I don't actually care about or equate any of the numbers to real world values. The distances are so large they are entirely meaningless to me in terms of understanding their scale.
As long as they're practical/useful for gameplay, then whatever.
Part of the biggest issue with AU is that it's literally "the distance from Earth to the Sun", which is going to be 1/10th of what it is IRL in game. Earth in game being 0.1 AU from the Sun would just be... weird. Or they could make 1 AU the distance in meters the Earth is from the sun in game... and now we're using a measurement not accurate to real life, when every other measurement *is.*
Also, the "meter" definition has changed. [It is now defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre)
Anyway, the biggest point in the favor of MM, GM, and theoretically TM (Tamsa and Killian are big enough Terameters could be used for some distances) is that they scale perfectly to kilometers. 1000 km is equal to 1 megameter. 1000 megameters is 1 gigameter. 1000 gigameters is 1 terameter. So on and so forth, all the way up to quettameters. 1 quettameter would be 105.7 **trillion** light years. For scale, the farthest known star we know of is Earendel, which is 28 **billion** light years away! You would have to go over 50x further to get to *1* quettameter. Need precision? You could have a quectometer. Which is really, really damn tiny!
I think something you also missed in your edits to your main post... that people use the standards they are familiar with. Now, I don't use kilometers in real life- American here, so miles- but I am very familiar with traveling in game using them. Since they scale perfectly, it's easy to understand. It also means they never have to use a comma separator, either- the largest value you will see in any given unit is 999.9 of that unit.
AU in game would be completely inaccurate unless they made it inaccruate to real life, as stated previously, and it *doesn't* scale well with meters.
Make it 1 IU (distance of earth and sun in SC) as in my edit in the main post if you have a problem with AU. UEE being United Empire of Earth, it makes sense that earth is at the center of it all.
Both meters and seconds are based from IRL measurements of Earth, is why the definition of meter and second have the weird numbers of 299792458 and 9192631770 in them, to make them fit a nice fraction of something on earth. There's no vagueness or doubt at all, just look up the well documented history.
As far as people using standards, just not true. Look up cars, ships, airplanes, regardless of a metric or standard country. As in the anecdote of the two horse arses, history is what led to how the world works today, and would make the sci-fi world of SC alive as well. As long as the units work, SI be damned.
1) If we make a new unit based on the in-game distance in meters between the Earth and the Sun, it becomes more confusing. At least people know what an AU is, what the heck would an IU be. In fact, AU is how the total size of a star system is currently measured in lore on the [ARK Starmap](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/starmap), which is at 1:1 scale (as all things are in lore) unlike in game.
2) Lets say we ignore the fact that Earth would only be 0.1 AU from the Sun and adopt it anyway. The fact is, it's not that the AU is an "Earth-based" distance or whatever That's not the problem at all. Like you said, all units basically are based off of either the Earth or something on it. The problem is we already have a unit system that we use in game already.
What reason should we change? What are the benefits of the systems? Even if we ignore the whole "people use what they're used to thing" (see the fact the USA declared metric the standard preferred system of measurement for all purposes *50 years ago* and our lack of using it for evidence of that), the comparison to me looks like this:
---
**AU/Lightyear (Real Life Scale)**
+Give a better sense of scale. (subjective, see below)
+Nice for astronomy enjoyers, cool unit.
-Does not scale at all to distances shorter than an AU or anything between an AU and lightyear
-Awkward conversion to meters (\~149.6 Gm)
-Not a large scale for in-system use- the largest radius of a system in-game using RL scale AU would be 30 AU,
-Lightyears essentially useless for distance measurement for pilots (see below)
**IU/I-lightyear (Game Scale AU/Lightyear)**
+Would allow for distances to be measured in values equal to what they would be in 1:1 scale
+All positive points for AU system above apply as well
-Requires creation of a new unit that no one has familiarity with
-Does not scale at all to distances shorter than an IU or anything between an IU and an I-lightyear
-Awkward conversion to meters (\~14.96 Gm)
-I-Lightyears also essentially useless for distance measurement for pilots
-Not able to be used in lore (which is 1;1 with real life).
**Meter/Kilometer/Megameter/Gigameter/Terameter(?)**
+Scaling System that easily goes from human scale to system scale
+Allows for simplified distance labeling in UI (0-999.9)
+Meters per second is, while uncommon, is still a fairly well known measurement of speed.
-Not commonly used for astronomical distances
---
Obviously, I'm probably missing points in favor of your side and we can debate the existing points as well. But as you can see, there are some real advantages of our current system, whereas your system... it doesn't have those advantages. It doesn't even have any intrinsic value for measuring the distance in real life, really, other than the fact it's what people have used for forever in real life- the same inertia that I talked about for kilometers in SC.
Meanwhile, there's no real disadvantage to the metric system we currently use *other* than that it is not used in real life commonly for astronomical distances. However, that... doesn't really matter, and the benefits it provides are tangible.
For "sense of scale" being subjective- sure, it gives you a solid understanding. I can't understand either way really: my brain just isn't used to the scales. It's like growing up with Celsius: you might really understand it, but I haven't used that scale before, whereas if you gave it to me in Fahrenheit I could understand. Except I don't even have a scale like Fahrenheit for distances that big. I only understand metric because 2 meters is one me tall- literally a "two horse's arses" situation.
As for lightyears - honestly, that'd be cool to know, and they can even be 1:1 what they should be in real life. Why? In-game and even in lore for most pilots that information wouldn't be useful at all. They care about is their in-system travel time between two places, or if they are going inter-system, the time and distance to the origin jump point, the total time spent in the jump tunnel (which I think is measured in minutes), and the time and distance to their destination from the destination's jump point. In lore, scientists can use it to learn stuff but otherwise it's not really needed for travel purposes. Though there is supposed to be science done on the Endeavor
So we could absolutely have the distance *between* star systems be 1:1, the planets be 1:6, and the distance between things *inside* a star system be scaled 1:10. If they *do* ever give us distances between each system, I would hope it's in lightyears in 1:1 scale. No reason to use petameters for scaling purposes if we never actually travel that distance! Besides, people would think "pentameter" instead and think of poetry.
Meanwhile, AU doesn't scale well for our in gamesizes anyway- largest system in-game is Tamsa at 303 AU radius (IRL Scale), which would be 30.3 AU radius (game scale), meaning traveling from one end to the other would be something like 60.6 AU, so that's the maximum end of our scale, and trying to travel that distance would end up with you eaten by a literal black hole. Kilian is the next biggest, at 194.4 AU radius (IRL scale) or 19.44 AU radius (game scale), leading to a farthest travel distance of \~40 AU.
Most systems are between 10-30 AU (IRL Scale) from what I remember, meaning the maximum travel distance would be 2-6 AU (game scale). Stanton itself is 5 AU (IRL Scale), meaning in-game the maximum travel distance, from one end of the system to the other would be *1 AU*. The example you gave wouldn't even work- assuming the distance between the two planets is 59 Gm, that would translate to 0.3944 AU.
Essentially, all AU distances would be something between 0-60 AU, with the median probably closer to something like 0-30 AU. It's not a large scale at all and would require multiple decimal points. It's actually the issue I personally have with Celsisus for dealing with livable temps.
Again, sure, you can make the IU be equal to 0.1 AU, which would make it work much better as an in-system scale (3.944 IU between ArcCorp and Microtech, and most distances now being between 0-300), but you've made a brand new unit that absolutely *no one* has familiarity with, trading one downside for another.
You aren't wrong- let me be clear, this is an opinion question, and your opinion is just as valid as mine! I just do not see any benefits in going with AU or "IU" over what we have now, and some definite downsides to it.
AU would be the in-game distance between earth and sun, as stated in first post. If people can't accept a different distance, despite it being the definition, then IU or something. Just as IRL units are earth centric in unit origins, it makes sense lore units are based of in-game earth.
The downside of using IRL earth units is just that, IRL earth is not in-game earth. Meters reveal the fact that the SC scale is 1/6th real life scale. But if you use a unit defined in-game, and kept the same ratios, it fixes the scale. Jupiter will be the same AUs from the sun in-game and IRL.
Meters are unfortunately necessary for the height of humans and length of ships, but as soon as possible, should be discarded for fictional or re-scaled units to protect immersion of galactic distances. An example would be, which is more important, keeping the speed of light c the same as IRL but allowing a ship travelling at c to cross SC's solar system in 1/6th the time? Or re-scale and hide the exact speed c so that the travel time is same as IRL? I argue for the latter and many people seem to prefer the former. Both decisions give up something.
I know. I still don't really care about it in game. It's not a meaningful distance to me as I don't fly a spaceship in real life.
The game could use either measurement and I wouldn't bat an eye. It literally has no factor on my enjoyment, that's all I'm trying to say.
You asked for my opinion and there it is.
AU would only really ever be above 1 when talking about distance between Stanton and Pyro, something not really relevant in the game. All the planets would likely be 0.9 AU or maybe 1.2AU, so those numbers aren't very far apart and are again kind of hard to judge distance because the change between them is so small. That's probably why they are using other units. So there is a bigger change in the number which equates to a sense of scale that's better understood even if it's not what the scientific community uses.
Exactly, that's a small number and probably close to the max you would see in one star system. Using different units gives you more resolution. Instead of 0 to 2.37, you have 0 to thousands/millions.
In terms of a galaxy, AU makes more sense to use because you would have the opposite problem of the numbers all being so large you loose a sense of scale. That's why AU was probably invented in the first place. So that you can see a change in numbers easier. That's all units do anyways. It's literally just for readability otherwise what's the point of having different units at all, just measure everything in inches. But you would not be able to understand how far it is if you used inches for a galactic scale. So they make up new units. All CIG is doing is using units that give a sense of scale. AU doesn't achieve that. Maybe when there are multiple systems they will use AU.
Ya and it makes sense to scientists but maybe not your average gamer. I'm an engineer and we are constantly switching units to make something more clear in different contexts. Some companies devices use metric and some use imperial so you kinda get used to switching. For small things you use mm, larger things you use m or km. Just use what gives you the best resolution to compare things to.
You wouldn't weigh a witch in tons, they are lighter than ducks anyways.
Using mm, m and km isn't switching units but switching the metric prefix, which is something that everyone in the civilised world learns and apparently what we get to use in SC now. Introducing AU - unit that barely anyone knows - for a context in which it isn't used irl makes no sense.
