Speed | Distance
Knot - Nautical Mile - Calculator for Ships
Calculates the speed in knots and the distance in nautical miles at shipping. At sea, the distance commonly is measured in nautical miles (nm), whereas one nm is exactly 1852 meters. As dimension for the speed, knots (kn) is used, one knot is one nautical mile per hour. Here, from two values and units, the third value can be calculated. The time can be given and calculated in days (d), hours (h), minutes (min) and seconds (s).
Example: to cover a distance of 1000 nautical miles with a speed of 7 knots, almost 6 days are needed.
One nautical mile is 1852 meters. This is originally derived from the length of a minute of arc of longitude at the equator. However, this value would be a little different, since in earlier times an exact measurement of longitude was very difficult. Therefore, the value used was internationally set at the now valid 1.852 kilometers.
There are historically other values for the nautical mile, as well as for the mile, which is more commonly used on land. However, only this sea mile or nautical mile and on land the international mile, English mile or country mile with 1609.344 meters are currently valid, those can be entered in this calculator. Miles and knots are not SI units, for scientific purposes the international system of units SI should always be used, the corresponding units there are meters and kilometers.
In addition to shipping, the knot unit is also sometimes used in aviation and meteorology. The origin of the name is the speed measurement on sailing ships, in which a piece of wood attached to a cord was thrown into the water. The wood floated in one place and the cord unrolled. There were knots at regular intervals on the line, so the number of knots that were unrolled in a given time was used to calculate the speed.
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