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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Dark as Silver said:
en.wikipedia.org

Mile - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
First standardised english mile was under Elizabeth I which seems reasonable for the approximate time period Warhammer, its likey that there were earlier efforts dating all the way back to Wessex.
However given there where also Scotish, Irish and Welsh miles this seems to be more of a "How centralised do you think the empire is?" question. Depending on that I could either agree or disagree.
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Reikland probably has a standard mile, but it's different subtlety to Wissenlands Mile and Middenhelm's Mile or the various other provincial miles. And Stirland/Hochland/Slyvania don't even have standardised measures of distance at all. That would be my wild guess.
 
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Just use the dwarf mile like sane people.

Note: It may be the same as the elf mile which both Empires will vigorously deny even while shaking their heads at the silly humans and their non-standard units of measure :V
 
I'd be astonished if the Dwarfs didn't use the Metric system. Why would they use Imperial, it's such an imprecise measurement.
 
Boney said:
I stand corrected, I wasn't aware that parts of Lebanon still identified with the Phoenicians.
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Prior to, during and after the Civil War, a significant element of our Christian community (mostly Maronites, the fucking chuunis) took on a fascist bent and made strong insistence that Christian Lebanese were not Arabs but in fact the descendants of the Phoenicians and other Semites who had been Hellenized and Romanized prior to the Arab Conquests. That they were, much like the Armenians or Israelis, a Judeo-Christian island in the Middle East with more in common with Europe than the Pan-Arab wave streaking across the region.
 
Codex said:
I'd be astonished if the Dwarfs didn't use the Metric system. Why would they use Imperial, it's such an imprecise measurement.
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I'll have to try and find the post again but there was one in I think the Screencaps thread about how the Imperial system is better for the day to work of someone working in a pre-Industrial system and the mathematics they'll need to do vs. Metric's implicit bias towards math as a mental exercise scratched out on paper.
 
It could also be that some measurements are quite literally unreplaceable in Runescraft, either because the Ancestors stumbled into a meaningful quantity that means something in Mallus metaphysics or that it was handed down with their learning and the runesmith either can't change it or won't.

When your sacred priests quite literally tell you that this unit of measurement is sacred and help bring about miracles work handed by their god ancestors, that tend to quell any backtalk.

Also given that they have an Ancestor god of engineering then I anticipate their unit systems to at least be sensible for other engineers.
 
seekingflame said:
It could also be that some measurements are quite literally unreplaceable in Runescraft, either because the Ancestors stumbled into a meaningful quantity that means something in Mallus metaphysics or that it was handed down with their learning and the runesmith either can't change it or won't.

When your sacred priests quite literally tell you that this unit of measurement is sacred and help bring about miracles work handed by their god ancestors, that tend to quell any backtalk.

Also given that they have an Ancestor god of engineering then I anticipate their unit systems to at least be sensible for other engineers.
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Of course there is no practical reason why they could not change the units of measure for most things right now is that is the case. I mean it's not like runes are common these days... but the dwarfs will never admit that about anything really.
 
Codex said:
The Ancestor Gods figured out a writing system, how to mine, smelt, smith and make runes. I'm sure they could make a consistent measurement system.
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Measuring things by your pace made a lot more sense as a consistent measurement system when you don't have easy access to measurement devices.
Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if dwarves measured everything on its own scale, so a standard axe was precisely 1 axe large and a standard forge hammer is 1 standard hammer long, which works pretty fine for the artisans but can be a real hassle for the artisans.
 
Now I imagine that they measure, at least in using the base standard scale, by the most reliable thing to a dwarf that any proper dwarf should have access to.

A dwarf beard.

A dwarf beard at exactly 100 years of age is the standard unit of measurement which all other are derived from, it is now my head canon.

I won't be surprised to learn that the variance in a dwarf beard growth is completely neglectable to any society that had yet to reach atomic scale.

Edit: the war of the beard was actually caused by the two superpower not agreeing on what should be the official Mallus standard unit, that or a something suitalby elf rubbish, so they went to war.
After the war devastated both superpowers, they were too ashamed to admit that the reason they fell from their respective golden age was because something that is essentially an engineers spat, so they blamed it all on a reliable believable victim, aka Malekith.
 
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I always headcanoned it that Dwarves used Feet to measure things, with one Dwarven Foot being the exact length of Grimnir's Grungni's foot.

In this reality, there's a long running feud between two prominent architecture clans, one who believes that a Foot should be based on Grimnir's Grungni's right foot, and the other who believes it's should actually be his left foot.
 
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Nerdasaurus Rex said:
I always headcanoned it that Dwarves used Feet to measure things, with one Dwarven Foot being the exact length of Grimnir's foot.

In this reality, there's a long running feud between two prominent architecture clans, one who believes that a Foot should be based on Grimnir's right foot, and the other who believes it's should actually be his left foot.
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Why the god of war? Shouldn't they use Morgrim or something?
 
consequences said:
Bah! Everyone knows that Metric Grungnisson's system of measurement is the only choice for a proper dawi!
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E:
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Fuck I meant Grungni. Foot of the King and all that.

Get them mixed up all the god damn time.
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Coward, double down on it. Grimnir left his armour behind at Karak Dum on his march north which allowed the dwarves to get an accurate foot size measurement, however Grungni just vanished with his armour, leaving no sufficiently accurate measurement behind
 
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DragonParadox said:
Well if that guys is a noble never planning to fight on foot may be a point of pride, it would not really be that strange for warhammer. I do hope that is a dark elf head and not a vampire though besides his saddle, otherwise he is going to have a very bad time.
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The idea of never expecting to fight on foot while riding a horse with no head or flank protection is hilariously optimistic.
Codex said:
I'd be astonished if the Dwarfs didn't use the Metric system. Why would they use Imperial, it's such an imprecise measurement.
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They might use a decimal system, but I'd be astonished if they actually used a Mallus metre (distance from the Polar Gate to the equator as it passes through Karaz-a-Karak, divided by 10,000,000) for various reasons. First of all they wouldn't abandon whatever traditional distance unit they have for some new fangled one after calculating the size of the Earth accurately. Second, they would not use a distance that goes through the Chaos Wastes and can never actually be measured. Third, they would not pick some seni-arbitrary cut-off and divide by a large number and then just call that something a random name.
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
I once witnessed two carpenters having a conversation, one measuring in inches and the other in mm.

The UK is where standardisation comes to die.
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What's wrong with millimeters?
 
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Rafin said:
The idea of never expecting to fight on foot while riding a horse with no head or flank protection is hilariously optimistic.
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I mean, mounted European knights would wear sabatons that ended in points that ended a foot or even more from their actual toes and had metal plates on the back of the shoe. Making walking if dismounted in battle near-impossible seems to have been in fashion back then for whatever reason.
 
When I give people measurements I like to use decimeters. It's close to 4" so easier for me to think with than meters or centimeters. And metric people never seen to use that unit so it makes them stutter. ;)
 
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