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Old 09-13-2021, 01:18 PM   #41
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

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Originally Posted by Stormcrow View Post
No, I'm suggesting the distance for a meter was chosen because it was very close to a yard. I don't actually know the reason, but being 1/10000th the distance from the pole to the equator isn't any less arbitrary than any other standard.
Choosing a distance a normal human can pace off isn't arbitrary.
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Old 09-13-2021, 02:48 PM   #42
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Default Re: Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

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I know what you mean. Metric isn't scientific in basis at all. Why is g 9.8 m/s^2 instead of 10? The only reasonable value for c given 20th century science is exactly "1". Shouldn't two grams attract each other with a force of one Newton, given why Newton is most famous? The units don't even go together well with themselves, which is why we have both cgs and MKS, with different prefixes hacking together a more practical set of effective base units, rather than just using mgs all the time.
There has been at least one attempt, not seriously mind, to base a system of measurement on universal constants. This was adapted for human-scale measurements (you can page up at the link to see the original system) by multiplying the values by a power of ten, for the purposes of a science fiction story.

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Actually it is. The meter was orignally supposed to be 1/10,000th the distance between the Equator and the North Pole on a longitude passing through Paris.
That should be 1/10,000,000th. Though a world that was 40km in circumference would be amusing.
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Old 09-13-2021, 03:49 PM   #43
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Default Re: Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

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No. The thing that's useful about mksA is that it's all powers of ten. No twelve inches to the foot, three feet to the yard, 1760 yards to the mile, or 20 pennyweight to the ounce, 16 ounces to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone, eight stone to the hundredweight, 20 hundredweight to the ton to memorize. Let alone the weird specialized units like ells and furlongs and fathoms and horsepower.
The units also have a single standard meaning. In 18th century France, every town had its own ell, its own pound, and so on. Units could even mean different things for different commodities! Like the custom of using actual barleycorns to weigh precious metals (a cup of heavy barleycorns for selling and light barleycorns for buying), this lead to all kinds of theft and controversy.

Even England had issues like "is a clothyard a yard plus a thumb, or a yard plus a nail (3")"?
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Old 09-13-2021, 04:25 PM   #44
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Default Re: Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Choosing a distance a normal human can pace off isn't arbitrary.
If you use a double stride, millimiles work very well. Which, considering that a Roman mile was 1000 paces (a pace is actually two steps), isn't that surprising.
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Old 09-13-2021, 06:08 PM   #45
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Default Re: Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Choosing a distance a normal human can pace off isn't arbitrary.
Neither is finding a new unit of measurement that you intentionally make resemble an old unit of measurement but which satisfies your need to use units of measurement that feel less arbitrary.

The conversation didn't go, "Our new meter should, of course, be 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator going through Paris. What could be more natural?" "Say, that unit is really close to the length of the yard!" "Is it?! What a coincidence!"
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Old 09-13-2021, 06:45 PM   #46
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Default Re: Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

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Originally Posted by Stormcrow View Post
No, I'm suggesting the distance for a meter was chosen because it was very close to a yard. I don't actually know the reason, but being 1/10000th the distance from the pole to the equator isn't any less arbitrary than any other standard.
"Hey, Pierre, we need a new name for sort of this distance" <holds hands slightly more than shoulder width apart> "Since we're having a revolution and can't have an old unit of measurement in this new revolutionary society"

"Ah, Jean. Let's find some scientific reasoning for that"
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Old 09-13-2021, 09:52 PM   #47
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Default Re: Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

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Damage

Keep in mind that there are no nice, neat physical formulas for GURPS damage from anything other than firearms or similar projectile weapons (e.g., bows). The physics for these sorts of impacts gets complex really fast, to the point that you need a computer program and specialist knowledge to do good modeling. Instead, damage is based on basic physics, forensic evidence, empirical weapons testing, reports by martial artists, and what "seems realistic" based on ~30 years of gaming experience.

A typical ST 10 person (1d-2 thrust damage, 1d swing damage) will, on average, knock out an equivalent ST 10 unarmored person with: 20 punches, 2-3 rapier or javelin thrusts, 2-3 swings of a baseball bat, 1-2 broadsword swings.
I don't think GURPS damage originally had anything but a gameist foundation. It's nice and neat to write that ST10 does 1d swing damage, then for each 10 cp spent to increase ST by +1 gives +1 damage.