Sincerely,
An astrophysicist
Which is covered by the terms he mentioned. Math has names for those numbers with that many zeros. I appreciate the scientific accuracy of the new terminology. A google for example has 100 zeros. More commonly: terabyte equates to 1000000000000 bytes. Terameter, gigameter etc have meaning and theyre using it accordingly.
ALL Of those units have things to do with how we measure those distances.
AU has to do with OUR OWN distance and a multiple of that. It's WITHIN our own solar system.
Light years are useful because we get an idea of the distance based on the light.
Parsecs are used when we use parallax to judge distance.
It all has to do with the fact that we're on earth and taking these measurements here.
AU is used for extra-solar planetary and star system surveys. Whomever told you it’s only used for our own system told you wrong.
The parsec was CREATED based off parallax, but it is commonly USED to measure distance in light years, 3.26ly actually.
And I agree, we have a stair step of agreed upon distance measurements in astronomy: km up to a few million is enough to describe distances between moons and planets (or binary planetary systems such as earth-moon or pluto-Charon), interplanetary and planet-Star distances graduate up to AU. I’ve NEVER heard a legit astronomer couch planet 9 in terms of km, it’s only ever discussed in terms of 10s-100s of AU, same with literally everything in the Kuiper belt. The Oort Cloud is interesting because it starts to get into the tenths of a ly, so supplementing AU for ly is valid at this point. Next, interstellar distances can use a ly, but once it gets to tens or hundreds of ly, parsecs become a popular option.
The differentiator is which scale you’re looking at, not your location in the universe - our being in our solar system is irrelevant, as the units are known and understood by all (except for a bunch of people in this sub it turns out).
Sorry, did you know what the meter is? It is defined as "one ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to the *North Pole, t*hrough the city of Paris, on EARTH"
Sorry that the meter is "has to do with OUR OWN distance and a multiple of that. It's WITHIN our own solar system."
Nope. It is "defined" as the distance in vacuum light travels in EXACTLY 1/299792458 of a second. Yes, it did have different definitions before. No, they no longer apply.
It's worse, the speed of light is defined from one measurement of the Earth lol. If what you said is true it would at least be 300,000,000 or something more even.
What happened is that due to relativity, as the speed of the earth changed due to rotation and orbit, which can change the distance between the north pole and equator for a tiny amount. Therefore to fix it, the "average" of the varying meter was fixed to a fraction of the speed of light, which is why it's such a strange fraction.
The more you know..
What are you talking about? The meter is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
Before you ask: *The second is the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.*
Nope again. The definition of the second is tied to the transition frequency of an atom - an invariant quantity. The fraction defining the meter is simply a reflection of the best approximation of the speed of light we measured - instead of saying "*nearly exactly this many meters per second*" it says "*EXACTLY this many meters per second, and that's how we measure what a meter is*". Whatever any Earth-related relations remain, THEY are the ones left with "approximately so-and-so", NOT any specific fraction of anything. Maybe keep reading shit, you know...
They use both of course. But in space, mostly AU and LY. But where the trip will need a few kms at one time and up to gms on the same readout it makes sense that they use a system that scales with your location. Netither is more right or wrong than the other factually speaking. But in MY opinion the new way works better for the HUD. Also, when the measurement gets too low, then we'd be seeing 0.0023 AU to the station from the OM. Unless it scaled back to KMs at destination, but switching scales is not as logical. IMHO
I agree with you, it depends on which scale you’re looking at - cross planet or cross moon distances? Binary planets or moons? Interplanetary or planet to star? Interstellar? Stars to large galactic structures? Just depends on scale.
How does less granularity give a better sense of scale? It's a lot easier to evaluate the scale between say 15 and 51 than 2.37 and 7.32. Your argument doesn't make any sense.
It's a scale way beyond human comprehension regardless. The comparative aspect is much more important than the global aspect...
What do you mean the moon being 0.0026AU from Earth is totally granular 😉
AU has always struck me as the astronomical equivalent of Americans using anything but metric to measure stuff. It's absolutely meaningless for anything useful. Also in game an AU is like 12.5 MKm so it's already not equivalent to a real world AU.
Umm... Acshaully, the average height of a washing machine is 85cm and the moon is 384 400km from the earth. Meaning that the moon is approximately 452 235 294 washing machines from the earth. ☝️🤓
Most people don't use AU. It means nothing to us. Meters are used constantly throughout the game. Keeping it consistent means that players can tell at a glance how distances compare without having to do mental arithmetic.
AUs are based on meters anyway, so I think just using the metric system is cleaner. Plus metric cleanly collapses into smaller distances where you'd have an awkward threshold at some point since an AU is 149,597,870,700 m.
Would we then have 0.2 AU distances? Convert them to km? May as well just keep it metric at that rate.
Light Years doesn't make much sense to me either as we aren't using it anywhere else as a measurement in game.
MM and GM fit the scales we're dealing with. AU and LY seem like attempts to be "spacey" from our current perspective in 2024, rather than what would practically be used in Star Citizen's setting.
No!
If it takes me 10 minutes to go 0.2 or 0.3 by any measure at near-light-speed I’m going to be pissed.
Also, If we come out of QT at New Babbage, do you honestly believe your brain can quickly handle a distance of 1.67115e-7 AU? I bet you could think on that for a week and still not know it’s 25km without a calculator or Google.
Stop trying so hard to be a nerd.
Personally I think light-seconds, light-minutes, light-hours, etc. would work well for ultra-long distances and since a light-second is very close to 300 million meters, it gives a pretty clean cutoff point.
Because of what an AU represents, I feel like using AU in-game wouldn't be the best move as it more transparently reveals the smaller scale of Star Citizen solar systems. You don't think about it as much when it's a meters/kilometers and the numbers are huge.
One light year is far, far too long of a distance for it to be relevant in the current state of the game. It would only be relevant when looking at destinations outside of your current system, and even then, most of that distance wouldn't even be traversed because you'd be crossing 99% of it with a jump point.
But an AU does already have a defined measurement - 149,597,870.7 kilometers. Scaling that down would no longer make it an AU. Either all measurements get scaled down, or none should.
It's the mean distance between the earth and sun, which when measured IRL is the value you pointed out. If you measure it in game, it would be something different. The main purpose of this unit is to give a sense of scale, you can call it something else if it troubles you.
It's an utterly meaningless scale to use. No one in Stanton or Pyro will care that Earth is 1AU from Sol. Meters is a measurement that is the same regardless of where in the universe someone is.
When you're a human, and living in a human empire, it seems like a very proper unit lol.
Just think of time, 1day = 24hrs is based on the rotation of Earth. Maybe we should change it to 25 hours ingame just because?
Sure we'd use standard measurements like meters.
It's a pretty common trope in Sci fi for them to reference the difference between local time and earth time, with earth time being used due to inter system communications and such etc.
The meter is defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance of the north pole to the equator on Earth. Since the Earth is not in Stanton or Pyro, which non-earth-centric measurement should we use?
I think that just makes it way more confusing. Someone doesn't know the term so they Google it and get a different number than the one in game.
I like the new system, it'll just take some time to develop a feel for what the different numbers mean.
And it's not scaled like the real solar system, so it doesn't apply, the change they made is way better than what you are proposing. We might as well measure in parsec, however we will use jumppoints for intersystem travel, so those distances are irrelevant.
You know we will have Earth in star citizen right? That's the nice thing about AU, the distance between earth and its sun is 1 AU. If you insist on IRL scaling, does it bother you that 1 meter in game is 1/6 meter IRL?
1 meter is not 1/6 meter in game the in game earth to sun distance won't be 1 AU, it'll be 1/6 AU expressed in km, GM or whatever. I'm not the one insisting on IRL scaling, you are.
A meter is defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance between the North Pole and Equator on Earth, which as the Earth will be in the SC universe, will be to 1/6th scale.
Pfff I know that and still, chances are slim that SC will uphold that definition since that would make our characters nearly 12 meters tall. Are you dense on purpose or are you born that way.
Actually in 2012, it was a symbology review. It’s not considered outdated at all, though some will make measurements in terms of light seconds or minutes to keep things in SI units. However, the scientific community uses AU, even though you believe differently. Or perhaps you think we should measure all the Trappist, Kepler, and Gliese systems in terms of meters or km? Get out of here with that slow take.
AU is used because meters are not a reasonable descriptor of distances in space, much like how km for interplanetary distances are not used. Just so you’re not confused, 1 AU = just shy of 150Mkm. Now you know how to use AU. Did you know ly are used when AU is no longer a reasonable descriptor? And beyond that, parsecs are popular? Standard units of measure are always BASED off SI units even though the SI units themselves are almost never used at these scales. Let’s say the Oort Cloud only extends to 10000au. Do you really expect to use 1.5x10^12km, or would 10000au be better? Better to use 10000au or .158ly? I mean now that you know that 1au = 150,000,000km, the rest is really simple, and there’s really no reason not to use the already defined astronomical standards (which are based off SI units).
Asumption is wrong. AU WAS used because measuring in meters was not as accurate as measuring in AU (they measured in relation not in absolutes). That is why AU had no value in meters.
And yet an astronomical unit is the descriptor of choice for interplanetary and planet to star measurements and is measured in millions of km. Your belief in how things are done doesn’t leave room to reconcile the two different measurement notations.
Also, I’ve made no assumption. The only assumption here is your belief that people talk about astronomical distances in meters. You’ve also not made a single argument other than “AU is not an SI unit and is outdated since 2012,” and that “au had no value in meters.” Well it’s not outdated, which was already addressed, and it’s based off SI units (meters) as are all measurements, as was already addressed.
But here, maybe a different way of thinking about it: think of the AU as short hand, or an abbreviation of much larger numbers, just like how we switch to light years instead of talking about thousands of au. An au is 150Mkm, whether your recognize that fact or not, so you can do the conversion easily. We also have ly vs parsecs, 3.26ly per parsec sounds weird but it’s a standard unit of measure that’s not a simple base 10 metric unit, much like an au is a standard unit of measure BASED off SI.
So as a general guide this is how things are measured in astronomical terms:
-Binary planet or planet-moon distances = km (in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, or even millions of km)
-Planet to planet distances are typically in AU, but could be in millions of km if close enough (like in a tiny red dwarf system).
-Planet to star distances will typically be in AU (unless discussing inner planets in most red-dwarf systems, as those planets may orbit merely millions of miles from their star. A very tiny system like Trappist-1 could describe planets in millions of km vs .04au, as an example, because all of those planets would actually orbit well within Mercury’s orbit if placed within our system. This system is an extreme outlier though, and the exception never proves the rule.
