When will the US Navy switch to the metric system?

[Torpedo Fodder]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Ships and planes measure their speed in knots. This is true for every country, even France.

And there's a reason for that: 1 nautical mile is equal to 1 arc-minute of latitude. For this reason alone I don't see that unit of measurement going away.

[Tchocky]

I still think kilometres per hour is easier than furlongs per fortnight

[Chaotic42]

Originally Posted by Torpedo Fodder

And there's a reason for that: 1 nautical mile is equal to 1 arc-minute of latitude. For this reason alone I don't see that unit of measurement going away.

They could use UTMs instead of Geographic Coordinates.

[Schatten]

Originally Posted by Chaotic42

They could use UTMs instead of Geographic Coordinates.

That wouldn't exactly simplify things because you'd have to train people how to use those exclusively as well. If having to go metric means adding that to the situation, and the idea of going metric was to simplify things...well I don't see it being any simpler at all.

Medical use is metric yeah, but those sort of guys usually aren't doing your navigation or picking the right size shell out of the magazine so not really comparable. If your corpsmen are doing those things you have bigger problems than wondering exactly how many km it is to the next Starbucks...

Basically I'm going with the old "if it ain't broke don't fix it" standby.

(and if people from countries who use metric can't understand it, but our guys can, then that doesn't classify it as "broken" in my book either)

[Letum]

I hate the mixed up gun measurements.

At one point the UK had different guns in service that measured in:

UK inches,
USA inches,
continental cm,
continental mm,
UK pounds
and continental Kg

[Spoon 11th]

Aviation in general uses messy mixture of metric and non-metric units. Finnish air force switched from metric to imperial in 2004.

[bookworm_020]

The US Army uses a lot of metric measurments, due to NATO. The Navy can get away with it as there is little connection between ships in hardware.

The US is one of only three countries that still don't use metric. I don't think the rest of the world will convert to suit America! I know there was a stink in the US when ex-pat Aussies found that shipments of vegiemite were being destroyed at the border, due to the fact they didn't have imperial weights on them! Yet the Carmello Koala's got through despite them only haveing the metric weight on them!

[GlobalExplorer]

Originally Posted by Schatten

If having to go metric means adding that to the situation, and the idea of going metric was to simplify things...well I don't see it being any simpler at all.

Well you can only say that because you have never worked with it. In the metric system almost all calculations are based on powers of 10 (1 millimeter is 1 m / 1.000, kilogramm is 1000 gramm and so on). Another advantage of the metric system is, that units are compatible in very different areas of physics. for example unit for pressure is kg / m² , acceleration is m / s², this works the same with electricity, energy like 1 joule = 1 newton * 1 meter , 1 watt = 1 joule per second, just for examples, of course that's much easier to work with.

I think imperial units are "cool" in a way, and Britain and US will probably fight for them for another 1000 years, but objectively, the metric system is better.

There are exceptions however, and one of them is naval and geographic matters. Here nautical miles are better than metric units because they are based on the geoid, i.e. the earth's diameter / 360 degrees / 60 arc minutes = 1 nautical mile (1.8518 km). That means the earth has a diameter of exactly 21600 nm (which can be nicely divided), whereas in kilometers that's an odd 40075. So of course it's much better using nautical miles here than calculating with meters which are a totally arbitrary unit. For instance in 1 hour the earth rotates by exactly 900nm as compared to 1669.7916 km.

[Konovalov]

Last option for me. Hopefully never.

[Schatten]

GlobalExplorer, I was specifically saying adding the UTMs on top of the metric system wouldn't simplify anything. The metric system is easy enough on its own, but adding UTMs because you can't use any of your own charts anymore doesn't sound like a simplification but an adding to of training problems.

Well you can only say that because you have never worked with it.

Well I have managed to avoid dropping artillery on my own position using metric maps before...so I think I can say I have at least a passing familiarity with the metric system.

[GlobalExplorer]

Originally Posted by Schatten

Well I have managed to avoid dropping artillery on my own position using metric maps before...so I think I can say I have at least a passing familiarity with the metric system.

I see - well, then at least you could have blamed it on the metric system if something would have gone wrong!