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"Hey, look! If we take 1/10,000th the distance between the Equator and the North Pole, it comes out close to one yard!"

"Okay, let's call that a meter."
Except the French don't seem to have used British yards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_...olution#Length
They appear to have had a footish pied du roi and a 2-yardish/1-fathomish toise.


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To recap from my grade 9 science class, where the metric system was being introduced to students who had heretofore only used the Imperial system (that was the assumption and usually valid), the metric system has three features which recommend themselves. First, unlike other systems of measurement it is universal in its nature, i.e. there is no Italian metre, no Spanish metre and no French metre, only the metre, and if you were to prefix the metre with an adjective such as French to indicate that you had measured it in France it would still be the same length as a metre designated as Italian.
You can imagine my consternation when buying a pint at a pub in Japan that serves British beer in a UK pint glass and American beer in a 20% smaller US pint glass, but both at the same expensive price.

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Up to a million, everyone is on the same page, but that stops when someone writes a billion. If the writer is from the U.S. or Germany, he quite likely means a thousand millions, but if the writer is from the U.K. or France, he more likely means a million millions.
You may have gone to 9th grade before 1974, because the UK has used short billions since then. I only learnt about the difference, and about the use of a milliard for a long-scale 10^9, from reading some older Heinlein or Asimov as a youngster.
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Old 09-13-2021, 10:17 PM   #48
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Default Re: Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

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*shrug* I wasn't commenting on what they were MEANT to be, only on how useful I PERCEIVE them to be. For science, Celsius is better for its compatibility with metric units. For a quick intuition of how comfortable the weather or a room is, Fahrenheit is better for its wider range and 0-100 scale.
Of course, this is also subjective. The 96% of the world's population that use Celsius can perfectly intuit how comfortable a particular temperature is in degrees C. (With the added bonus that saying a temp is "below zero" or "sub-zero" is synonymous with saying it's below freezing. Subzero or negative temps then indicate snow, frost and ice, useful for weather and talking about your freezer.)


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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
No. The thing that's useful about mksA is that it's all powers of ten. No twelve inches to the foot, three feet to the yard, 1760 yards to the mile, or 20 pennyweight to the ounce, 16 ounces to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone, eight stone to the hundredweight, 20 hundredweight to the ton to memorize.
This was my biggest problem with GURPS Vehicles, where it used cubic feet as its basic measure of volume. I just can't do the mental arithmetic to convert from cubic inches (1728/cf) or tons (35 cf of water) or gallons (7.4 gal/cf) that metric can handle seamlessly. (1000 ml/cc = 1 litre = 0.001 m^3).


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Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
I know what you mean. Metric isn't scientific in basis at all. Why is g 9.8 m/s^2 instead of 10? The only reasonable value for c given 20th century science is exactly "1". Shouldn't two grams attract each other with a force of one Newton, given why Newton is most famous?
Because these units were defined long before many of those constants could be accurately measured. And the Newton unit is named for his Second Law of Motion, which is also pretty famous, F=ma, being 1 kg per metre per second per second.

In any case, imperial measurements are still useful for poetic, proverbial and colloquial uses. Saying things like, "give an inch and take a mile," "jump six feet in the air," "walk a mile in someone's shoes," "a pound of flesh" and so on don't really work in metric.
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Last edited by Daigoro; 09-13-2021 at 11:23 PM.
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Old 09-14-2021, 09:20 AM   #49
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Default Re: Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

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Originally Posted by Žorkell View Post
"Hey, Pierre, we need a new name for sort of this distance" <holds hands slightly more than shoulder width apart> "Since we're having a revolution and can't have an old unit of measurement in this new revolutionary society"

"Ah, Jean. Let's find some scientific reasoning for that"
Exactly.

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Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
Except the French don't seem to have used British yards.
British yards wasn't my point. The "about this much" measurement was.

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Of course, this is also subjective.
Of course it is. I'm not saying Fahrenheit is better because it objectively sets boundaries for human comfort. I'm saying that I find Fahrenheit better suited to intuiting my temperature ranges, and I can understand why some others who share my situation would find it so as well. It's entirely subjective, as I've been saying all along.
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Old 09-14-2021, 03:33 PM   #50
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Default Re: Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

I love the 0-100 scale of Celsius in theory. But a degree Fahrenheit is about my threshold for perception making Celsius a bit clunky. Of course that's purely my preference.
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