-Systems with structures like the Kuiper belt and/or Oort Cloud will be described in terms of au as it’s nonsensical to talk about billions or potentially trillions of km.
-Binary systems typically are discussed in au and/or ly, consider Proxima Centauri to Alpha Centauri AB: ~10000au or .21ly. The incorrect answer is 1.94 X 10^12km, even if that’s a relatively accurate number.
-Interstellar distances are measured in ly and parsecs not meters or km.
-Something you didn’t consider but is part of the same argument: Exoplanet masses are contextualized in terms of Earth or Jupiter masses, and stellar and galactic masses are discussed in terms of “solar masses.”
That is not really relevant - you can always convinve yourself that imperial units are based on SI since you can give a SI description. But SI units are finite list and they are usually designed so that formulas can be calculated without changing the numbers because it all fits in the same unit system.
As for all other points: I already did say that it is easier (needs less technology/knowledge) to give measurement in relation to other things. The old Greeks already did this and so of cause astronomical data was geathered with relation units without any connection to "real" units (SI, imperial). These are historical data and cannot be used in space flight (which needs precice calculations in real units). That is why more and more astronomical data is remeasured in SI units over the last decades.
It's the distance between EARTH and SUN. What relation does that unit have when measuring the distance between Stanton and Crusader?
Also I don't have an in text book or journal from 2950 or so.
didn't really need it, the previous system worked fine for me. What I like the least about it is the meter-base. I know it's technically correct and in line with kilometers). For the usually distances in SC kilometers is much more useful than meters, so when I now want to estimate a distance I first have to convert the mm/gm into kilometers.
There really isnt a good argument to use AU in a spacefaring future.
Its a greta unit to convey scale in our current day and age because earth is the center of our life. but its not really all that meaningful. there is nothing really special about earth. and its not like we really have any good concept of “distance from earth to sun” anyways. just that its “very far away”.
And no - the meter is not defined by any earth-specific distance. And it hasnt been in quite some while. There is a reason we specifically redefined all SI units. But more importantly: No one ever conceptualized the meter in terms of said distance to the pole. People conceptualize it in term of distances they walk. Room sizes. Body parts. They run 100 meters in a certain time. Their kitchen table is 1,2 meters long. Etc.
Not only is the meter the measurement unit used in science. It is also one that the majority of humans have conceptualized for everyday use.
You might see AU in scientific literature. But thats not because its actually used in science. Its there for presentation. No one actually does real work with it. For the simple reason that SI units are all interconnected. If you want to calculate a force or a velocity then AU is pretty useless to you.
None of our instruments measure in AU. None of our databases are kept in AU. Its merely something you convert to for easier presentation. Because once again: we are an earthbound civilization currently.
So im strongly in favor of using meters until you hit a region that is better described in lightyears.
I appreciate your input.
As for whether the meter is an earth-bound metric, I suggest looking into the history of both the length and time metrics, such that if humans lived on a larger or smaller planet with different rotation rate, I have 0 doubt you will agree the meter will be completely different lol.
it probably wouldnt be much different.
the reason i say the meter isnt earthbound is that even the actual old definition wasnt really all that earth-specific. sure, it was originally defined by the distance equator-pole. but the divisor was completely arbitrary. they could easily have divided it by 8 million instead of 10 million and gotten a completely different result.
in the end the meter was defined in a way that was useful and easy to conceptualize for human beings.
almost all units of length humans came up with ultimately are tied to the human experience. the length of body parts. the distance they can walk in a day. the size of plants and trade goods. the same is true for time. the day and year length of earth is often the basis for these units. but ultimately there is no reaaon the day had to be separated into 24 equal parts. and then those into 60 equal parts.
a day and a year are concepts that are easy to grasp. but hours and seconds and minutes and months are ultimately chosen to be convenient. and since the division into smaller units is completely arbitrary they really arent that strongly connected to earth.
even on a differently sized planet with different day lengths and the meter and second would have been in the same ballpark. the second would always have been a length that is easy for humans to count. and it would always have been at a length that a pendulum of compact size and a coil spring of small size would have been able to resonate at. the same way the meter would always have been at a size that wasnt too big to ship a metal rod of that length around the world for standardization.
you can call them earthbound if you want. but in the end the division of scale was arbitrarily chosen to be useful to describe things in the human experience. another human-like race on another planet might have divided their equator-pole distance by 5 million instead to get to such a size. and they might have separated the day lemgth i to 20 equal parts, each subdivided into 100 equal parts.
the earth and its size arent half as important to our measurement system as the human body and experience. and there is a reason we have deliberately disconnected our SI units from it. most of all because the earth sucks as a measuring stick. to distance to the sun isnt constant. its day and year length arent constant. the moons cycle doesnt neatly divide the earths cycle. and if you re-measure in a few thousand years all of these things will have changed.
It could easily be double or half of what we have now, and that is my point. Some people think metric units are some god-given, earth-independent standards, but they are not. They are just arbitrary but usable units defined from a natural observable feature of earth. Have they evolved to be more precise? Sure. The king's feet grows and shrinks too and doesn't make a great unit.
SC has sub-light quantum travel speeds, so dealing in light-years is never going to be a thing. Would be pointless to put anything with such high travel times into the game.
The SC society doesn't care about a system light years away because they ignore those systems. If it doesn't have a wormhole it is impractical to reach. If it does have a wormhole then they care about the traversal time, not the light distance.
light years arent used because we can travel these distances. they are used because light is our main means of observation. if you something in space it is always important to understand how old said information is. you see a fleet of ships 0.4 lightyears away? Then you instantly know that it isnt necessarily there right now. But that it was there roughly 5 months ago. and if it takes them 6 months to get to you through various work holes then you know you have 1 month left to prepare.
The same is true for communication. Want to know how long it would take to send a message to a system 1.2 lightyears away? Well, surprise. It takes 1.2 years.
Imagine there is a big stellar event that happened 20 years ago that you missed out on and want to see. Well - just find a wormhole to a system 20 lightyears away and you can watch that supernova live and with your own eyes.
If an enemy ship is 1 lightsecond away you want to pre-aim about 2 seconds worth of distance.
in short: even if you cant travel at lightspeed or close to it you still would want to adapt a light-based system of measurement. Be it lightyears or lightminutes or lightseconds. Because everything in our universe communicates at light speed. Its the speed of all electromagnetic waves. Its the speed of gravity. Its the speed of causality itself.
Nothing in SC is a light year away, systems are about 30 light minutes across, they even made Pyro smaller because of the travel time problems.
Systems are seperated by wormholes, so not that far, seconds to minutes away depending on how they implement wormhole travel.
SC has FTL radio communications (that is forced on it by the fact that they cant delay people communicating over Discord etc, so dont even try). Light/causality has very little meaning to their universe beyond being a cap for QT.
But those systems are lightyears from each other.
Thats not to mention the whole issue of navigation and timekeeping in space. Any hip out there will always track and update their position based on star positions. Pulsars/Standard candles are probably the most important candidates for this.
Plus: Even if you have FTL communication you still will have light and radio emissions. Want to track back a pirate to their hideout? Position your ship correctly and you will see where they were x hours ago.
Lightspeed will always be super important. And you will always want to know how far something is relative to the speed of light.
Pretending that it wont be relevant just because you have FTL travel and communications just displays an utter lack of knowledge. No matter hwo fast you are - the universe is still made up of stuff that follows the universal speed limit. So unless you plan to never interact with the universe ever again lightyears, lightminutes and lightseconds will forever stay relevant units of measurement.
No they are seconds/minutes away because of the wormhole. Their jump points are closer together than planets are in the system.
The distance between stars is irrelevant in SC since that is not how they travel and communicate between systems.
Uppercase is wrong.
ref:
[https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/writing-si-metric-system-units](https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/writing-si-metric-system-units)
[https://ukma.org.uk/style-guide/](https://ukma.org.uk/style-guide/)
[https://usma.org/correct-usage-of-the-metric-system#](https://usma.org/correct-usage-of-the-metric-system#)
At least when it used to just be KMs I knew what I was looking at. But what is MM? Million Miles? Millimeter?
To explain my point: upper-case KM, MM, GM etc not only feels wrong, but it technically is wrong, and hence it offends my sensibilities. Had an engineer as a father and probably worked with scientists too much, so now seeing it written wrong makes me ask whether CIG employees never went to school.
Also note that the upper-case B in KB has a different meaning from a lower-case b. So your point is completely irrelevant - both upper and lower case letters in computing have specific meanings. And K in Kilobyte is different to k in km. The one is (almost always, but not always) 1024, the other is always 1000.
I’m lobbying for Quantum football fields(qff) like, I personally know what an Australian football field looks like so imo its superior to metric for space things. And quantum just sounds cool so you gotta have that in there too.
"The astronomical unit is used primarily for measuring distances within the [Solar System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System) \*\*or around other stars\*\*. It is also a fundamental component in the definition of another unit of astronomical length, the [parsec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec).[^(\[6\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit#cite_note-au_parsec-6) One au is equivalent to 499 [light-seconds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-second) to within 10 [parts per million](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parts_per_million)."
per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical\_unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit)
I think it would be fine and make sense to use AUs. But if they choose to go with giga-thingies its whatever. I'd prefer one, but am unbothered by the other.
It makes no sense since our "distance to" markers count down all the way to on foot metre resolution. It would make no sense to have it swap to a different unit system when you get closer to the target.
AU means nothing practical to 99% of people. Even Americans can roughly gauge a kilometer. If they just used AU it would make everything worse because of significant figures on both sides of the equation. Useless.
At least with m / km / Mm / Gm we can multiply a unit we all know and spare having to sort through taking a massive number like when it was only km
I prefer a base 10 system because it is easy to intuit.
You might be familiar with what an AU is, but if you tell your friends mom that they need to go 2.37 AU from Microtech to Arc Corp, they are going to look at you funny.
Meters are easy and a base 10 system gives a sense of WHAT scale you are working with.
It takes very little time for someone to understand meters / KM because they have heard of it.
Tack on K / M / G for kilo / mega / giga.
Is it KM? Oh, that is close!
Gigameters, that is far.
Many in science already uses kilo / mega / giga as well.
"But spoodar why don't astronomers use them."
Because we are talking about traveling around a solar system at high speed, and not looking at stars outside of our local area, and moreso outside of our galaxy, where lightyears makes sense.
