Chris Keenan wrote:
And I prefer fps (foot-pound-second) - which is what I was taught to call it
at school.
When I learned that system in Engineering School, they called it the British Engineering System. (It may also have been called the British Gravitational System.) The pound was the pound of force (including weight, which is just a particular force) while the slug was the unit of mass. This system was pretty much restricted to mechanical quantities which, in addition to those mentioned above, included:
energy (including work) in foot-pounds power in Horse Power or foot-pounds per second (where 550 ft-lbs/s = 1 HP) speed in feet per second acceleration in feet per (second squared) torque (also called moment of force) in pound-feet or pound-inches momentum in slug-feet per second
There was a similar but not identical system called the British Absolute System (I think) in which the pound was the pound of mass and forces were measured in poundals. As far as I know, this "system" was not used for much and I never saw it used to calculate energy or power and the like.
Regards, Bill Hooper Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA
