[geoschmo]

Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
Just to add some more fuel to the discussion... I always assumed kT referred to "displacement", like it does with sea-faring vessels. In which case "1 kT" means it displaces 1 kT of water.

It's funny you mention fuel, because that I believe is actually the source of the terminology. Someone posted here a while back, (can't remember who or where, but I wanna say it was Baron) that the source of the kiloton unit of measurment for ships originated with old pen and paper space games such as Traveller and Starfire. In those ships were fueled by liquid hydrogen, which was stored in tanks and measured in kilotons. Other components were measured relative to this in the amount of fuel that a similer size tank could hold. And weapons rating according to this is how large a component they can destroy according to this scale. At least that's how I remember it. It made sense at the time.

Geoschmo