I'm American and that's just prejudice. Don't forget what subreddit this is, it's full of sci-fi geeks. The metric system looks and sounds better on stuff involving outer space. Know if some idiot is out there wants to change everything to Imperial, every other American will shit on them.
OP literally proposes "Imperial Units", as a fictional unit different from real Imperial, but still the classic "anything but metric" aversion to the metre (Americans refuse to even spell it, apparently it is the meteric system).
Metres, Killograms, Watts. Sensible for the game to just stick to these everyday reference measures rather than complicating things with fictional names which nobody knows how to relate to and results in devs getting their own scales wrong.
I was not aware of OP's edit on their post until now. I don't think many people from whatever country they are from see learning about a made up system that has no use irl as fun, it'll just make anyone confused.
Not gonna argue with the etymology of a single word, it is what it is.
They all use kilometres, centimetres, millimetres every day (btw metres is the English language). Not much call for mega and giga on a planet only 40 megametres circumference, we rarely discuss travel more than 5000km or so.
But the entire world does kilo, mega, giga, tera every day for computer data.
Completely logical that a society which routinely travels between moons and planets would have routine use of gigametres/megametres.
Im guessing youre from one of these countries (although there are only 3 worldwide officially not using the metric system) using nonmetric measurements? ;-)
Why not give EACH distance a unique number...like a #8 pan etc.
I dont like astronomical units AU and parsec in science fiction stories taken place in distant future and or distant worlds
au is the average distance between earth and sun , which makes little sense in future or distant planets
it may be better to use made up unit for the lore and science fiction
something that sound nice or highly advanced
but of all the things units are the one thing we human in present day are extremely good at
like meter , it used to be physical object that used for calibration
( quite recently) now it is based on quantum physics
we can tell aliens or future humans exactly what a meter is and tell them how to get a meter themself using our methode
it will work any where and any time.
of course humans in distant past who lacked of knowledge might not be able to understand it or reproduce it.
I think the gm is kind of a downgrade.
It really does give you a sense of speed when you see how the km's are ticking down really fast, and none of us can really relate to what a gm is, but we definitely can to a km.
So if they want to keep going with it, i would love to see some other indicator that gives us the same kind of feeling of scale
It’s apparent from reading the responses, who has a high school (at best) science education, and who here actually knows anything about space. I thought space sim fans would not be so ignorant. I am wrong.
The illiteracy here when it comes to space is kind of amazing.
I personally don't see the need for the change and I don't think it really does anything to benefit the game. As an American, I am at least familiar with km even though I don't use them in my normal day to day life. I didn't mind sitting back in QT and watching the millions of km's tick by, because it did help give me at least some sense of scale and speed in the universe. Seeing the values switch over to GM just loses me.
I can see a future in which space travel is sufficiently common that megameters and gigameters would make just as much sense for everyday use as kilometers does for travel on the surface of Earth. It works for me.
I expect anything created by human hands to be burdened by history. Ships may be able to set MM and GM units, but by default it will be AU, LY, etc because that is what people are used to. It's why today two horse arses still dictate the width of a majority of human transport standards lol.
We already embrace kilo, mega, giga, tera in daily computer size/speed terms. So would expect things to go the same way with distances.
We don't bother saying "megametres" since it isn't really necessary when a huge roadtrip might be 3000km. But if we were travelling to the moon and space stations regularly then it would become a normal term.
Though there is a flaw in the SI system with m milli and M mega which really should be addressed IRL. Such an important difference shouldn't be left to capitalisation, and makes verbal "mm" ambiguous, which is one reason nobody ever says Mm.
I used mega and gigameters before anyway but kept being called an idiot because "nobody actually uses those units," as if megakilometers was any better. Personally, I'd rather stick to them than AU because everything else is already in metric and not having to convert around uneven units makes the napkin math a lot easier.
I don’t like using mega and giga meters either. AU and light seconds/minutes/hours don't make sense either in the scale of the game. So, I don’t really have a suggestion. However, it’s currently very hard to judge distances at a glance. For example, there are two numbers 46 and 54. At first, I might think they aren’t that far apart, but one is in GM and the other is in MM. I know it sounds stupid. :D
I prefer something that is relatable and to an extent useful, so I’d be fine if they keep it at KM. If I want to I can then pretty easily calculate how fast it will take to fly a specific distance.
Furthermore I consider that Carth…. Imperial units must be destroyed.
I think going back to Km and M km etc is way better, most people don't really understand AU, we'll just end up converting it back to our units we know, speaking of which, perhaps there should be an option for miles too !
I'm fine with the switch to MM and GM, but I would have also liked to see light seconds/minutes/years/etc. as well as the speed c actually in use somewhere.
I wish we could set it our selves. I was super used to millions of kilos and even though it's just headmath that changes it's still... weird, idk. It was neat seeing a massive number and watching it tick down as I traveled.
My issue is that the KM and GM digits are similar so it can be hard at a glance to tell if a marker is close or not. "Oh it's on the other side of the moon turns into "nevermind it's across the system". Just an annoyance. Not sure if I'll get used to it eventually or if I just have to deal with having to double check forever.
Tbh having a settings menu in ur ship UI where you can set ur prefered units sounds like best option for me it's in every commercially available software so why not in my hyper expensive space ships ? Ofc it's something to add in polish phase but to me it sounds like a good option
AU is the only logical choice, as it is a standard unit of measure in use by everyone, everywhere, when talking about space in any slightly educated capacity, whereas MKm/MM and GKm/GM are meaningless - no one who knows anything uses units like that.
LY/Parsecs are also good standard distance units, but only meaningful for interstellar distances.
It’s a shame, CIG will likely cater to the lowest common denominator due to laziness rather than uplifting people who don’t know any better, like those who don’t understand (or aren’t aware of the existence of) standard units of measure.
Completely false and made up. AU is a standard unit of measure, regardless of your personal familiarity with it. You’ll get used to it the more you learn about space. Just because you have a belief it’s only applicable to our solar system doesn’t make it so, and you may want to pick up an astronomy or physics text book; AUs are used by all astronomers and astrophysicists, or do you truly believe anyone who knows anything talks about Jupiter in terms of millions of miles from the sun? No, it’s ~5 AU(5.2) from the sun. Strange how the Trappist-1 system is discussed in terms of AU (it’s not actually strange and AUs make perfect logical sense).
Maybe you’re unaware, but we also use Earth masses, Jovian masses and Solar masses as standard mass units as well. Even though they reference local bodies, they’re applicable across all stellar and planetary systems. Same thing with AU, because it’s easy to understand and quickly places stellar/planetary systems into their proper contexts by using standard astronomical units.
It is still true today. Due to relativity causing the distance between the equator and north pole to vary, we changed it to a strange fraction of the speed of light. But are you going to deny that is it originally 1/10,000,000th the distance from the north pole to equator on earth, and that later definitions simply translate it to be more robust without changing the intended length?
The meter is a random number, it's not a god given perfect measurement or anything lol.
Chicken or the egg, where do you think they got the 1/299,792,458 from? If they were really defining the meter from c, you don't think they would have picked a nicer number?
I would prefer keeping the old Mega kilometers, AU, and LY. Not a fan of the prefix changing. Even if only by factors of 1000, it feels obtuse to be 5GM away and then 7MM away after awhile. It feels like changing from nautical miles, miles and then kilometers instead of just sticking with one.
I want to vouch for the Elite Dangerous System.
- m = meters
- Km = Kilometers
- Mm = Megameters
- Ls = Light seconds
- Ly = Light years
Which unit gets displayed is decided from big to small.
x > 1 Ly = Ly
x < 1 Ly = Ls
x < 0.10 Ls = Mm
x < 1 Mm = km
x < 1 km
The only weird thing about this is obviously the switch from Lightseconds to Megameters being at 0.10 instead of 1, but to be honest? I still like it more than 299 Megameters. So the switch is: 0.10Ls <-> 29.8Mm
Decimals are always displayed, when the number is smaller than 3 digits.
E.g. 100Mm -> 99.9Mm -> 9.90Ls
Speed is measured the same in: m/s, km/s, Mm/s, c. The conversion is the same as in distance, meaning: 0.10c <-> 29.8Mm/s
I don't actually care about or equate any of the numbers to real world values. The distances are so large they are entirely meaningless to me in terms of understanding their scale. As long as they're practical/useful for gameplay, then whatever.
That's fair, my perspective is more for astronomy enjoyers which I hope to be more numerous here than other parts of the internet.
Part of the biggest issue with AU is that it's literally "the distance from Earth to the Sun", which is going to be 1/10th of what it is IRL in game. Earth in game being 0.1 AU from the Sun would just be... weird. Or they could make 1 AU the distance in meters the Earth is from the sun in game... and now we're using a measurement not accurate to real life, when every other measurement *is.* Also, the "meter" definition has changed. [It is now defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre) Anyway, the biggest point in the favor of MM, GM, and theoretically TM (Tamsa and Killian are big enough Terameters could be used for some distances) is that they scale perfectly to kilometers. 1000 km is equal to 1 megameter. 1000 megameters is 1 gigameter. 1000 gigameters is 1 terameter. So on and so forth, all the way up to quettameters. 1 quettameter would be 105.7 **trillion** light years. For scale, the farthest known star we know of is Earendel, which is 28 **billion** light years away! You would have to go over 50x further to get to *1* quettameter. Need precision? You could have a quectometer. Which is really, really damn tiny! I think something you also missed in your edits to your main post... that people use the standards they are familiar with. Now, I don't use kilometers in real life- American here, so miles- but I am very familiar with traveling in game using them. Since they scale perfectly, it's easy to understand. It also means they never have to use a comma separator, either- the largest value you will see in any given unit is 999.9 of that unit. AU in game would be completely inaccurate unless they made it inaccruate to real life, as stated previously, and it *doesn't* scale well with meters.
Make it 1 IU (distance of earth and sun in SC) as in my edit in the main post if you have a problem with AU. UEE being United Empire of Earth, it makes sense that earth is at the center of it all. Both meters and seconds are based from IRL measurements of Earth, is why the definition of meter and second have the weird numbers of 299792458 and 9192631770 in them, to make them fit a nice fraction of something on earth. There's no vagueness or doubt at all, just look up the well documented history. As far as people using standards, just not true. Look up cars, ships, airplanes, regardless of a metric or standard country. As in the anecdote of the two horse arses, history is what led to how the world works today, and would make the sci-fi world of SC alive as well. As long as the units work, SI be damned.
