Hakaga Fighter Compliment

[Wolf Dog]

I am sure this has been postulated, but I couldn't find a thread talking about it in a quick search. The generally quoted figure for the fighter compliment of the Hakaga is 288. The quotation in Fleet Action is "three eighties and six eights of strike craft and fighters." Thinking that "eighties" is in base ten it would be 288, but if "eighties" is in base eight it would instead be 240.

It would be like saying "three hundreds and five tens" which we would assume is 350 and then having a person accustomed to base 16 incorrectly assume that by "hundreds" we meant 100 in base 16, interpretting the number as 818. Just as "three hundreds and five tens" would clearly mean to us 350, I would argue that the Kilrathi would clearly mean 240 by "three eighties and six eights."

 

[Wolf Dog]

I finally found a previous thread discussing this: http://www.crius.net/zone/showthread.php?t=8172&page=1&pp=50&highlight=base+8

The issue is of course what the word translated to "eighties" in English means. I think the previous suggestion that it could be a quantity like our dozen has some validity. However, I also thing the 100(8) coming after 77(8) could be expressed in English as eighty just at 10(8) coming after 7(8) is expressed as eight. I am trying to search for any cultures that have or currently use base eight to see what nomenclature is used to write the numbers in text and how that text is translated to English. That might give a clue as to how such things are generally interpretted.

Back to the specific case of the Hakaga fighter compliment, it would be a very odd use of "eighties" if the Kilrathi use it like we use "dozen." We might use a "dozen" to denote 12(10), but only when it makes the numbers work out better. We wouldn't express 50(10) as 4 dozen and two, its less intuitive to us then the nice round number fifty. 288(10) equals 440(8). Since this conversion is a nice round number in base eight, I think it would an unituitive use of "eighties" for the Kilrathi if it did indeed represent 80(10).

 

[Bandit LOAF]

My apologies for bringing back an old thread, but it seems wholly underappreciated.

I took out a copy of Fleet Action to think about redoing the timeline skeleton in base eight... but the more I look at it, the more I wonder if the "eighty equals 80" theory is not correct. It seems to reason that "eighty" would not mean 64 specifically because the Kilrathi have another expression ('eight of eight') which is used in the same context to mean 64 -- unless my entirely nonmathmagical brain isn't appreciating what else "eight of eight" (and 'eight eights') might mean.