Comment on People who do not specify units of measurement in international contexts

• holy_scroller@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  My last project in aerospace with 100’s of people was mostly Imperial. There is a lot of mixing of units and you can basically design your subsystem however you want. There was a mandate decades ago to go metric, but that has largely been ignored. It’s the worst of both worlds!

  My current project is just a couple people, so I mandated all metric. I have to spend a lot of money on tooling, but it is largely fine. I would say 10 years ago getting some fancy aerospace grade fasteners was easier in Imperial, less so today.

  My mind still defaults to Imperial for very small dimensions like a 8 thou gap or something.

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  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Didn’t that happen because of the Mars Climate Observer crashing? Caused by a us team using pounds-force-seconds where nasa expected newton-seconds (sending it hurtling towards mars at a too-low dip into the atmosphere)

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  • TIEPilot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    30+ years satellites, we are all metric. But as @FuglyDuck said it was a mixed team that mixes SAE\Imperial and metric that caused the failure.

    We do everything in house so when parts\waveguide\antenna’s\etc all gets ordered its all metric.

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    • holy_scroller@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      A lot of duel dimensioned drawings when you are interfacing.

      I just have to be able to convert back and forth, sometimes in a single sentence: “we are using a 500mm X 450mm base made from 1/16” sheet metal."

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      • TIEPilot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Yeah I’ve been here, in the US so getting raw stock in metric is prohibitively expensive. So sheet metal is where it all falls down and makes me a bit of a fibber. We would convert it to mm for the final drawings.

        Before CNC’s were common I can tell you some horror stories going to a local machine shop needing it all in metric and you could hear the modem noises in their heads. We would bring them metric micrometers and scientific rulers to help them along. Mind you this was in the late 90’s and they were masters of their art, but metric wasn’t the norm in their world.

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