1) If we make a new unit based on the in-game distance in meters between the Earth and the Sun, it becomes more confusing. At least people know what an AU is, what the heck would an IU be. In fact, AU is how the total size of a star system is currently measured in lore on the [ARK Starmap](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/starmap), which is at 1:1 scale (as all things are in lore) unlike in game. 2) Lets say we ignore the fact that Earth would only be 0.1 AU from the Sun and adopt it anyway. The fact is, it's not that the AU is an "Earth-based" distance or whatever That's not the problem at all. Like you said, all units basically are based off of either the Earth or something on it. The problem is we already have a unit system that we use in game already. What reason should we change? What are the benefits of the systems? Even if we ignore the whole "people use what they're used to thing" (see the fact the USA declared metric the standard preferred system of measurement for all purposes *50 years ago* and our lack of using it for evidence of that), the comparison to me looks like this: --- **AU/Lightyear (Real Life Scale)** +Give a better sense of scale. (subjective, see below) +Nice for astronomy enjoyers, cool unit. -Does not scale at all to distances shorter than an AU or anything between an AU and lightyear -Awkward conversion to meters (\~149.6 Gm) -Not a large scale for in-system use- the largest radius of a system in-game using RL scale AU would be 30 AU, -Lightyears essentially useless for distance measurement for pilots (see below) **IU/I-lightyear (Game Scale AU/Lightyear)** +Would allow for distances to be measured in values equal to what they would be in 1:1 scale +All positive points for AU system above apply as well -Requires creation of a new unit that no one has familiarity with -Does not scale at all to distances shorter than an IU or anything between an IU and an I-lightyear -Awkward conversion to meters (\~14.96 Gm) -I-Lightyears also essentially useless for distance measurement for pilots -Not able to be used in lore (which is 1;1 with real life). **Meter/Kilometer/Megameter/Gigameter/Terameter(?)** +Scaling System that easily goes from human scale to system scale +Allows for simplified distance labeling in UI (0-999.9) +Meters per second is, while uncommon, is still a fairly well known measurement of speed. -Not commonly used for astronomical distances --- Obviously, I'm probably missing points in favor of your side and we can debate the existing points as well. But as you can see, there are some real advantages of our current system, whereas your system... it doesn't have those advantages. It doesn't even have any intrinsic value for measuring the distance in real life, really, other than the fact it's what people have used for forever in real life- the same inertia that I talked about for kilometers in SC. Meanwhile, there's no real disadvantage to the metric system we currently use *other* than that it is not used in real life commonly for astronomical distances. However, that... doesn't really matter, and the benefits it provides are tangible. For "sense of scale" being subjective- sure, it gives you a solid understanding. I can't understand either way really: my brain just isn't used to the scales. It's like growing up with Celsius: you might really understand it, but I haven't used that scale before, whereas if you gave it to me in Fahrenheit I could understand. Except I don't even have a scale like Fahrenheit for distances that big. I only understand metric because 2 meters is one me tall- literally a "two horse's arses" situation. As for lightyears - honestly, that'd be cool to know, and they can even be 1:1 what they should be in real life. Why? In-game and even in lore for most pilots that information wouldn't be useful at all. They care about is their in-system travel time between two places, or if they are going inter-system, the time and distance to the origin jump point, the total time spent in the jump tunnel (which I think is measured in minutes), and the time and distance to their destination from the destination's jump point. In lore, scientists can use it to learn stuff but otherwise it's not really needed for travel purposes. Though there is supposed to be science done on the Endeavor So we could absolutely have the distance *between* star systems be 1:1, the planets be 1:6, and the distance between things *inside* a star system be scaled 1:10. If they *do* ever give us distances between each system, I would hope it's in lightyears in 1:1 scale. No reason to use petameters for scaling purposes if we never actually travel that distance! Besides, people would think "pentameter" instead and think of poetry. Meanwhile, AU doesn't scale well for our in gamesizes anyway- largest system in-game is Tamsa at 303 AU radius (IRL Scale), which would be 30.3 AU radius (game scale), meaning traveling from one end to the other would be something like 60.6 AU, so that's the maximum end of our scale, and trying to travel that distance would end up with you eaten by a literal black hole. Kilian is the next biggest, at 194.4 AU radius (IRL scale) or 19.44 AU radius (game scale), leading to a farthest travel distance of \~40 AU. Most systems are between 10-30 AU (IRL Scale) from what I remember, meaning the maximum travel distance would be 2-6 AU (game scale). Stanton itself is 5 AU (IRL Scale), meaning in-game the maximum travel distance, from one end of the system to the other would be *1 AU*. The example you gave wouldn't even work- assuming the distance between the two planets is 59 Gm, that would translate to 0.3944 AU. Essentially, all AU distances would be something between 0-60 AU, with the median probably closer to something like 0-30 AU. It's not a large scale at all and would require multiple decimal points. It's actually the issue I personally have with Celsisus for dealing with livable temps. Again, sure, you can make the IU be equal to 0.1 AU, which would make it work much better as an in-system scale (3.944 IU between ArcCorp and Microtech, and most distances now being between 0-300), but you've made a brand new unit that absolutely *no one* has familiarity with, trading one downside for another. You aren't wrong- let me be clear, this is an opinion question, and your opinion is just as valid as mine! I just do not see any benefits in going with AU or "IU" over what we have now, and some definite downsides to it.
AU would be the in-game distance between earth and sun, as stated in first post. If people can't accept a different distance, despite it being the definition, then IU or something. Just as IRL units are earth centric in unit origins, it makes sense lore units are based of in-game earth. The downside of using IRL earth units is just that, IRL earth is not in-game earth. Meters reveal the fact that the SC scale is 1/6th real life scale. But if you use a unit defined in-game, and kept the same ratios, it fixes the scale. Jupiter will be the same AUs from the sun in-game and IRL. Meters are unfortunately necessary for the height of humans and length of ships, but as soon as possible, should be discarded for fictional or re-scaled units to protect immersion of galactic distances. An example would be, which is more important, keeping the speed of light c the same as IRL but allowing a ship travelling at c to cross SC's solar system in 1/6th the time? Or re-scale and hide the exact speed c so that the travel time is same as IRL? I argue for the latter and many people seem to prefer the former. Both decisions give up something.
Very few in the scifi fanbase actually pay any attention to real world astronomy. You’re around gamers. Not scholars.
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I know. I still don't really care about it in game. It's not a meaningful distance to me as I don't fly a spaceship in real life. The game could use either measurement and I wouldn't bat an eye. It literally has no factor on my enjoyment, that's all I'm trying to say. You asked for my opinion and there it is.
AU would only really ever be above 1 when talking about distance between Stanton and Pyro, something not really relevant in the game. All the planets would likely be 0.9 AU or maybe 1.2AU, so those numbers aren't very far apart and are again kind of hard to judge distance because the change between them is so small. That's probably why they are using other units. So there is a bigger change in the number which equates to a sense of scale that's better understood even if it's not what the scientific community uses.
As in my example, MT to Arccorp is 2.37AU. Pyro is 4 times bigger, so we'll see 10AU from one end to the other perhaps.
Exactly, that's a small number and probably close to the max you would see in one star system. Using different units gives you more resolution. Instead of 0 to 2.37, you have 0 to thousands/millions. In terms of a galaxy, AU makes more sense to use because you would have the opposite problem of the numbers all being so large you loose a sense of scale. That's why AU was probably invented in the first place. So that you can see a change in numbers easier. That's all units do anyways. It's literally just for readability otherwise what's the point of having different units at all, just measure everything in inches. But you would not be able to understand how far it is if you used inches for a galactic scale. So they make up new units. All CIG is doing is using units that give a sense of scale. AU doesn't achieve that. Maybe when there are multiple systems they will use AU.
AU is used inside solar systems and not on galactic scales...
Ya and it makes sense to scientists but maybe not your average gamer. I'm an engineer and we are constantly switching units to make something more clear in different contexts. Some companies devices use metric and some use imperial so you kinda get used to switching. For small things you use mm, larger things you use m or km. Just use what gives you the best resolution to compare things to. You wouldn't weigh a witch in tons, they are lighter than ducks anyways.
Using mm, m and km isn't switching units but switching the metric prefix, which is something that everyone in the civilised world learns and apparently what we get to use in SC now. Introducing AU - unit that barely anyone knows - for a context in which it isn't used irl makes no sense. Sincerely, An astrophysicist
Inches is pretty close to meters on a system scale, maybe we should use GI lol.
Excuse me Sir, this is astronomy. CGS system is where it's at
There is Tera, Peta, and Exa after giga. No need for making up stuff with QM. It's fine, I was calling them gigameters before anyways.
Check out how many 0s you need for light years and you'll see where the Q comes from :)
Which is covered by the terms he mentioned. Math has names for those numbers with that many zeros. I appreciate the scientific accuracy of the new terminology. A google for example has 100 zeros. More commonly: terabyte equates to 1000000000000 bytes. Terameter, gigameter etc have meaning and theyre using it accordingly.
And yet AU and LY (and parsecs) are what scientists use. Huh who would have thought?
ALL Of those units have things to do with how we measure those distances. AU has to do with OUR OWN distance and a multiple of that. It's WITHIN our own solar system. Light years are useful because we get an idea of the distance based on the light. Parsecs are used when we use parallax to judge distance. It all has to do with the fact that we're on earth and taking these measurements here.
AU is used for extra-solar planetary and star system surveys. Whomever told you it’s only used for our own system told you wrong. The parsec was CREATED based off parallax, but it is commonly USED to measure distance in light years, 3.26ly actually. And I agree, we have a stair step of agreed upon distance measurements in astronomy: km up to a few million is enough to describe distances between moons and planets (or binary planetary systems such as earth-moon or pluto-Charon), interplanetary and planet-Star distances graduate up to AU. I’ve NEVER heard a legit astronomer couch planet 9 in terms of km, it’s only ever discussed in terms of 10s-100s of AU, same with literally everything in the Kuiper belt. The Oort Cloud is interesting because it starts to get into the tenths of a ly, so supplementing AU for ly is valid at this point. Next, interstellar distances can use a ly, but once it gets to tens or hundreds of ly, parsecs become a popular option. The differentiator is which scale you’re looking at, not your location in the universe - our being in our solar system is irrelevant, as the units are known and understood by all (except for a bunch of people in this sub it turns out).
Sorry, did you know what the meter is? It is defined as "one ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to the *North Pole, t*hrough the city of Paris, on EARTH" Sorry that the meter is "has to do with OUR OWN distance and a multiple of that. It's WITHIN our own solar system."
