UNITS OF MEASUREMENT U.S.NAVY
 

Hello everyone:
After trying a while the Silent Hunter III, and always end sunk as part of the 70% of German submarines sunk in the war. Decided to find a more balanced submarine warfare and am about to install Silent Hunter IV, at least only 15.6% of American submarines were sunk in the war, and that means being able to play without much stress as I produced the Battle of the Atlantic. I've seen pictures and videos of the USN submarines in SH4, and in them the depth gauge has a maximum mark of 165, I guess refers to feet, not meters. Moreover a target distance measured (range) in yards there and not in meters? Other units of measurement to the metric system is used? Square inch for water pressure? etc. etc. Thank You So Much.

A meter is a measurement drawn up by arrogant Frenchmen, thinking that measuring things for the use of man should have their basis in measurements of dead things. Like the planet Earth. They carefully measured the circumference of the Earth, took a fraction of that and called it (ta da!!!!!) the meter. Made a platinum bar they put in some vault as the arbiter of the new unit. Imagine, people who liked to style themselves "humanists" dehumanizing the entire measurement system! Makes sense. To the ancient Greeks man was the measure of all things. To the French of the time man was only raw material for the guillotine.

Except that they measured the Earth wrong. And the meter is just an arbitrary unit with no basis in either human or "physical science" measurement. It is a group of crazy French "scientists" telling the world how to measure things.

Their next mistake was to depart from the natural order of things, being sized in ratios determined by multiples of small prime numbers and hautily deciding that different levels of measurement should differ from each other by factors of ten. Mind you NOTHING in the natural world is scaled in such a way. When a tree branches, the diameter of the branch is not one-tenth the diameter of the trunk. There is no proportion in a snowflake that is a factor of ten from anything else in the snowflake. Measuring your height in meters is ridiculously too large a unit and centimeters ridiculously too small. There is no way out. The metric system steps on its foreskin from beginning to end.

So to justify that, the metric apologists say, our units are in factors of ten for easy calculation. Whoopee doooo.:woot:Who cares! The universe is not constructed for ease of calculation. That's stuffing a square peg in a round hole just because you don't have a square drill. And I'm typing this on a device that doesn't give a rip whether something is base 10 or base 16. It's all easy. As a matter of fact it works in base 2 and second level up figures everything in base 16. It has to convert base 10 to even work with it. So the metric system and the imperial system are equally foreign to the computer. And it works both at equal speeds.

Final nail in the metric coffin. Even the Germans figured their speed in knots. Do you know why? It goes back to the hauty French "scientists" who botched their calculation of the circumference of the earth. You see the knot DOES have a precise fraction of the diameter of the earth.

You see, a nautical mile is equal to one minute of longitude at the equator. The imperial measurement system DID NOT botch the earth's circumferance. Their units, the nautical mile and the knot (one nautical mile per hour) actually help you navigate! (imagine that.....a useful measurement unit, what a concept--totally foreign to the metric gods) If you travel at one knot for 60 hours you will traverse one degree of longitude or latitude at the equator, and pretty close for longitude all over the world, with latitude proportional to your latitude. At 45º latitude you'll travel about 2º longitude per hour at one knot.

Because the imperial measurement is useful and corresponds to the natural order in ways that the metric system never can, even the Germans were smart enough to use it for their navigational unit.

Again, the natural world is proportioned in ratios of products of small prime numbers: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 with proportions of multiples of the smaller numbers much more prevalent. A proportion of 1/10 occurs nowhere in the natural order, so in measuring that way we conceal the natural order of the universe. Whole number ratios become dizzying processions of numbers after the decimal point. Sense is lost and understanding turned to gibberish.

Even metric fanatics are not stupid enough to divide the day into ten hours or the week into ten days or the year into 10 months. They continue to divide the circle into 360 degrees and other quite sensible things because even they are knowledgeable that ultimately the metric system analyzes into pure human hubris and foolishness.

To measure things designed for the use of man, measurements derived from the size of man is appropriate. An inaccurate fraction of the earth's circumference is just loony. To measure the earth, an accurate fraction is appropriate and the French "scientists" botched the job, leaving the nautical mile unchallenged, even in countries which went metric. There's a lesson in there.:rock:

For American submarines the relevant measurement units are yards, nautical miles and feet. The low depth meter stops at 165 feet, the higher depth meter shows deeper levels in feet. There are about 2,000 yards in a nautical mile, making calculations very easy.

