KS and U?!

[bis]

Can someone explain what U and KS are? It seems that U and KS are measurement of both speed and distance.

[Subject Zero]

ks seems to be the distance and U (aka ks/s) is the speed.

[Behrwulf]

KS is kilometers per second. U is a measure they are using probably equals 1 meter. In space it would be AU which is the distance from the earth to the sun.

[TeKett]

U generally means unit and:
The units of space are meters (and square meters and cubic meters)
The units of time are seconds
The units of velocity are meters per second

so saying U is the same as saying meter but could be confusing so you normaly dont, you most of the time you only hear it when talking about atom and molecule weight

[bis]

KS being Km/s doesn't make much sense though. As the KS will decrease or increase when you get closer or further from a planet. It seems to be a measurement of distance. However, they also use KS for the speed when you use boosters. It makes no sense to me

[Sleazy Ninja]

Found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4g41w6/units_of_measurement_in_nms/

Seems like decent logic.

[bis]

Publicado originalmente por Sleazy Ninja:

Found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4g41w6/units_of_measurement_in_nms/

Seems like decent logic.

Ty. That helped :)

[hardReboot]

I figured that KS means kilosecond. Or 1000 light seconds. The distance that light travels in 1000 seconds

[QuaestComm]

If you watch your ship's display carefully during a Pulse Jump, you'll see two things:

1. Initially, the distance travelled is displayed in terms of units distance (up to 999,999u).
   
2. Once the distance travelled exceeds 999,999u, it switches to ks (1,000ks and above).

Thus, one may conclude that 1.ks = 1000u .
EDIT: Distances of planetary points of interest (while on foot) are also given in terms of units distance if they are not further than ~1000u away (otherwise, time to destination is displayed instead).

[MechWarden]

Publicado originalmente por QuaestComm:

If you watch your ship's display carefully during a Pulse Jump, you'll see two things:

1. Initially, the distance travelled is displayed in terms of units distance (up to 999,999u).
   
2. Once the distance travelled exceeds 999,999u, it switches to ks (1,000ks and above).

Thus, one may conclude that 1.ks = 1000u .
EDIT: Distances of planetary points of interest (while on foot) are also given in terms of units distance if they are not further than ~1000u away (otherwise, time to destination is displayed instead).

This better explains it, and is easily verifiable.

Some weeks ago I noticed the Pulse Engine's distance traveled indicator as well ticking over from generic Units to Kilo-unitS, which answered my question about the KS thing. Now I've gotten used to thinking about them as 'klicks', as in the military slang for kilometers.

I think there is a higher unit past KS, but I don't know off hand what it might be, nor what would be the best term to use.

When the ETA shows, the actual distance is still shown at the top where your compass is at of anyone is wondering.

As for what a Unit (length measurement) is, it's hard to say. Some assumptions would have to be made on people and object sizes, and then measure how how long they are in NMS Units.

[LilTOJustice]

Idk if anyone still cares but I want to put all of the NMS units business to rest and will using LOGIC and MATH to figure out what's up.

Upon reading another forum I was inspired by a pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ comment that someone clearly pulled out of their ass. They claimed that each planet has roughly the surface area (hereby referred to as SA) of manhattan and all of the planets together are roughly the SA of Delaware.

Obviously this is wrong but the more disgusting part of this claim was the Delaware part.

Here comes some math: (I'm going to be using miles for all the units I'm so sorry it's just how I did my original calculations)

ASSUMING they are correct that the surface area of the average NMS planet is indeed the surface area of Manhattan = 22.82 mi^2.

What if Manhattan were a planet? (SA of a sphere = 4*pi*r^2)

If we can find the radius of "planet Manhattan" then we can get a better idea of how true this claim is:

22.82 = 4*pi*r^2 -> r = sqrt(22.82/(4*pi)) ≈ 1.348 miles

It's tough to conclude whether this is accurate (especially since we don't have an accurate conversion factor between u and meters (or miles in this case), but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

Just how big is NMS?

It's a well-known fact that the amount of planets in NMS is roughly 18 Quintillion (18,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1.8*10^19 planets)

So, using 22.82 mi^2 as our golden number for the surface area of a planet (still doubtful it is this small) we can find out just how big the game is.

We have 22.82 mi^2 * 1.8*10^19 = 4.1076 * 10^20 planet*mi^2

Um... Well

Delaware's surface area is an estimated 2,489 mi^2...

So it's about 4.1076*10^20/2,489 = 1.650*10^17 times bigger than Delaware (ouch)

And if you are super curious that is almost 200 billion times the surface area of the sun.

Misinformation certainly is a thing, isn't it?

Anyway,
I just started playing this game a few days ago and I'm really having a great time with it, soon enough I will find a way to standardize the units in NMS although energy might be a bit hard. Using this information I want to have a standard for measuring the radius of planets in-game (it'd be nice if the devs just did this for us) but at the present, I don't see a way to find it.

Thanks if you made it this far