Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Use m/s as the standard unit for displaying movement speeds, instead of km/h.

What ?

When you hover the pointer over vehicles and biters, their movement speed is listed in km/h. I suggest using m/s instead.

Why ?

For consistency's sake. Everywhere else, time is listed in seconds: batteries have a crafting time of 4 seconds, transport belts are listed as having a throughput of 15 items/second (not 900 per minute), gun turrets have a shooting speed of 10/second, and the fuel value of coal is 4 MJ (not 1.11 kWh).

Likewise, the units used to display movement speeds should have second, not hour, as the denominator.

I understand where you're coming from... but I'm pretty certain there are a much larger number of people who understand km/h intuitively than people who understand m/s. Granted, for us here in the U.S. km/h isn't an intuitive mechanic either, most people understand mph. But that's because most of us here in the U.S. are dumb and refuse to convert to the metric system, so I support leaving his in the metric system over converting to mph.

That said, the intuition of km/h or m/h does NOT work when it comes to ingame anything, because those intuitions are linked to a person in a vehicle, usually one they are driving, in first person view, with all the sensory information that entails.

In video games, you might be able to get first person, but even then, I have never found it a useful gauge.


If I cared about calculating efficiency between trains and belts, for example, I would have to convert from km/h to m/s, which involves a bit of math. km/h means nothing to me in the game, whereas m/s does, because it is one tile per second.

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As for US persons being dumb and refusing to convert, its unrelated, but I'll kinda give you that. Its also Tradition, having to replace tons of stuff to convert, people are used to it, and most importantly, it has a lot of nice factors for thirds and so on which the metric system can't really handle properly. Not that that makes up for it, but yea.

dozenal > decimal
and
an hypothetical "imperial" dozenal would be > metric decimal
but
metric decimal > "imperial" decimal (inconsistency !)

Also, "hours" are more dozenal than decimal, and "barely metric",
so, yeah, IMHO m/s would probably be better for Factorio.

Especially with the nice coincidence that decimal has with binary with 32 chunks being 32 x 32 = 1024 tiles ~ 1k tiles !

P.S.: Factorio actually doesn't use seconds everywhere - the Production and Kill screens are in minutes !