History Memes

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[–] becausechemistry@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I still don’t understand nautical miles. Everyone knows regular miles. Or even feet, that’s what Blue Origin does because it’s relative to aircraft altitude that people might know. But nautical miles? I don’t get it.

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[–] iocase@lemmy.zip 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

It's because if you travel at one knot for an hour you'll travel a nautical mile. Still dumb but that's where it comes from... And of course knot comes from knots in a rope tied to a board or bag dropped off the side of the ship to measure it's forward speed.

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[–] becausechemistry@piefed.social 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

Sorry, I misspoke. I understand what a nautical mile is. What I don’t understand is why ULA describes both downrange distances and altitude in nautical miles when covering rocket launches.

Kilometers are great. Used in sciencey stuff in the US and for everything in the rest of the world. Or miles / feet, which the primary audience in the US is familiar with. But nautical miles? Most people never interact with them. Not good for science and engineering communication with the general public.

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[–] iocase@lemmy.zip 1 point 3 months ago

Yeah that's very true especially since rocket scientists use metric for all of their calculations so the target audience speaking in nm is basically just pilots

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[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 point 3 months ago

It's a space ship I guess. I have a fondness for sci-fi that uses naval conventions because that's probably how things will end up going, because tradition takes priority over utility.