doing my best to thoroughly confuse my child by mixing unit systems as much as possible. Once I find out what they're teaching at school I'll exclusively use the other at home.

I like to mix different systems into the same topic. "We have to stop off at the store and grab three litres of milk and a pound of coffee beans." Really keep them on their toes.

Edited February 9, 2017 by Nathair
Splelign

[boccelounge]

8 hours ago, Leafbaron said:

As an American, naturally I love the units of my measurement system. Other than that there is no argument for it. Metric is vastly easier.

(bold emphasis added)

*Raises hand*

Well... yeah... but... I appreciate your statement, and generally all the arguments for the metric system here are sound, but I make one exception (well, for me, it's a big exception):

I am a master carpenter and fabricator.

Imperial units-- that is, fractional-based units rather than decimal-based units-- are far easier and more efficient to use when measuring and calculating lengths, loads, and volumes manually-- that is, on-the-fly, without software.

As a simplified example, if I needed to fabricate a piece that is exactly 1/3 of [something] that is 2' 5-1/4", I can easily reduce the fractions and come up with 9-3/4".  (This is a very simple example; usually I'm working in much smaller variances (/32, /64), but you get the point.)

I can do this quickly-- almost automatically, given decades of using my brain in this way.  But If I had to calculate 1/3 of 70cm...  Sure, I can quickly divide 70 by 3, but I don't have a tape measure, miter gauge, or caliper with 0.000001cm precision (nor does any human have the eyesight to read such a scale).

Other than that, I agree wholeheartedly with your notion that Americans should (probably, definitely) get on metric.  Just wanted to mention that there are arguments and applications that favor Imperial/fractional-based measurement.

Edited February 9, 2017 by boccelounge

[Rhomphaia]

8 hours ago, eloquentJane said:

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but England uses the metric system.

Except for the roads and the beer.