The number of hundred yards you travel in three minutes is equal to your speed in knots by the way. That's how you measure target speeds. Time two positions 3 minutes apart, if they are 1100 yards apart the target is moving at 11 knots.

American subs must be fought differently than U-boats. They are much faster surfaced than the U-boats and that is the natural realm of the submarine, on the surface, scanning the most square miles of ocean in 24 hours, submerging only when necessary and then only for the minimum possible amount of time. On the huge Pacific hunting is a numbers game. Your number of targets will always be proportional to the number of square miles of surface you can search in a day. A submerged submarine is harmless to the enemy and a danger to itself. The mission of the submarine is to be dangerous, and a submarine hiding at 400 meters is completely safe to the enemy. Don't let them be safe.

The best remedy for being in fear for your own life is to make the enemy more afraid for his. Quit hiding and attack!:arrgh!:

Your next obstacle is going to be "The American TDC is just CRAZY!!!!!" It is very different. But it is different with a stroke of genius. Everything the German TDC can do, the American can do. But the opposite is not true. There are special capabilities there which are well worth learning. I've made a practice of teaching German techniques adapted for American submarines with the Dick O'Kane and John P Cromwell manual attack methods. It works great. But you cannot adapt American targeting procedures to U-boats. They didn't have the tools to do that.

Rocking Robbins:
Very interesting and detailed explanation of the basis of the imperial system and its inprovement on the metric. It is likely to be right, and at least I will not discuss your arguments. In Argentina as in other countries of the world the metric system is always used, although curiously at hardware stores to buy the inch bolts and nuts are used to measure lengths and threads. But the vast majority have become accustomed to the metric, and we find it difficult to adopt a different one. The conversion of measures from one system to another can create considerable confusion in critical moments when you have an enemy ship in the periscope focusing, and this is not good. I'll tell you frankly, if as in the case of other versions of Silent Hunter, "Wolves of Pacific" gives me the option to choose Imperial or metric system, I will adopt the latter. In fact the crew voices are heard in English, but everyone will see the texts in Spanish, which is the language I speak and understand better. This does not mean that with practice I then decide to change the system, to make the game more realistic. Indeed orders in -some English and I know I can understand the well-all without reading the translation. Thank you very much for such a full explanation Comrade!

Wow! I never would have suspected that. There has to be a good story behind why that is true and it sure would be fun to know what it is.

Really! It's a crime that no-one has made up a mod to translate the voices to Spanish. I know that there are several players from Central and South America in this forum and it really surprises me that neither Ubi nor anyone else has thought to localize the language. After all, part of the function of the game is to teach how the American sailors thought, how it was different from the German way and how it was also the same sometimes. Understanding the spoken words is a large part of that. I'm glad you spend more time understanding English than the average American spends understanding other languages.

And make no mistake--the imperial measurement system is not an improvement on the metric, because it was here first. Strengths and weaknesses of the system are its own, based on no other systems other than Roman and Greek and barbarian tribes of Europe. And you can tell that it wasn't thought up by some educated people because they wouldn't have been concerned enough about how the units of measurement fit their use as by the mathematical relationships and ease of calculation.

We do the same thing when we measure something in units that don't fit the task. We say that the Milky Way galaxy is moving at 1.5 million miles per hour, 2,414,016 kilometers per hour, and think to ourselves that the galaxy is moving like a bat out of hell at breathtaking speed. And it's because we're using completely inappropriate units to describe the movement.

Let's use scale speed instead. When we look at something and say "that's moving slowly" or "that's moving quickly" it has nothing to do with its actual speed in any units. We judge by the amount of time it takes to travel its own length. We see a fly zipping around at 5 kph, 2 mph and say, "this guy is really ripping!" Because he's moving 20 times his own length in a second. We look at a car moving the same speed and say "it's just crawling" because it takes many seconds to move its own length.

Let's do a thought experiment. You and I are standing next to a car and trying to decide if it's parked. We look at it for a couple of hours and we can't measure any movement at all. We agree it's parked, right?

We're standing far enough from the Milky Way to look at it at the same angular size as the car and trying to decide how fast it's moving. How will we do that? See how long it takes to travel its own length. How long is that? Try 50 million years. No instrument in the world could detect that the "car" isn't parked when it's moving at one and a half million miles per hour.

