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Originally Posted by malloyd
I think he's considering calories a non-SI unit and assuming that makes them a US Engineering one. Calories are actually metric too, the system having been defined before determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat.
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Yes but calories aren't SI and joules aren't US customary. "Food calories" are kilocalories and food energy is given in joules in SI countries.
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Anyway, the most common US Engineering energy unit is probably is the kilowatt-hour, electrical units being the same in both systems,
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US engineers and physicists use metric units, at least mostly, when they can.
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though horsepower-hours are occasionally met with.
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That would also be more consistent with GURPS being US customary.
However it appears I was making a far to subtle joke, my apologies. I
know why GURPS does it the way it does. We use kilowatt-hours for electrical power in the US and it's the measure most readers will be familiar with. I was more poking fun at our haphazard adoption of some but not all SI units. When I was in the Corps, we measured distance in meters, weight in pounds, human height in inches, and altitude in meters unless you were communicating with an aircraft which had to be converted to feet.