My conversion story

[Alex K]

That's never going to play over here, I guess you know.  We like our acres and inches, yards, cubits and so on.

That's what they all say at first. Our wedge strategy is to sell delicious beer by the Liter. That'll force everyone subtly to adopt the new doubleplusgood system of thought, whether they want to or not.

[Gemini]

For a sci fi story I was writing, I once had to convert earth-based astronomical units into a different standard of AU (1.0 to 1.2 AU, or ~8.3 to 9.9 million light minutes). 

I did this for eight different planets. Plus satellites and orbitals. It was intense.

[Alex K]

For a sci fi story I was writing, I once had to convert earth-based astronomical units into a different standard of AU (1.0 to 1.2 AU, or 9.9 million light minutes). 

I did this for eight different planets. Plus satellites and orbitals. It was intense.

You write sci fi stories?

[Gemini]

For a sci fi story I was writing, I once had to convert earth-based astronomical units into a different standard of AU (1.0 to 1.2 AU, or 9.9 million light minutes). 

I did this for eight different planets. Plus satellites and orbitals. It was intense.

You write sci fi stories?

For fun. I like to set them in a fictional star system that's been in a fusion age for countless millennia. It's kind of like an ageless, mythological era.

[Alex K]

You write sci fi stories?

For fun. I like to set them in a fictional star system that's been in a fusion age for countless millennia. It's kind of like an ageless, mythological era.

Interesting. So what's the conflict, the stakes for the characters in such a world?

[Gemini]

For fun. I like to set them in a fictional star system that's been in a fusion age for countless millennia. It's kind of like an ageless, mythological era.

Interesting. So what's the conflict, the stakes for the characters in such a world?

The conflict is driven by the necrotics. I'm stipulating that the limit of life extension is neural degeneration, and there's a cybernetic procedure that can potentially evade this, but at the cost of potentially causing insanity. At the point of time I'm writing, the unipolar polity that once ruled for the star system for millennia has collapsed. It falls apart in much the same way as the Roman Republic did...but with evil, insane, immortal cyborgs (necrotics) driving the conflict.

Anyway, the resulting dark age sees the emergence of a several plutocratic polities, as well as the remnants of the original governing republic, and the necrotics.

Re: stakes for characters: the protagonist is a refugee from the origin planet (Haven, homage to Asimov), who chooses to to risk her life in a futile war against the necrotiics.

[Alex K]

Haha nice!

[Thumpalumpacus]

One day, I needed to know for some reason how many fluid ounces are in a mile cubed. With kilometers and liters, it's really simple, because a liter is 10cm cubed, so 1 meter cubed is a 1000 liters, so 1000 meters cubed is a 1000 billion liters. But with miles, conversion is a bit more difficult. A mile is roughly 1600 meters. A fluid ounce is roughly 0.03 liters. So if you cube the 1600, you get roughly 4.1 billion, times a 1000 liters is 4.1 trillion liters. Multiply by 33.3 because that's how many floz go into one liter, and a mile cubed is roughly 140 trillion fluid ounces. I hope you liked my conversion story.

Do the computation in liters and then multiply by 33.814.

/trolllogic

[Alex K]

Gemini, what is the culture like?

[Little lunch]

You write sci fi stories?

For fun. I like to set them in a fictional star system that's been in a fusion age for countless millennia. It's kind of like an ageless, mythological era.

Hey Gemini, do you get into Iain M Banks and the Culture series?
It sounds slightly similar.
He's my favourite author by the way. Also under Iain Banks for non sci-fi. :-)