you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 7 points 6 days ago (7 children)

Yeah, but satellites don't orbit at 2 - 200 megameters, they orbit at 2,000 to 200,000 kilometers for some reason.

  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 6 days ago* (4 children)

    You do see Mm and Gm sometimes in telemetries and infographics. Sadly no one uses it in spoken language though

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago (2 children)
  • [–] 6 points 6 days ago (1 child)

    I think the fact that you intuitively know which unit should come next is kinda the point though. What's after a mile? An armpit? How many miles to pit? Is that the same for a nautical pit? Are satellite orbits measured in regular pits or nautical pits?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 5 days ago

    that's the thing with customary units, you generally don't change them. If something gets unruly in a unit, you just make a new one and any conversion factor is just trivia at that point.

    Astronomy did it several times with AU, light-years, and parsecs. It doesn't really matter how many meters any of those are.

  • source
  • parent