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What do you use for units of measure? Do you assume that we will have gone completely metric in a few centuries, and convert everything?
Personally, I write for the READER, and my audience (at least where I market and sell) is Amazon's .com, not their .co.uk or .au domains. Sure, they'll sell there, but I haven't seen any sales yet, and few indie authors can afford to market in more than one domain.
So with this in mind, I'll use metric where it makes sense, but imperial where the reader would have to do a conversion. For example, orbital velocity is 28,000 kph and a standard gravity is 9.8 m/S2. However, a character's height and weight would been in feet/inches and pounds.
What's your approach?
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I use the imperial system, because I'm American and I can measure past ten with my shoes on (/s).
Jokes aside, I use modern IRL units of measurement because "300 miles" doesn't interrupt the flow of the story like "76 Quaburts" does, and "98 units away" has no meaning. Most everyone knows at least vaguely that 300 miles is a fairly long distance, even if they're only familiar with metric. I explain outside of the story itself that I'm avoiding using made-up units because the reader would have to stop and consult a reference to know what that unit means. Nothing screws up the flow of a sniper scene quite like having to stop and look up multiple fictional units of measurement for distance, speed, and angle to understand what's going on.
EXACTLY!!!
Especially describing people. I would have to use Google to know if 150 cm was short or tall. Or if 125 Kg was fat or skinny. It would make many people stop momentarily. One of the advantages we have is that the people in Europe and Austrailia are FAMILIAR with imperial measurements. US products have been to pervasive around the world, and have carried our measurement system with them.
I only use made-up measurements for aliens in first or near-first contact. Like "Dex", which is the number of gradiations in an alien's circle, which they divide into 100 instead of 360. Kinda-sorta like our Radians. But I have to EXPLAIN it.
I think the units interrupt the flow regardless of the units. If you tell me 300 miles, I think about something 300 miles from where I am. I know I can travel by car sixty miles per hour, so I do the math. How far could I travel in five hours. Then I'm back to the story with how fast can the characters travel? On horseback? On foot? By skimmer?
Ugh. I've entirely lost the plot thread. Better to say 76 Quaburts and have a character exclaim that travel will take two days, or however long it will take. Or maybe they will run out of fuel. Show the impact on the characters, don't tell the reader the distance.
"Give me a range!"
"Four hundreds yards, sir!"
"When they hit two hundred pop a flare, we'll break cover and open fire."
"Roger that!"
Ten seconds passed, Sir shifted in the trench, taking pressure off the salvaged prosthetic leg that was half an inch too long. Thirty more seconds passed and he checked his men's spacing. Twenty feet between each fighter, enough that the enemy couldn't take out more than one man with a grenade.
The flare hissed into the sky and Sir drove himself up and propped his 15mm THUNKR rifle on the firing ledge of the trench and hammered the oncoming line of machines.
The discarding sabot rounds slammed into alien steel at over six thousand feet per second, slowing the charge as the first rank fell and the following ranks were impeded by the wreckage.
At one hundred and fifty yards, Sir reloaded.
At seventy five yards, Sir fired his last two grenades.
At fifteen yards, the humans erupted from their trenches and Sir drove all eight inches of his durasteel bayonet into the power feed of one of the hated machines.
It's not very polished and pretty heavy handed, but I think that's a decent example of using units to move things along instead of bogging them down. You know how close the enemy, roughly how fast they're moving, that things have gone poorly enough to just slap prosthetics onto the wounded and put them back into combat, they're using big guns with powerful ammunition, the enemy is still closing the distance, and those big guns have big knives attached.
For me the units are bogging it down and reducing emotional impact. Instead of telling the reader "ten seconds" you can show what happened in those ten seconds. Adrenaline distorts perception of time and space, so the POV character would be unable to accurately judge ten seconds. It comes off as a narrator intrusion. Unless the character has a heads-up display and so could report time and distance accurately.
This might be too much to ask, but would you rewrite it to show me what you mean? I'm only imagining an ill-defined description of the spaces and time involved instead of the more deliberate awareness that I was going for, and I know that's not what you're saying. I'd like to have a better understanding of how you'd implement that.
Metric or appropriate astronomic or physics units (ie light seconds, lightyears, electronvolts for particle physics, etc etc etc)
Why? Because I just prefer to use metric.
In-universe - they probably have a lot of different measurements going on, but to be honest, I just make them appear as metric as to appear to the reader. This is also why it seems that everyone on my universe speaks English (when their language should actually be very, very different from it.)
…Metric for sci-fi or make it entirely fictional.
Whenever possible, I will use objective measures for units: for big measures of energy I will use "sol" equivalent to the output the Sun (with backstory about the origin of that measure if necessary; generally that's part of the non-explicit worldbuilding), measure planetary masses in units based on Earth (or equivalent), etc. If there's metric (and often there is) I will try to explain why it still exists (in my current setting, humans serve as a type of ancient race and have distributed something like the metric system and Panglo, a universal language).
I have used imaginary units in stories, but they tend to bog things down unless you're really careful with them. I've also stolen the "rationalized units" approach that people like Greg Egan and Charlie Stross have used in the past, with kiloseconds and megameters, and that works okay in some cases where you want to emphasize the alienness of the setting.
Actually, the "Sol" as a unit of measurement goes all the way back to "Invaders from the Infinite" by John W. Campbell back in 1961.
I'm pretty sure he poached it from astronomy and astrophysics where it's been a unit for a bit too, and I think I stole it from someone who stole it from him (I wanna say it showed up in someone's shared universe short stories in Analog?
I use outdated terminology whose meanings most readers won't instinctively know mixed with Americanized metric such as "clicks".
For example "he's accurate at five hundred paces" or "the sensor array can't detect anything a hundred clicks out".
As an American, writing for people who read the story (even if just me), metric is for ammo. Imperial for basically everything else 😂
That makes sense! 9mm 20mm 30mm.
BRRRRRRRRT
I love that sound!
Rotary Cannon: The ability to say "Fuck You" fifty times a second.
Depends on the story. One series is clearly USA all the way, so that's Imperial. In another series it's all metric. But I don't convert in-universe, I just stick to one UoM as that's easier for readers...and for me
…Cubits wuz good enough for Pharaoh and the Canaanites; they’s good ‘nuff f’me…
My units are metric. But in-world metric where they had already mastered space flight when laying down the system. So an AU is exactly 150,000 km. The speed of light in vacuum is exactly 3e8 m/s. A standard unit of quintessence is equivalent to 1.21 gigawats. And the kilogram... yah... they are still scratching their head over that.
Instead of a platinum iridium cube, they use however many moles of (hydrogen1, Oxygen16) water molecules (at ph7) fit inside of a 10cm cube (at STP). But then again, they have literal Maxwell daemons to do the counting.
Units of measure are a great why to show off worlding building. Use of imperial measurement suggests that space was colonized by the United States or Britain. It also shows how the POV character thinks.
It seems unlikely that the POV character would think about orbital velocity as 28,000 kph or standard gravity is as 9.8 m/S2. The same goes for thinking about hight. Consider how rarely you can determine someones height accurately or even think about it.
My fictional world uses base twelve metric. 10;6 is twelve and a half meters. I only use it when showing something about the world or POV character.
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/futuremeasure.php
Metric.
1G is 10m/s2
Time is metric as well.
Lightyears.