Imperial measure owes nothing to any Earth system of measurement. The Imperial system was designed in an already scientific and technological era for much the same reasons Earth’s metric units were designed – to simplify a complex system of historical measures.
The numeration system is base sixty – 3 times 4 times 5. This makes numbers more easily manipulated than previous systems. It works upon the same positional basis as our Hindu-Arabic system, and the same concepts apply, with multiples of 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 (and 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30) having intermediate importance in thought between the unit and the system base of sixty. For all units, the digital places are described thus:
Prime: 60 times the base unit
Square: 3600 times the base unit
Cube: 216,000 times the base unit
Fourth: 12,960,000 times the base unit, and so on.
For fractional numbers, iprime is 1/60th of the base unit, isquare is 1/3600th, ithird is 1/216,000th, ifourth is 1/12,960,000th, and so on. If there’s an ‘i’ in front of the multiplier, it relates to a fractional number.
For situations requiring more precision than a single digit, the spoken convention is to specify the magnitude of the leading digit, and following digits are presumed to be immediately decreasing in magnitude. “Two minutes thirty” can be two and a half minutes of time, or two and a half light-minutes of distance. “Seven ithirds fortysix fourteen” would be seven 216,000ths, forty-six 12,960,000ths, fourteen 777,600,000ths of the relevant units. If the relevant digit is a zero, the zero is spoken, so “seven ithirds zero fourteen” would be seven 216,000ths, zero 12,960,000ths, fourteen 777,600,000ths of the relevant units
Most of the time, measures are context sensitive in translations to English. For instance, a range is assumed to be given in distance units, a mass or weight in terms of mass units, and so on. In Technical, the fact of what you are measuring requires the units of measurement to match, and this has, over time, leaked over to conversations in Traditional as well. In Mindlord, everything is context sensitive anyway, and nobody uses Concept for technical or technological purposes, as the ‘language’ is entirely unsuitable for that purpose.
Mass
The Empire actually uses two units of mass, the atomic mass unit familiar to Earth scientists (called the ‘mass’ if there is need), and the ‘bar’, which is sixty to the fourteenth power atomic mass units. The bar is far more commonly used as the mass is almost never called for except in theoretical chemistry and physics.
1 bar = 60^14 atomic mass units = 13.017303005980066445182724252492 grams
.4592 oz
1 prime = 781.0 grams 27.55 oz (1.722 lb)
1 square = 46.86 kg 103.3 lb
1 cube = 2812 kg 6199 lb (3.099 tons)
1 fourth = 168,700kg 186.0 tons
1 fifth = 10,120 metric tons 11,160 tons
1 sixth = 607,300 metric tons 669,500 tons
1 seventh = 36.438 million metric tons* 40.17 million tons*
Energy
Since the advent of siphons and converters, it has become common to refer to energy in terms of the rest mass required to generate it.
1 bar = 1.16993684898 x 10^15 Joules (roughly 11,700TJ, or 2800 kilotons of TNT)
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