How do you guys do calculations when there aren't any units?

[cantab]

Yeah, my guess is the odd fuel units are a leftover from the early days of KSP. Remember at one point there wasn't even separate oxidizer, just a single "liquid fuel". Changing the units now would be a nuisance, especially if Squad want to avoid throwing older saves askew.

[Laie]

Just to spell it out: fuel and oxidizer come in units of 500g (wrong! see below), or what is colloquially called a pound in my corner of the world. So the resource panel shows consumption in "pounds per second". If you will. At least it makes kinda-sorta-sense.

Edited October 15, 2014 by Laie
can as well point out my mistake.

[Red Iron Crown]

Just to spell it out: fuel and oxidizer come in units of 500g, or what is colloquially called a pound in my corner of the world. So the resource panel shows consumption in "pounds per second". If you will. At least it makes kinda-sorta-sense.

They're 5kg units AFAIK, not 500g.

[Th3F3aR]

Nevertheless you still don't even need to know how much fuel in liters is in a tank, there is a wet weight and a dry weight on the wiki and there you get your fuel in kg (T/pounds) or whatever

Also is the fuelconsumption given in kg and liters.

[Meithan]

Fuel is given in arbitrary volume units. There is no in-game evidence they're litres and good reason to think they're not.

Considering Kerbin's density is around 58 g/cm^3 (as opposed to something like 5.5 for Earth), I'm willing to accept they're liters even if that'd make fuels too dense compared to real life (and tanks not properly scaled for the volume they hold).

As has been said, knowing what the game's units for propellant volume are is not important anyway. As long as you know the mass of a unit, you can call them whatever. Propellant volume units do not interact with anything directly.

Edited October 16, 2014 by Meithan