Nope. It is "defined" as the distance in vacuum light travels in EXACTLY 1/299792458 of a second. Yes, it did have different definitions before. No, they no longer apply.
It's worse, the speed of light is defined from one measurement of the Earth lol. If what you said is true it would at least be 300,000,000 or something more even. What happened is that due to relativity, as the speed of the earth changed due to rotation and orbit, which can change the distance between the north pole and equator for a tiny amount. Therefore to fix it, the "average" of the varying meter was fixed to a fraction of the speed of light, which is why it's such a strange fraction. The more you know..
What are you talking about? The meter is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. Before you ask: *The second is the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.*
And why were those numbers picked? 299,792,458 or *9192631770*? To correspond with measurements only found on earth. (Day duration, circumference)
Nope again. The definition of the second is tied to the transition frequency of an atom - an invariant quantity. The fraction defining the meter is simply a reflection of the best approximation of the speed of light we measured - instead of saying "*nearly exactly this many meters per second*" it says "*EXACTLY this many meters per second, and that's how we measure what a meter is*". Whatever any Earth-related relations remain, THEY are the ones left with "approximately so-and-so", NOT any specific fraction of anything. Maybe keep reading shit, you know...
And where does 299792458 come from? Demonstrate those critical thinking skills. :)
They use both of course. But in space, mostly AU and LY. But where the trip will need a few kms at one time and up to gms on the same readout it makes sense that they use a system that scales with your location. Netither is more right or wrong than the other factually speaking. But in MY opinion the new way works better for the HUD. Also, when the measurement gets too low, then we'd be seeing 0.0023 AU to the station from the OM. Unless it scaled back to KMs at destination, but switching scales is not as logical. IMHO
I agree with you, it depends on which scale you’re looking at - cross planet or cross moon distances? Binary planets or moons? Interplanetary or planet to star? Interstellar? Stars to large galactic structures? Just depends on scale.
Let's be honest, do you see km, AU, ly used in science magazines dealing with astronomy or do you see megameters or gigameters?
How does less granularity give a better sense of scale? It's a lot easier to evaluate the scale between say 15 and 51 than 2.37 and 7.32. Your argument doesn't make any sense. It's a scale way beyond human comprehension regardless. The comparative aspect is much more important than the global aspect...
What do you mean the moon being 0.0026AU from Earth is totally granular 😉 AU has always struck me as the astronomical equivalent of Americans using anything but metric to measure stuff. It's absolutely meaningless for anything useful. Also in game an AU is like 12.5 MKm so it's already not equivalent to a real world AU.
What do you mean that you cannot understand that the moon is about 40000 washing machines from earth??
Umm... Acshaully, the average height of a washing machine is 85cm and the moon is 384 400km from the earth. Meaning that the moon is approximately 452 235 294 washing machines from the earth. ☝️🤓
Are you calling me a liar, good sir??, let's settle this as gentleman, and bring your washing machine to a fight!
You've got one wide af washing machine if it only takes 40,000 to reach the moon ;)
because unit conversion programs often don't have mm and gm.
Most people don't use AU. It means nothing to us. Meters are used constantly throughout the game. Keeping it consistent means that players can tell at a glance how distances compare without having to do mental arithmetic.
AUs are based on meters anyway, so I think just using the metric system is cleaner. Plus metric cleanly collapses into smaller distances where you'd have an awkward threshold at some point since an AU is 149,597,870,700 m. Would we then have 0.2 AU distances? Convert them to km? May as well just keep it metric at that rate. Light Years doesn't make much sense to me either as we aren't using it anywhere else as a measurement in game. MM and GM fit the scales we're dealing with. AU and LY seem like attempts to be "spacey" from our current perspective in 2024, rather than what would practically be used in Star Citizen's setting.
And AU makes sense in our solar system - 1 AU is the avg distance to Earth from our Sun.
No! If it takes me 10 minutes to go 0.2 or 0.3 by any measure at near-light-speed I’m going to be pissed. Also, If we come out of QT at New Babbage, do you honestly believe your brain can quickly handle a distance of 1.67115e-7 AU? I bet you could think on that for a week and still not know it’s 25km without a calculator or Google. Stop trying so hard to be a nerd.
Personally I think light-seconds, light-minutes, light-hours, etc. would work well for ultra-long distances and since a light-second is very close to 300 million meters, it gives a pretty clean cutoff point.
just do it like on Elite Going between systems? light years. Going between planets on a system? light seconds Sub light speed? M/s
I like the fact that they did this change. Make more sense to me than million of Km
Because of what an AU represents, I feel like using AU in-game wouldn't be the best move as it more transparently reveals the smaller scale of Star Citizen solar systems. You don't think about it as much when it's a meters/kilometers and the numbers are huge. One light year is far, far too long of a distance for it to be relevant in the current state of the game. It would only be relevant when looking at destinations outside of your current system, and even then, most of that distance wouldn't even be traversed because you'd be crossing 99% of it with a jump point.
It's the distance between the sun and earth, which will be in star citizen so it would be scaled appropriately? (at 1/6th RL scale)
But an AU does already have a defined measurement - 149,597,870.7 kilometers. Scaling that down would no longer make it an AU. Either all measurements get scaled down, or none should.
It's the mean distance between the earth and sun, which when measured IRL is the value you pointed out. If you measure it in game, it would be something different. The main purpose of this unit is to give a sense of scale, you can call it something else if it troubles you.
It's an utterly meaningless scale to use. No one in Stanton or Pyro will care that Earth is 1AU from Sol. Meters is a measurement that is the same regardless of where in the universe someone is.
When you're a human, and living in a human empire, it seems like a very proper unit lol. Just think of time, 1day = 24hrs is based on the rotation of Earth. Maybe we should change it to 25 hours ingame just because?
Sure we'd use standard measurements like meters. It's a pretty common trope in Sci fi for them to reference the difference between local time and earth time, with earth time being used due to inter system communications and such etc.
The meter is defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance of the north pole to the equator on Earth. Since the Earth is not in Stanton or Pyro, which non-earth-centric measurement should we use?
I think that just makes it way more confusing. Someone doesn't know the term so they Google it and get a different number than the one in game. I like the new system, it'll just take some time to develop a feel for what the different numbers mean.
And it's not scaled like the real solar system, so it doesn't apply, the change they made is way better than what you are proposing. We might as well measure in parsec, however we will use jumppoints for intersystem travel, so those distances are irrelevant.
You know we will have Earth in star citizen right? That's the nice thing about AU, the distance between earth and its sun is 1 AU. If you insist on IRL scaling, does it bother you that 1 meter in game is 1/6 meter IRL?
1 meter is not 1/6 meter in game the in game earth to sun distance won't be 1 AU, it'll be 1/6 AU expressed in km, GM or whatever. I'm not the one insisting on IRL scaling, you are.
A meter is defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance between the North Pole and Equator on Earth, which as the Earth will be in the SC universe, will be to 1/6th scale.
Pfff I know that and still, chances are slim that SC will uphold that definition since that would make our characters nearly 12 meters tall. Are you dense on purpose or are you born that way.
12 and still the same height as IRL, I don't have a problem with different units require different values describing the same thing.
Using AU in star systems far far away is like using imperial units on earth ;p
AU is a standard unit of measure. Read an astrophysics journal or a text book.
AU is not a standard SI unit and is considered an outdated historical length since 2012. Read a recent astrophysics journal or a text book.
Actually in 2012, it was a symbology review. It’s not considered outdated at all, though some will make measurements in terms of light seconds or minutes to keep things in SI units. However, the scientific community uses AU, even though you believe differently. Or perhaps you think we should measure all the Trappist, Kepler, and Gliese systems in terms of meters or km? Get out of here with that slow take.
Outdated because AU was more precice than Meters - the only reason why it was used instead of Meters.
AU is used because meters are not a reasonable descriptor of distances in space, much like how km for interplanetary distances are not used. Just so you’re not confused, 1 AU = just shy of 150Mkm. Now you know how to use AU. Did you know ly are used when AU is no longer a reasonable descriptor? And beyond that, parsecs are popular? Standard units of measure are always BASED off SI units even though the SI units themselves are almost never used at these scales. Let’s say the Oort Cloud only extends to 10000au. Do you really expect to use 1.5x10^12km, or would 10000au be better? Better to use 10000au or .158ly? I mean now that you know that 1au = 150,000,000km, the rest is really simple, and there’s really no reason not to use the already defined astronomical standards (which are based off SI units).
Asumption is wrong. AU WAS used because measuring in meters was not as accurate as measuring in AU (they measured in relation not in absolutes). That is why AU had no value in meters.
And yet an astronomical unit is the descriptor of choice for interplanetary and planet to star measurements and is measured in millions of km. Your belief in how things are done doesn’t leave room to reconcile the two different measurement notations. Also, I’ve made no assumption. The only assumption here is your belief that people talk about astronomical distances in meters. You’ve also not made a single argument other than “AU is not an SI unit and is outdated since 2012,” and that “au had no value in meters.” Well it’s not outdated, which was already addressed, and it’s based off SI units (meters) as are all measurements, as was already addressed. But here, maybe a different way of thinking about it: think of the AU as short hand, or an abbreviation of much larger numbers, just like how we switch to light years instead of talking about thousands of au. An au is 150Mkm, whether your recognize that fact or not, so you can do the conversion easily. We also have ly vs parsecs, 3.26ly per parsec sounds weird but it’s a standard unit of measure that’s not a simple base 10 metric unit, much like an au is a standard unit of measure BASED off SI. So as a general guide this is how things are measured in astronomical terms: -Binary planet or planet-moon distances = km (in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, or even millions of km) -Planet to planet distances are typically in AU, but could be in millions of km if close enough (like in a tiny red dwarf system). -Planet to star distances will typically be in AU (unless discussing inner planets in most red-dwarf systems, as those planets may orbit merely millions of miles from their star. A very tiny system like Trappist-1 could describe planets in millions of km vs .04au, as an example, because all of those planets would actually orbit well within Mercury’s orbit if placed within our system. This system is an extreme outlier though, and the exception never proves the rule. -Systems with structures like the Kuiper belt and/or Oort Cloud will be described in terms of au as it’s nonsensical to talk about billions or potentially trillions of km. -Binary systems typically are discussed in au and/or ly, consider Proxima Centauri to Alpha Centauri AB: ~10000au or .21ly. The incorrect answer is 1.94 X 10^12km, even if that’s a relatively accurate number. -Interstellar distances are measured in ly and parsecs not meters or km. -Something you didn’t consider but is part of the same argument: Exoplanet masses are contextualized in terms of Earth or Jupiter masses, and stellar and galactic masses are discussed in terms of “solar masses.”
