the high voltage pulse generator

Also interesting:

Quote "No changes registered in noise emissions from 1,000 foot acceleration".

Or:

The DA40 is designed and built by the Austrian company Diamond Aircraft Industries.

Sure looks like Mars missions in Imperial units beat the heck out of Metric ones.

US Mars missions have an outstanding record of success. No other country does. All the Russian missions have failed.

ESA's Rosetta did a gravitational slingshot past Mars on the way to the comet, where it failed.

We coat when the customer requires it, which is mainly military/aerospace. We send it out to a shop that specializes in coating, and mark up the cost some.

We never pot; it's too messy and expensive and impossible to probe or rework. Failure analysis is horrid. I wouldn't have taken this job if it involved potting. Any job, actually.

If I do have any problems with my board, it might be coated, but I don't expect trouble. The board goes in an optical assembly that will be very clean. Coating might outgass onto the optics, another complication.

It was Operation Paperclip,

that brought Wernher Von Braun and others to the US, otherwise there would not have been the race for the ICBMs and moon as we know it

Cheers

Klaus

There is a really good book about Operation Paperclip. My former neighbor in Germany had a copy and let me read it. Some things were hard to believe but based on facts and documents.

An "inch" is just as good as a "centimeter" if you're designing ordinary stuff.* Using the inch & its decimal fractions is LESS likely to cause errors than using multiple metric units (m, cm, mm). If a creative designer put a dimension as 6.73dm (dm IS a standard metric unit), the unit could easily be assumed to be cm.

"Yeah", you say, "but we only use 'cm' to avoid that." In that case, metric has no advantage.

• - including Mars rovers. There's no part on a rover that can't be conveniently sized in inches & not worry about inch-foot conversion.

Bob

We landed on the moon using both systems: the Apollo guidance computer worked internally with SI metric units and converted to feet etc for display in units familiar to the astronauts.

See

piglet

The Germans /did/ put all the men on the moon. They were working near Huntsville, Alabama at the time.

Wackypedia lists these names:

The USA can't make claim to any sort of genetic superiority. We are mostly immigrants and mongrels. But we attract a lot of very good people for various reasons.

The USA crushes everyone else in scientific Nobel prizes, partly because we steal everyone else's talent.

How did those morons think they would get away with it? The story will make a great book about the culture of technology.

It's going to cost a lot, likely more than VW is worth.

We use decimal inches for mechanical things and PC boards. No feet, yards, miles, or fractions. It's a minor nuisance to convert imperial metric now and then, but no big deal.

All metric would be better, but it's not very important.

Inches are a kinda nice size.

There you have this funny notion again that m, cm, mm are different units. They aren't. The unit of length is the meter. The leading letter is just a multiplier prefix that works with any unit. You can have mm, mV, mA, mJ, mF, ms, etc, etc, etc.

Metric is nice when you need to mix units from mechanics, electricity, and some other fields. There are fewer funny conversion factors. A watt is *one* Nm/s, a joule is *one* Nm, a pascal is *one* N/m^2, and so on. It makes the relations between different disciplines so much easier.

I grant you that there is still room for improvement. There *are* still some funny constants and we're not likely to be rid of them any time soon. The unit of mass is still a wart. We're working on that.

Jeroen Belleman

Do you fill tires in KPa or in atms?

We use PSI.

The US is big. It would be surprising if it didn't get its share in proportion. A more enlightening measure is the number of Nobels normalized to the population count. You're 15th on that list.

Mmmh. Ignoring Sweden and a few countries too small to have reliable averages, I see Switzerland is doing pretty well, mostly medicine oddly enough.

Jeroen Belleman

This just in:

So don't do that.

Why would I do that?

Because someone decided to *change* units. Leave 'em alone and such foolishness won't happen.

That's what computers are for.