A spacecraft weighing two tons fires its engine in a straight line for five seconds. It uses up 100 pounds of fuel, and the engine is rated to exert 500 pounds of force. What is the delta V, in miles per hour?
I can do that calculation in metric easy peasy, because all the SI units convert at a 1:1 ratio, and I can easily convert between the different scales. Can you do the math in Imperial without looking up the conversion factors?
Nope, but nobody does calculations like that in imperial either. All science is done in metric, then converted to imperial at the end if that’s needed.
Yeah, the US system is inconvenient with feet and inches and ounces and ounces and pounds. But for the most part it’s fine right up until you start doing physics or engineering at which point you want to strangle your country folk until they start using metric. But noooooooo all the tradesfolk want their drawings in customary despite the fact that our products are in metric and it’s just better.
A spacecraft weighing two tons fires its engine in a straight line for five seconds. It uses up 100 pounds of fuel, and the engine is rated to exert 500 pounds of force. What is the delta V, in miles per hour?
I can do that calculation in metric easy peasy, because all the SI units convert at a 1:1 ratio, and I can easily convert between the different scales. Can you do the math in Imperial without looking up the conversion factors?
Nope, but nobody does calculations like that in imperial either. All science is done in metric, then converted to imperial at the end if that’s needed.
And aerospace is in metric in the US ever since the Mars crash
Yeah, the US system is inconvenient with feet and inches and ounces and ounces and pounds. But for the most part it’s fine right up until you start doing physics or engineering at which point you want to strangle your country folk until they start using metric. But noooooooo all the tradesfolk want their drawings in customary despite the fact that our products are in metric and it’s just better.
Well you would also have to look up the conversion factor for tons, pounds, and miles, to SI units, so I dunno what you’re on about.
My chevy uses SI displacements and all that. Roll back 70 years and, sure, they used imperial displacments and volumes.
So what? The time to do the math is a trivial portion of the investment, and only done to convert units for consumer volume and for publicity.
Most uses are more simple, like putting 1 oz of 2-4,D in a gallon with a nice glop of chemsurf.
And the history of math, counting, and measurement is endless and sublime, they got shit done with primitive tools and measures.