THE METRIC SYSTEM IS EVIL 'not really' BUT IT CAN; GET YOU KILLED.

Battlestar Ghostship (The Mogollon Monster)

Everything on the Mermaid class Battlestars are standardized in colonial units (inches, feet, pounds, etc.). The Cylons are standardized on what I call 10base (which is metric). There is not a single piece of equipment that is compatible with anything the 12 colonies manufactured after they adopted 10base units(metric), in the year 113 BCH (Before Colonial Holocaust). There are however; many notable exceptions (like the overall dimensions of the Galactica's armor plating.

On a Mermaid Class Battlestar all calculations MUST be done using Colonial Units. Failure to do so can result in court-martial; in some cases it has. There are certain rooms on Mermaid Class Battlestars where you cannot go unless you have what's called UNIT clearance; including the C-I-C.

While this might be considered ridiculous; there are two serious reasons for it. First; it messes up the Cylons. Second; the FTL on Mermaid Class Battlestars must be calculated in Colonial units or you're going to end up in the wrong place, or worse.

The cause of all this mayhem is a floating point error.

QUOTING FROM WIKIPEDIA:

"Floating-point error mitigation is the minimization of errors caused by the fact that real numbers cannot, in general, be accurately represented in a fixed space. By definition, floating-point error cannot be eliminated, and, at best, can only be managed." - wiki/Floating-point_error_mitigation

So what causes these floating point errors? Converting feet to meters or vice versa ALWAYS introduces a floating point error that is difficult to manage. This is because the ACTUAL conversion from centimeters to inch is not 2.54 cm per inch. It's actually 2.539- and goes on for infinity. Or if you want to convert inches to cm 0.3937007874- - -. It is an irrational number (like) PI.

What the designers of the Mermaid Class discovered was that since the Cylons were standardized in the metric system; whenever they tried to get precise measurements on colonial assets that were all built on inches - it greatly slowed down their processor speeds, often even crashing the unit. This alone slows down any Cylon hacking considerably. No matter how hard they try to hack a computer system on a Mermaid Class battlestar they run into this trouble. (See computers on the Mermaid Class Battlestars).

Invariably the Cylon hacker will encounter instruments designed in colonial units (See Valve Powered Firewalls). This causes absolute havoc with any hacking attempt. Interestingly, this also makes it impossible for the Colonials to infect Cylon ships with computer virus.

SEE ALSO
COMPUTERS ON THE MERMAID CLASS BATTLESTARS

VALVE POWERED FIREWALLS