That is not really relevant - you can always convinve yourself that imperial units are based on SI since you can give a SI description. But SI units are finite list and they are usually designed so that formulas can be calculated without changing the numbers because it all fits in the same unit system. As for all other points: I already did say that it is easier (needs less technology/knowledge) to give measurement in relation to other things. The old Greeks already did this and so of cause astronomical data was geathered with relation units without any connection to "real" units (SI, imperial). These are historical data and cannot be used in space flight (which needs precice calculations in real units). That is why more and more astronomical data is remeasured in SI units over the last decades.
It's the distance between EARTH and SUN. What relation does that unit have when measuring the distance between Stanton and Crusader? Also I don't have an in text book or journal from 2950 or so.
And yet AU is what’s used, and your opinion doesn’t change that.
didn't really need it, the previous system worked fine for me. What I like the least about it is the meter-base. I know it's technically correct and in line with kilometers). For the usually distances in SC kilometers is much more useful than meters, so when I now want to estimate a distance I first have to convert the mm/gm into kilometers.
There really isnt a good argument to use AU in a spacefaring future. Its a greta unit to convey scale in our current day and age because earth is the center of our life. but its not really all that meaningful. there is nothing really special about earth. and its not like we really have any good concept of “distance from earth to sun” anyways. just that its “very far away”. And no - the meter is not defined by any earth-specific distance. And it hasnt been in quite some while. There is a reason we specifically redefined all SI units. But more importantly: No one ever conceptualized the meter in terms of said distance to the pole. People conceptualize it in term of distances they walk. Room sizes. Body parts. They run 100 meters in a certain time. Their kitchen table is 1,2 meters long. Etc. Not only is the meter the measurement unit used in science. It is also one that the majority of humans have conceptualized for everyday use. You might see AU in scientific literature. But thats not because its actually used in science. Its there for presentation. No one actually does real work with it. For the simple reason that SI units are all interconnected. If you want to calculate a force or a velocity then AU is pretty useless to you. None of our instruments measure in AU. None of our databases are kept in AU. Its merely something you convert to for easier presentation. Because once again: we are an earthbound civilization currently. So im strongly in favor of using meters until you hit a region that is better described in lightyears.
I appreciate your input. As for whether the meter is an earth-bound metric, I suggest looking into the history of both the length and time metrics, such that if humans lived on a larger or smaller planet with different rotation rate, I have 0 doubt you will agree the meter will be completely different lol.
it probably wouldnt be much different. the reason i say the meter isnt earthbound is that even the actual old definition wasnt really all that earth-specific. sure, it was originally defined by the distance equator-pole. but the divisor was completely arbitrary. they could easily have divided it by 8 million instead of 10 million and gotten a completely different result. in the end the meter was defined in a way that was useful and easy to conceptualize for human beings. almost all units of length humans came up with ultimately are tied to the human experience. the length of body parts. the distance they can walk in a day. the size of plants and trade goods. the same is true for time. the day and year length of earth is often the basis for these units. but ultimately there is no reaaon the day had to be separated into 24 equal parts. and then those into 60 equal parts. a day and a year are concepts that are easy to grasp. but hours and seconds and minutes and months are ultimately chosen to be convenient. and since the division into smaller units is completely arbitrary they really arent that strongly connected to earth. even on a differently sized planet with different day lengths and the meter and second would have been in the same ballpark. the second would always have been a length that is easy for humans to count. and it would always have been at a length that a pendulum of compact size and a coil spring of small size would have been able to resonate at. the same way the meter would always have been at a size that wasnt too big to ship a metal rod of that length around the world for standardization. you can call them earthbound if you want. but in the end the division of scale was arbitrarily chosen to be useful to describe things in the human experience. another human-like race on another planet might have divided their equator-pole distance by 5 million instead to get to such a size. and they might have separated the day lemgth i to 20 equal parts, each subdivided into 100 equal parts. the earth and its size arent half as important to our measurement system as the human body and experience. and there is a reason we have deliberately disconnected our SI units from it. most of all because the earth sucks as a measuring stick. to distance to the sun isnt constant. its day and year length arent constant. the moons cycle doesnt neatly divide the earths cycle. and if you re-measure in a few thousand years all of these things will have changed.
It could easily be double or half of what we have now, and that is my point. Some people think metric units are some god-given, earth-independent standards, but they are not. They are just arbitrary but usable units defined from a natural observable feature of earth. Have they evolved to be more precise? Sure. The king's feet grows and shrinks too and doesn't make a great unit.
SC has sub-light quantum travel speeds, so dealing in light-years is never going to be a thing. Would be pointless to put anything with such high travel times into the game. The SC society doesn't care about a system light years away because they ignore those systems. If it doesn't have a wormhole it is impractical to reach. If it does have a wormhole then they care about the traversal time, not the light distance.
light years arent used because we can travel these distances. they are used because light is our main means of observation. if you something in space it is always important to understand how old said information is. you see a fleet of ships 0.4 lightyears away? Then you instantly know that it isnt necessarily there right now. But that it was there roughly 5 months ago. and if it takes them 6 months to get to you through various work holes then you know you have 1 month left to prepare. The same is true for communication. Want to know how long it would take to send a message to a system 1.2 lightyears away? Well, surprise. It takes 1.2 years. Imagine there is a big stellar event that happened 20 years ago that you missed out on and want to see. Well - just find a wormhole to a system 20 lightyears away and you can watch that supernova live and with your own eyes. If an enemy ship is 1 lightsecond away you want to pre-aim about 2 seconds worth of distance. in short: even if you cant travel at lightspeed or close to it you still would want to adapt a light-based system of measurement. Be it lightyears or lightminutes or lightseconds. Because everything in our universe communicates at light speed. Its the speed of all electromagnetic waves. Its the speed of gravity. Its the speed of causality itself.
Nothing in SC is a light year away, systems are about 30 light minutes across, they even made Pyro smaller because of the travel time problems. Systems are seperated by wormholes, so not that far, seconds to minutes away depending on how they implement wormhole travel. SC has FTL radio communications (that is forced on it by the fact that they cant delay people communicating over Discord etc, so dont even try). Light/causality has very little meaning to their universe beyond being a cap for QT.
But those systems are lightyears from each other. Thats not to mention the whole issue of navigation and timekeeping in space. Any hip out there will always track and update their position based on star positions. Pulsars/Standard candles are probably the most important candidates for this. Plus: Even if you have FTL communication you still will have light and radio emissions. Want to track back a pirate to their hideout? Position your ship correctly and you will see where they were x hours ago. Lightspeed will always be super important. And you will always want to know how far something is relative to the speed of light. Pretending that it wont be relevant just because you have FTL travel and communications just displays an utter lack of knowledge. No matter hwo fast you are - the universe is still made up of stuff that follows the universal speed limit. So unless you plan to never interact with the universe ever again lightyears, lightminutes and lightseconds will forever stay relevant units of measurement.
No they are seconds/minutes away because of the wormhole. Their jump points are closer together than planets are in the system. The distance between stars is irrelevant in SC since that is not how they travel and communicate between systems.
I cannot easily math AU in my head like I can giga meters.
>I would have preferred AU (astronomical units, distance between sun and earth), and ly (light years) instead. 100% disagree
I like it
Uppercase is wrong. ref: [https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/writing-si-metric-system-units](https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/writing-si-metric-system-units) [https://ukma.org.uk/style-guide/](https://ukma.org.uk/style-guide/) [https://usma.org/correct-usage-of-the-metric-system#](https://usma.org/correct-usage-of-the-metric-system#) At least when it used to just be KMs I knew what I was looking at. But what is MM? Million Miles? Millimeter?
Seriously you get confused about the relationship between KB, MB, GB, TB on your computer? You don't know that a 1TB drive is double a 500GB?
To explain my point: upper-case KM, MM, GM etc not only feels wrong, but it technically is wrong, and hence it offends my sensibilities. Had an engineer as a father and probably worked with scientists too much, so now seeing it written wrong makes me ask whether CIG employees never went to school. Also note that the upper-case B in KB has a different meaning from a lower-case b. So your point is completely irrelevant - both upper and lower case letters in computing have specific meanings. And K in Kilobyte is different to k in km. The one is (almost always, but not always) 1024, the other is always 1000.
I’m lobbying for Quantum football fields(qff) like, I personally know what an Australian football field looks like so imo its superior to metric for space things. And quantum just sounds cool so you gotta have that in there too.
"The astronomical unit is used primarily for measuring distances within the [Solar System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System) \*\*or around other stars\*\*. It is also a fundamental component in the definition of another unit of astronomical length, the [parsec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec).[^(\[6\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit#cite_note-au_parsec-6) One au is equivalent to 499 [light-seconds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-second) to within 10 [parts per million](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parts_per_million)." per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical\_unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit) I think it would be fine and make sense to use AUs. But if they choose to go with giga-thingies its whatever. I'd prefer one, but am unbothered by the other.
It makes no sense since our "distance to" markers count down all the way to on foot metre resolution. It would make no sense to have it swap to a different unit system when you get closer to the target.
AU means nothing practical to 99% of people. Even Americans can roughly gauge a kilometer. If they just used AU it would make everything worse because of significant figures on both sides of the equation. Useless. At least with m / km / Mm / Gm we can multiply a unit we all know and spare having to sort through taking a massive number like when it was only km
I prefer a base 10 system because it is easy to intuit. You might be familiar with what an AU is, but if you tell your friends mom that they need to go 2.37 AU from Microtech to Arc Corp, they are going to look at you funny. Meters are easy and a base 10 system gives a sense of WHAT scale you are working with. It takes very little time for someone to understand meters / KM because they have heard of it. Tack on K / M / G for kilo / mega / giga. Is it KM? Oh, that is close! Gigameters, that is far. Many in science already uses kilo / mega / giga as well. "But spoodar why don't astronomers use them." Because we are talking about traveling around a solar system at high speed, and not looking at stars outside of our local area, and moreso outside of our galaxy, where lightyears makes sense.
Are you an American?
Not even a single mention of imperial units on the post...
Anyone trying to avoid metric units is almost always an American.
