Allow me to restate: Celsius is not arbitrary. It is based on the melting and boiling points of water
Right - the melting point at 0 degrees and the boiling point at 99.974 degrees - how could I be so silly as to forget?
Fahrenheit was originally based on the melting point of water (fixed to 32) and the average human body temperature (fixed to 96 - exactly 64 [2
6] degrees above 32).
Now they're both based on an arbitrary fraction of the triple point of water (1/273.16 and 1/491.688) and an arbitrary zero point (in Celsius's case, .01K below that triple point, for Fahrenheit, -32.018°R below it) chosen more to match past flawed measurements than the actual properties of water.
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Anyway - there are three separate components to this thread:
The internal representation - right now, this is a scale where one unit = 1°R (~0.56 K) and absolute zero is fixed at 9508.33. This could change, or it could stay the same. Changing it would break saves, but bear in mind he
is in the middle of a save-breaking revision right now.
The raws - the solution most people here seem to support is allowing a variety of units. A bare number (10067) would indicate the old scale, or the temperature could be given as 99F, 37.2C, or 310.3K
And the last is temperature display - right now all we see is "It is cold", "It is freezing", but why not allow, for example, "It feels like mid-50s" with init set to give it in fahrenheit, or "It feels like about 12 degrees"* (for a temperature of 10030 and a wind-chill factor of ~7F/4C).
Or even allow thermometers to be built (require a unit of mercury [easily extracted from cinnabar] and a glass tube?) to monitor the temperature at a specific point on the map.
*How do you say imprecise temperatures in speech in celsius? With your larger degree, [upper/lower/mid]-[decade]s seems like it would be _too_ vague, and an exact degree is too exact