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alex_stoddard

Am I correct to assume all the designs are for US Letter paper?

(And not the A4 size common in the UK and elsewhere. http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/)

I remember the frustration as kid getting a book of designs from the US and having none of them work quite right.

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> I remember the frustration as kid getting a book of designs from the US and having none of them work quite right.

"Not quite right" means even more fun. We used a non-standard paper format, the resulting planes were a little bit different than shown and this made them unique.

> a little bit different than shown and this made them unique.

Sounds like when I attempt a 1000 piece puzzle. It doesn't always have to match the box!

Yeah. Sorry :(

FWIW, you can simply cut 2 cms from the tall end and have the same ratio as US paper.

For the very same reason I wonder whether there might be a difference in taste between a metric recipe and an imperial one.

Fun story: when the Soviets tried to reverse-engineer captured B-29s bombers (into Tupolev Tu-4s) they had a lot of trouble because their production of sheet aluminium, rivets, etc. was done in metric sizes, whereas the B-29 used imperial-sized components, and thus extensive re-engineering was required to compensate the slight differences in thickness (and thus in weight and balance) of all components.

And Airbus only uses imperial bolt sizes.

I wonder if this justifies the US adherence to the imperial standard - meaning it acts as a basic barrier to entry for other countries who use the "world" standard.

sort of like the use of analog comms on the Galactica right?

Not quite the same thing, but since you mention Galactica and her non-networked systems, I believe watching this show should be required of anyone even tangentially considering work in an IoT project.

Try making a paper airplane with Galactica’s octagonal sheets of paper!

Compatibility usually gains you more than you lose. If you can't make US planes with parts from the rest of the world then that does mean other countries can't make US planes, but that also means that the US manufacturers can't import parts from elsewhere.

The F-35 has components made all over the world, but was designed in the US. Is that plane metric?

I would assume/hope so? Lockheed of all companies should be on top of that after the mars probe incident.

> imperial standard

The US does not use Imperial. It uses US Customary.

This differs from Imperial in many ways especially for volume measure. And of course Imperial is not a standard.

For one thing a pint is still (roughly) a pound.

Thanks for mentioning it here. I would have wasted a lot of time wondering why these designs didnt work as expected.

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