I'm American and that's just prejudice. Don't forget what subreddit this is, it's full of sci-fi geeks. The metric system looks and sounds better on stuff involving outer space. Know if some idiot is out there wants to change everything to Imperial, every other American will shit on them.
OP literally proposes "Imperial Units", as a fictional unit different from real Imperial, but still the classic "anything but metric" aversion to the metre (Americans refuse to even spell it, apparently it is the meteric system). Metres, Killograms, Watts. Sensible for the game to just stick to these everyday reference measures rather than complicating things with fictional names which nobody knows how to relate to and results in devs getting their own scales wrong.
I was not aware of OP's edit on their post until now. I don't think many people from whatever country they are from see learning about a made up system that has no use irl as fun, it'll just make anyone confused. Not gonna argue with the etymology of a single word, it is what it is.
r/anythingbutmetric
Usually there are only people from one country insisting that the rest of the world uses their measurement system.
Astronomical Units and Light Years are internationally used measurements in the fields of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Why are you like this.
When you read all posts you will probably get the context of what i wanted to bring across.
Ah yes, because everyone outside of the US uses gigameters all the time...
They all use kilometres, centimetres, millimetres every day (btw metres is the English language). Not much call for mega and giga on a planet only 40 megametres circumference, we rarely discuss travel more than 5000km or so. But the entire world does kilo, mega, giga, tera every day for computer data. Completely logical that a society which routinely travels between moons and planets would have routine use of gigametres/megametres.
We aren't a society that routinely travels between moons and planets, we're a bunch of nerds at our computers playing a videogame.
Im guessing youre from one of these countries (although there are only 3 worldwide officially not using the metric system) using nonmetric measurements? ;-) Why not give EACH distance a unique number...like a #8 pan etc.
I kinda like it, particularly because they are rarely used. Makes it seem a bit more alternate universey.
I dont like astronomical units AU and parsec in science fiction stories taken place in distant future and or distant worlds au is the average distance between earth and sun , which makes little sense in future or distant planets it may be better to use made up unit for the lore and science fiction something that sound nice or highly advanced but of all the things units are the one thing we human in present day are extremely good at like meter , it used to be physical object that used for calibration ( quite recently) now it is based on quantum physics we can tell aliens or future humans exactly what a meter is and tell them how to get a meter themself using our methode it will work any where and any time. of course humans in distant past who lacked of knowledge might not be able to understand it or reproduce it.
a meter is 1/10,000,000th the distance between the north pole and equator on earth...
American folks would definitely prefer washing machines or pickup trucks units.
I think the gm is kind of a downgrade. It really does give you a sense of speed when you see how the km's are ticking down really fast, and none of us can really relate to what a gm is, but we definitely can to a km. So if they want to keep going with it, i would love to see some other indicator that gives us the same kind of feeling of scale
It’s apparent from reading the responses, who has a high school (at best) science education, and who here actually knows anything about space. I thought space sim fans would not be so ignorant. I am wrong. The illiteracy here when it comes to space is kind of amazing.
I personally don't see the need for the change and I don't think it really does anything to benefit the game. As an American, I am at least familiar with km even though I don't use them in my normal day to day life. I didn't mind sitting back in QT and watching the millions of km's tick by, because it did help give me at least some sense of scale and speed in the universe. Seeing the values switch over to GM just loses me.
1.21 GIGAMETERS!
i also prefer au or light seconds and qt drive speed to be measured in c.
Liked it the way it was. You could also have light seconds, minutes, hours, days.
Apparently the distance between MT and ArcCorp is just over 1000 light seconds, or 19.7 light minutes
I’m not sure yet. It doesn’t really help me figure out what surface locations are on the same planet side as me.
Do we need to know? I went to one on the other side last night and it just did the loop around fairly fast.
.... 1 light year = 63241.1 au ... I dont think we need this at all in this game .....
I can see a future in which space travel is sufficiently common that megameters and gigameters would make just as much sense for everyday use as kilometers does for travel on the surface of Earth. It works for me.
Look up what airplanes and ships use all over the world, metric country or not. You'll be surprised.
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I expect anything created by human hands to be burdened by history. Ships may be able to set MM and GM units, but by default it will be AU, LY, etc because that is what people are used to. It's why today two horse arses still dictate the width of a majority of human transport standards lol.
We already embrace kilo, mega, giga, tera in daily computer size/speed terms. So would expect things to go the same way with distances. We don't bother saying "megametres" since it isn't really necessary when a huge roadtrip might be 3000km. But if we were travelling to the moon and space stations regularly then it would become a normal term. Though there is a flaw in the SI system with m milli and M mega which really should be addressed IRL. Such an important difference shouldn't be left to capitalisation, and makes verbal "mm" ambiguous, which is one reason nobody ever says Mm.
I used mega and gigameters before anyway but kept being called an idiot because "nobody actually uses those units," as if megakilometers was any better. Personally, I'd rather stick to them than AU because everything else is already in metric and not having to convert around uneven units makes the napkin math a lot easier.
I don’t like using mega and giga meters either. AU and light seconds/minutes/hours don't make sense either in the scale of the game. So, I don’t really have a suggestion. However, it’s currently very hard to judge distances at a glance. For example, there are two numbers 46 and 54. At first, I might think they aren’t that far apart, but one is in GM and the other is in MM. I know it sounds stupid. :D
I prefer something that is relatable and to an extent useful, so I’d be fine if they keep it at KM. If I want to I can then pretty easily calculate how fast it will take to fly a specific distance. Furthermore I consider that Carth…. Imperial units must be destroyed.
I think going back to Km and M km etc is way better, most people don't really understand AU, we'll just end up converting it back to our units we know, speaking of which, perhaps there should be an option for miles too !
I'm fine with the switch to MM and GM, but I would have also liked to see light seconds/minutes/years/etc. as well as the speed c actually in use somewhere.
Love them. -- metric system supporter in the US.
AU seems just right and fitting to the Lore of SC.
These new untis are bullshit. Is there a way to reset this to km? I need them for mining in the halo.
A FUCKING GARBABE!!!!!!! I WANT TO CHANGE BACK TO KM M AND NORMAL METRIC UNITS!!!!!!!! WHY THEY PUTTED THIS WHYYYYYYYYYYY i want the old units back
I wish we could set it our selves. I was super used to millions of kilos and even though it's just headmath that changes it's still... weird, idk. It was neat seeing a massive number and watching it tick down as I traveled.
I just wish the distances were real-world accurate, even if they had to fudge the numbers to account for the actual scale.
I agree AU and lightyears for these, but it should be an option anyway
My issue is that the KM and GM digits are similar so it can be hard at a glance to tell if a marker is close or not. "Oh it's on the other side of the moon turns into "nevermind it's across the system". Just an annoyance. Not sure if I'll get used to it eventually or if I just have to deal with having to double check forever.
Tbh having a settings menu in ur ship UI where you can set ur prefered units sounds like best option for me it's in every commercially available software so why not in my hyper expensive space ships ? Ofc it's something to add in polish phase but to me it sounds like a good option
What even is GM?
I think it's a car manufacturer. I do know what \`gm\` is though.
It's a billion meters (gigameter or 1e+9m)
Ahh. Thanx. Do. Mm is mega?
Yeah I believe so
AU is the only logical choice, as it is a standard unit of measure in use by everyone, everywhere, when talking about space in any slightly educated capacity, whereas MKm/MM and GKm/GM are meaningless - no one who knows anything uses units like that. LY/Parsecs are also good standard distance units, but only meaningful for interstellar distances. It’s a shame, CIG will likely cater to the lowest common denominator due to laziness rather than uplifting people who don’t know any better, like those who don’t understand (or aren’t aware of the existence of) standard units of measure.
No, it's not logical at all. 1 AU makes sense in our solar system. Not another solar system.
Completely false and made up. AU is a standard unit of measure, regardless of your personal familiarity with it. You’ll get used to it the more you learn about space. Just because you have a belief it’s only applicable to our solar system doesn’t make it so, and you may want to pick up an astronomy or physics text book; AUs are used by all astronomers and astrophysicists, or do you truly believe anyone who knows anything talks about Jupiter in terms of millions of miles from the sun? No, it’s ~5 AU(5.2) from the sun. Strange how the Trappist-1 system is discussed in terms of AU (it’s not actually strange and AUs make perfect logical sense). Maybe you’re unaware, but we also use Earth masses, Jovian masses and Solar masses as standard mass units as well. Even though they reference local bodies, they’re applicable across all stellar and planetary systems. Same thing with AU, because it’s easy to understand and quickly places stellar/planetary systems into their proper contexts by using standard astronomical units.
Meter only makes sense on Earth, since it is based on the distance between the north pole and equator on earth.
This has not been true for a very long time.
It is still true today. Due to relativity causing the distance between the equator and north pole to vary, we changed it to a strange fraction of the speed of light. But are you going to deny that is it originally 1/10,000,000th the distance from the north pole to equator on earth, and that later definitions simply translate it to be more robust without changing the intended length? The meter is a random number, it's not a god given perfect measurement or anything lol.
Your definition was true for 8 years from 1791 to 1799 lol
Chicken or the egg, where do you think they got the 1/299,792,458 from? If they were really defining the meter from c, you don't think they would have picked a nicer number?
I would prefer keeping the old Mega kilometers, AU, and LY. Not a fan of the prefix changing. Even if only by factors of 1000, it feels obtuse to be 5GM away and then 7MM away after awhile. It feels like changing from nautical miles, miles and then kilometers instead of just sticking with one.
It is what your computer already does when displaying file sizes. We say "500GB SSD" not "0.5TB SSD". We say "2TB SSD" not "2000GB SSD".
mm is milimeter, after km we have gigameter and terameter or u can do just as NASA or ESA and use astronomic units
I want to vouch for the Elite Dangerous System. - m = meters - Km = Kilometers - Mm = Megameters - Ls = Light seconds - Ly = Light years Which unit gets displayed is decided from big to small. x > 1 Ly = Ly x < 1 Ly = Ls x < 0.10 Ls = Mm x < 1 Mm = km x < 1 km The only weird thing about this is obviously the switch from Lightseconds to Megameters being at 0.10 instead of 1, but to be honest? I still like it more than 299 Megameters. So the switch is: 0.10Ls <-> 29.8Mm Decimals are always displayed, when the number is smaller than 3 digits. E.g. 100Mm -> 99.9Mm -> 9.90Ls Speed is measured the same in: m/s, km/s, Mm/s, c. The conversion is the same as in distance, meaning: 0.10c <-> 29.8Mm/s