Jon S Berndt wrote: > > On Wed, 15 May 2002 12:52:39 -0400 > David Megginson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >I have no objection personally to doing everything in SI -- I'm > >Canadian, so I'm very used to metric. > > I wish that the U.S. had standardized on metric, and that > I had grown up on it, and that everything we use was based > on metric - that would make it easier for all of us. > Unfortunately that's not the case. I also wish that a > kilogram was always a unit of mass and was not used as a > unit of weight (force).
The users are abusing the system. There's no way to use "kilograms" for a force in an official way (because we've got Newtons for that). > Since much of our data that we build up aircraft models on > is found in English units, we'd have to spend time > converting that - and potentially introducing errors. I > sympathize with SI users - it's a generally good system. > But in the real world we've got to use what we're given - > reality is not so nicely ordered. You are right about the "potentially introducing errors". We should try to minimize that. FDMs (et al) are programmed once, so we need only one hardcoded transformation that gets verified all the time. So there's low risk of getting an error (and a very low risk for a systematic error) But as most users (assuming international audience) are used to SI (or at least are familiar with it) they should be confronted with SI. Otherwise they are likely to get the values wrong each time (or most of the time) they use them. A totally different discussion is the unit on the panel gauges. These should be in the international avionics standard - we are seeking for realism after all. CU, Christian -- The idea is to die young as late as possible. -- Ashley Montague Whoever that is/was; (c) by Douglas Adams would have been better... _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
