Yep... and *$^%$0(!@#)-+\/>< to satisfy the letters

and on less than 64k of memory I might add

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That’s a shot across the bow @talkers.

NASA has used the Metric system since the 1990s…

Yes I know we landed on the moon 20 years prior, but since the switch we’ve landed all of our Mars rovers, the ISS, Deep Impact, etc. Nothin wrong with a little base 10 my good friend.

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Other than Mars Polar Lander. ( Hit the planet, win a prize… )

Which was due to in part to a metric to English conversion mistake. :slight_smile:

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Might be confusing Mars Polar Lander with the Mars Climate Orbiter. Both had issues and failed 2 and half months apart from one another.

I do not believe Mars Polar Lander issues were determined to be unit/system related.

Mars Climate Orbiter issues were definitively tracked down to NASA (US-based) using the metric system (yr. 1999) and Lockheed Martin (US-based) software that was using the English system for calculations.

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You’re right. 20 years worth of fuzziness on that memory.

Wasn’t JUST a unit error. Lockheed had a hardware in the loop sim running in Boulder. It diverged from the actual spacecraft. Instead of finding out shy, the model was corrected ( incorrectly ) to match the spacecraft.

Hilarity ensued. Shirt vendor at the Texas Star Party that year sold out in 1 day a shirt with “hit the planet win a prize” and Mars on the front, and the correct unit conversions on the back.

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We landed on the moon in sixties … we started using metric like all other countries and have never been back. Cause and Effect, I don’t know. Just an observation.

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Metric system resolution (3 place decimal) on CNC translates to 40 millionths of an inch imperial. Closer resolution is as close as flipping a bit…

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Metric bashing is all fun and games until you need to convert dimensions to mass.

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If your base unit is millimeter, sure. Set your imperial base unit to mil because why not. Three decimal places on a mil is 1 millionth of an inch, that’s 40 times more precise than metric.

Not that that level of decimal significance is the limiting factor of floating point variables, or even that the computer is the limiting factor in CNC precision in the first place.

I’m all for metric anyway, I just don’t think that’s the most salient argument for switching.