So our science books seriously mislead us with true information because they use units of measurement that are completely inappropriate for measuring galaxies and their movements. That's what happens when you use the wrong kind of units for the task. At that point your understanding of what is happening is so warped it doesn't matter if the units are easy to calculate. Might as well measure our height in microns. Nobody would think that was appropriate. But they don't apply the same thinking to other tasks.

Rocking Robbins:
As for what I counted on using inches as the unit of measurement in hardware stores, I tried to find out the reason for this but the answer is simply that it has always been so. The funny thing is that those planning to do some work material take necessary measures in centimeters and millimeters, but then the call at the hardware store in inches, not curious?
Regarding the language in Silent Hunter, when using the SH3 I chose the voices in German, and now with the SH4 will choose the English voices. I like to listen to orders in the language corresponding because it gives more realism to the game and puts me in the same climate.

American scientists also care, since units of 10 are perfect for any kind of scientific calculation.

As for the kilometer itself, it was defined in 1791 as the distance around the Earth on a line between the north pole and Paris, divided by 10,000.

The distance around the equator is, as your link shows, 21,600 nautical miles. It is also 40,003 kilometers, the imprecision coming from the difference in circumference between the North Pole-Paris line and the Equator itself.

A nautical mile is therefore not 2000 yards, as it used to be, but 2025.37 yards, or 6076.1155 feet. There was also the British nautical mile, which was precisely 6080 feet, or 2026.6667 yards. The change was made in 1929 by the First International Extraordinary Hydrographic Conference, held in Monaco. The agreed-upon official Nautical Mile is precisely 1852 meters.

I agree with your assessment for the most part, but you do seem awfully angry about this. :sunny:

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the System International is that all its measures are derived from time, i.e the second. Originally a second was the length of a day divided by 24 by 60 by 60; now it's defined by a similar (but more precise) amount of time quantified by the radioactive decay of a Cesium isotope. The meter, originally based on an imprecise measure of the earth, is now based on a precise measure of the speed of light. The gram, originally based on the mass of a certain volume of water at a certain temperature, has evolved to the mass of a specific kilogram-defining object made of metal. Thus, Scientific Units are based on immutable reality, and can be derived in a lab independent of the original measures (indeed, in an independent galaxy). SI units also have the advantage of being made to be scaled, whereas the English/Imperial system requires use of ridiculous scales or converting units (and fail to measure tiny things). It is perhaps telling to note that English/Imperial units are now largely defined in terms of their SI counterparts. Even the supposedly concrete English/Imperial units were originally based in flawed measures of variable natural phenomena.

So SI units are vastly superior when measurements must be precisely communicated and repeatable, eg in science. Certainly Dick O'Kane did not need to know anything about the decay of Cesium to send a Japanese freighter to the bottom of the sea.

Again, we have computers which just as easily calculate imperial and metric unit as both are entirely foreign to the hybrid base 2/base 16 computer processor. Therefore there is no calculation advantage to either system. The computer can even work with randomly chosen measurements in both schemes. Ease of calculation no longer qualifies as a basis for declaring the metric system superior.

Oh, and tomorrow I'll explain the reason for defining time by the rate of radioactive decay and for the mysterious leap seconds we seem to add at random times. I gotta get off this crazy cell phone screen keyboard before I go crazy!

Okay, I'm on a real keyboard (what a relief!)

First of all, the speed of light is not an immutable constant. It is, in fact, different through every different medium through which light can be transmitted. Even space is different degrees of vacuum, depending on the density of gasses, plasma or dust light travels at different speeds through space even. This can be proven by the fact that light refracts. It refracts because its speed changes when changing mediums.

Our atmosphere, for instance refracts light, visibly raising the apparent position of astronomical objects actually below the horizon to visibility above it. Therefore, distances defined as the length light travels in a certain length of time are not immutable, but variable.

Further, the dimensions of a standard object in a vault, as in the "mass of a specific kilogram-defining object made of metal" are similar to objects defining other systems of measurement, not immutable, changing dimensions with temperature, for instance, not able to be reproduced in distant galaxies. The visions of grandeur by these shortsighted "scientists" are just infested with hubris and false importance.

Just the idea of exchanging information with a distant galaxy is ludicrous. Forget the distant galaxy let's talk about our own. The closest major nebula to the Earth is the Orion Nebula, which is so large you can see it naked eye. It is a thousand light-years away. That means that the first radio signals of any information density, broadcast approximately 100 years ago are a tenth of the way there. That's a tiny fraction of the 100,000 light-year diameter of the Milky Way!

