I used to be captain of a boat out of Florida, and I noticed that whenever dealing with the USCG or Navy, they always referred to distances in “yards” (as in, “We are the USCG Cutter UmptySquat, 4500 yards off your port bow”), instead of nautical miles, or feet, or millimeters. This never made sense to me, especially when dealing with large distances. I mean, why have different units of measure if you’re only going to use one? I asked this to my friend the Submariner and stumped him. It seems to be the same on land for the Army, Marines, etc., as far as I can tell.
LOL
Milimeters?
We are the USCG Cutter UmptySquat, 4.11 million milimeters off your port bow
When I was in the army distances were given in either klics (kilometers) or meters, with an occaisional use of miles for long distances.
Lance, you’re right now that I think about it, the “land” military tends more towards kilometers, which makes sense for longer distances. Doesn’t account for the high seas though.
Just a WAG here, but I think this is a result of the artillery tradition of the navy. When ships started carrying cannons they used the same tables that the land artillery men used. These tables were used in calculating distances and determining what those distances translated to in terms of gun angle and charge size. Yards were likely the most useful measurement because they represented the maximum amount of percision that was expected, even at short range. Fast forward to today, manual targeted guns likely still use yards in their gunnary tables, so distances to targets are still calculated in yards.
In the navy they use nautical miles when calculating distances to destinations or the distances to air targets, but surface and sub targets are given in yards.
my experiance is that small distances would be in yards while great distances would be in Nautical miles. Small depths would be in feet while larger depths would be in fathoms.
a Nautical mile is about 2025 yards and it is easier to handle 4500 yards than 2.22 Nautical miles. I doubt they would use yards for anything greater than 10 or 20 NM.
Well I DO know how to spell experience but this brings me to another question. Sometimes my typos are a key placed next to the one I was trying to hit but very often it seems I get a vowel for another vowel and I wonder if this is common for other people as well and what makes it happen.