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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   30205 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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I've never understood the argument the US customary units are "human-centric".

Is 0.00731x the weight of an average man really that much more intuitive than 0.0161x? How about 0.588x the historical average height vs. 0.0149x (or was it 0.179x)? Is 2.63 just-noticeable-temperature-difference-intervals worse than 1.46 of them? (I'm not going to bother questioning the zero point of Fahrenheit. Freezing is much better.)

I can tell the difference between 1/4", 5/16", and 3/8" head hex screws from across the room, but that's just because I've seen tens of thousands of each of them. There's nothing intrinsically human about any of my intuitions, it's just what I've learned (and no, I haven't learned metric to the same degree).

Imperial is great because it has so many quick levels of accuracy. When you take a diagonal are you working to the nearest inch? Half inch? Quarter inch? 16th? 1/32000th?
With metric what are you gonna do? "Aha, I see ve have measured 1.285 meters to 1.315 meters, a 97.7% degree of accuracy!"

Are you reporting a length as 11 16/32" if that's what you measure? If not, then it's plain worse communication than 11.50" because it's ambiguous with 11.5". Reduced fractions (e.g. 1/2") is a horrible system, and expanded fractions (e.g. 16/32") is almost as bad.

Also, the multiple levels of measurement was the first thing I dropped when I did construction: everything was in 1" or 1/8" increments, and we didn't use feet (so something might be 135" or 135 1/4", but never 11' 3 1/4", 135 5/16" or 135 1/2" from that measurement). Same with the manufacturing I'm doing now: it's 1/16" (reported as 1/16ths, so 8/16 is the proper format) or 0.001", and never feet when it is imperial.

I've never understood the argument the US customary units are "human-centric".

I mean, I find it really easy to work with some units because I know their origins. It's much easier to know that a "league" is about as far a person can walk in an hour, and it is 3 miles, and then to work from that fact to how far my D&D party could walk with 8 hours of travel on flat terrain, than to do anything involving distance with metric units.

In practice, 24 mi in eight hours would make me assume the party was made up entirely of marathon runners.

Obligatory mention that GURPS, unlike Dungeons & Dragons, has multiple sets of rules for long-distance travel, depending on how much detail you want. Assuming default humans with no encumbrance at all:

  • Basic Set p. 351: Hiking achieves a speed of 50 miles per day, at no cost.
  • Low-Tech Companion 2: Weapons and Warriors p. 32: Hiking achieves a speed of 2.5 miles per hour, at a cost of 1 FP (Fatigue Point) per hour. Once you've lost 7 FP, you move at half speed. Resting regenerates 6 FP per hour. Some quick algebra indicates that the optimal strategy for a 16-hour day is 14 hours and 40 minutes of hiking mixed with 1 hour and 20 minutes of resting, for an overall speed of 37 miles per day. But you may want to keep your FP higher than 3, just in case you are ambushed while hiking.
    • The Last Gasp (Pyramid vol. 3 iss. 44 (Alternate GURPS II) p. 4): It's unrealistic that your speed isn't reduced until you've lost an entire 7 FP. Instead, your speed is reduced by one-fifth after you've lost 5 FP, and by two-fifths after you've lost 9 FP. Also, it's unrealistic that your FP regenerate at 6 per hour. Instead, your reservoir of FP is divided into 5 points of mild fatigue, which regenerate at 1 FP per 2 hours, and 5 points of severe fatigue, which regenerate at 1 FP per 8 hours. Some quick algebra indicates that the optimal strategy for a 16-hour day is 8 hours and 40 minutes of hiking mixed with 7 hours and 20 minutes of resting, for an overall speed of 22 miles per day.
  • Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures p. 21: Hiking achieves a speed of 2.5 miles per hour. Instead of doing a bunch of finicky FP math, just assume that you spend 30 minutes striking camp in the morning, 3 hours resting throughout the day, 30 minutes pitching camp in the evening, and 12 hours actually walking, for an overall speed of 30 miles per day. If you are ambushed while hiking, you are missing 1 FP when the encounter starts.

Seems like the best rule would be something like "pick an exertion level from "Gentle Amble" to "Forced March". Multiply by the difficulty of terrain and individual encumbrance. That's how much fatigue you gain per hour of marching.
The straight-line distance you travel is your march speed x hours x terrain difficulty modifier (from "marked highway" to "the cursed swamp-forest maze of fuck-you."
Tune the table so the DM can have players traveling from 0-40 miles a day.

So you're only moving at the speed of your slowest party member, and the wizard is going to arrive more tired than the monk-ranger. Maybe have him ride the barbarian or use a few spell slots on Harkonnen's Floating Fatass

GURPS also incorporates rules for forced marching, terrain difficulty, and encumbrance, but I omitted them from this simplified overview.

Ahem

It's easier to remember historical trivia and perform the unit conversion than just "5 km/h is walking speed"?

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