The closest galaxy similar to our own (there are several dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way which are closer) is the Andromeda Galaxy, M31. It is two million light-years away. Now let's talk about communication. That's a total joke. We're isolated. And remember communication is a 2-way process, taking twice as long in years as the light-year distance. 4 million years to communicate a single message to Andromeda Galaxy and back. Silly proposition by people educated far beyond their intelligence.

Our communications threshold right now is a few hundredths of a percent of our own galaxy. If we received a reply we wouldn't know what they were replying to. We haven't received anything that we can recognize. Spread spectrum digital communication that we primitive beings use today wouldn't be recognized as communication by anybody. And language itself is entirely arbitrary, a community project developed with no plan or coordination. My bad.:har:

And we're assuming that our methods of sound and written communication would correspond to any foreign methods, a cute and quaint primitive thought. Our ignorance is showing.:D

Okay, leap seconds and cesium. The Earth is hiding a dirty secret. The moon, when it was formed, was much closer to the Earth than it is now, most likely on the order of 1/10 the distance, maybe as close as 1/20. It was ten times as large in the sky as it is now, not able to be covered by four fingers held at arm's length. Can you imagine that! The gravitational interplay between Earth and the Moon causes tides on both objects.

The net result is that the Moon steals rotational energy from the Earth and converts it into orbital velocity. That causes the Moon to recede from the earth at about the same velocity as your fingernails grow. It was greater at first and receding now as it is further from the Earth. That means that defining time as a fraction or multiple of an Earth day is using a variable standard! Our day grows longer every day. That's been a known fact for more than fifty years but no one was able to prove it by measurement.

Enter the cesium clock. It keeps the same time basically forever--as long as it runs. With two cesium clocks, one on a flying plane and another on the ground, scientists were able to measure the change (predicted by the theory of relativity) in the rate of time between a fixed spot on Earth (which is not fixed of course) and an airplane moving in relation to the "fixed" clock. (At the end of the flight the two cesium clocks no longer agreed. Time itself is not an immutable characteristic!) It also revealed that the day is indeed increasing and measured the exact amount. The rate of change isn't constant. So every year the cesium time is compared to the planet and when necessary, a leap second is added to the clock to resynchronize the rotation of the earth to what time we say it is.

And now you know a very small portion of the rest of the story.

All units of measurement are arbitrary, none are immutable, and since they are measuring a universe which is in itself not immutable, that is the way it probably should be.:D:D

Well, what I can say? your level of knowledge is impressive. I fear too much for this old retired policeman, who only seeks to entertain with a good computer game. But equally it is a pleasure to read you!!

Thank you! These science guys are just too sure of themselves for their own good. One thing the New Horizons spacecraft going to Pluto should have taught that we should have known already is that we never know what we're going to learn. We'll always be surprised. The number of answers we have is completely overwhelmed by the answers we can't even imagine. Heck, I doubt we know the questions.:D:D:D

We live in interesting times.

I can calculate a dopamine drip with a pen and paper in the back of an ambulance going 80mph down the highway... But what you just posted Robbins, blew my freaking mind... :huh:

Hey Rockin Robbins, I have really enjoyed your posts in this thread. Great stuff.

As for the metric system, well you're lucky you are not Canadian. As a 65 year old I had to endure the introduction of this system when I was already an adult and had been educated in the Imperial system. Now I buy gasoline by the litre but deck screws by the pound. The temperature is given in degrees Celsius but my tape measure is in inches. I really don't know which system is better, although I prefer the Imperial system, but to use both is madness. What a country. :O:

Your other posts about time and space etc. is fascinating. Keep it comin'.

:salute:

All units of measurement which come from humans are born out of arrogance since none of them take into account universal laws and constants of measurements. None of them reflect the inaccuracy of vibration bodies which make up the world the arrogant thought came from.

So outside of that I suppose the the least inaccurate measurement would be based on 1 Arc second but no one has decided to use that one as yet either. Although some skippers in WWII did actually use the Arc second they did not know what it was they were really doing and was calculated in their brain and not by a slide rule.

You call it leading the target by use of guesstimation based on visual inputs and estimations of forward momentum.

It is still an Arc second however.