I think the standard Star Trek unit is the ‘dork’. As in ‘There were 200 dorks at the Trek convention on Saturday’. There is also a unit called a ‘mega-dork’.
Hail Ants wrote:
Well, they did use those terms, centons usually used as a unit of time, perhaps as ‘minutes’. I’m also certain that microns were used as an inappropriate distance measurement. The commercial for the reruns currently running includes the quote ’ enemy closing, 30 microns.’ (not sure about the number, but I’m certain about the microns.)
TOS (the original show) used both metric and English units; they used both erratically. They’d usually use metric in space, but over planets they’d lapse into English units: miles, temperatures, etc.
I just watched the TOS episode “Space Seed”. They used the non-metric unit “in Hg” as a unit of pressure for a decompression chamber in Sick Bay.
Re: NASA using the metric system:
I read in Scientific American some years back (early 1980’s)that English standard threaded fasteners (bolts, nuts, screws) have significantly more threads per unit of length than metric ones, so that when NASA decided to specify metric as the standard for fasteners in its vehicles, they came up with a new metric “standard” for fasteners so that they would have metric outside measures (diameters and so on), but would have approximately the number of threads per inch/mm of English fasteners. I believe this would have been done by lowering the pitch of the threads. A non-standard standard; something only a government standardization committee could devise.
I don’t know that Sci Am usually gets its facts wrong. Can someone out there confirm if this was and/or still is the case?