Re: The Big Sheep | Unknown name | Zierer Tivoli
^I do believe you mean "siriometers per fortnight", which would be a lovely way to measure speed if it was easier to get numbers on the same scale as other measuring systems. In other words, digits roughly between 0 and 100 for everyday situations. I was actually going to propose the use of kilofurlongs per fortnight, which usually ends up with numbers of "everyday size". In this case, 27 mph is 72.58 kf/fn. Siriometers per gigayear works too, but only barely since one Sm/Gyr is less than 0.1 mph (this coaster clocks in at 2.54 Sm/Gyr). In other words, you'd have to get up to rather drastic speeds to push the needle past 10.
Alternately, you could up the ante a little, citing a speed of 39 000 sheppeys per dog year. Looks good on a poster or a billboard, at least. Though for practical purposes, you'd mostly be using either kilosheppeys or millidogyears, or even divide the dog year into 365 dog days, which would yield a speed of 106.8 Shp/Dd.
The problem with listing alternate units of speed is that speed is a derivative of length and time, and only the former has had a myriad of measurement units throughout history. You have units such as leagues, hands, horselenghts or beard-seconds to pick from, whereas unusual units of time are mostly delecated to fractions of a century (one microcentury = 52 minutes 36 seconds) or denoting extremely small intervals such as ticks, shakes, or jiffies (owing to their origin in computer science). The fortnight seems to be the only time unit of practical size between "ridiculously short" and "ridiculously long" aside from the more widely-used units. This means you have to compensate with really big or really small units of length to get speed numbers of a relateable size, which just looks forced.
*sigh*. Ain't easy complaining about the Imperial System...
