Degrees to Streck (° to streck)

1 degree equals 17.5 streck exactly.

How to convert degrees to streck

To convert degrees to streck, multiply the number of degrees by 17.5. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply streck by 0.05714285714 (rounded).

streck = degrees × 17.5

Example: 10 degrees = 175 streck.

About these units

Degree (°)

General & non-SICurrent unit

One 360th of a full turn. The everyday unit of angle, inherited from the ancient Babylonians' base-60 counting.

Dividing the circle into 360 parts traces back to the astronomers of ancient Babylon, who counted in base 60. Why 360 in particular is still debated. One explanation points to Persian and Babylonian calendars, which used a year of about 360 days, so the Sun seemed to advance roughly one degree each day. Another says the Babylonians started from the angle of an equilateral triangle and split it into 60 pieces, and a third credits early chord-based trigonometry, where a chord equal to the radius made a natural base. Greek astronomers such as Aristarchus and Hipparchus were among the first to use Babylonian astronomical knowledge systematically.

The number also divides well. 360 has 24 divisors and splits evenly by every whole number from 1 to 10 except 7, which suits a world cut into 24 time zones of 15 degrees of longitude each. Each degree breaks into 60 arcminutes, and each of those into 60 arcseconds. The SI Brochure lists the degree among the widely used non-SI units, equal to π/180 radian, about 0.01745. For scale, the Moon and the Sun each look about half a degree wide, and a little finger held at arm's length covers roughly one degree of sky.

1 degree = 0.002777777778 turns (approximately).

Sources: BIPM SI Brochure, 9th edition (2019); Wikipedia: Degree (angle); Wikipedia: Angular diameter

Streck (Swedish Mil) (streck)

ScandinavianTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

One 6,300th of a full turn, the Swedish military unit. Close to a milliradian (1/6,283).

Swedish gunners divided the circle into 6,300 parts and called each one a streck, which is Swedish for a stroke or line. One streck is therefore 1/6300 of a turn, close to a milliradian, since a true circle holds about 6,283.185 of those. The rounding gave artillery officers a convenient number, because a milliradian covers about one meter at a distance of one thousand meters.

Other armies picked different round numbers. NATO uses 6,400 mils per circle and the Warsaw Pact used 6,000, so mixing the systems in range calculations leads to errors of a few percent. The idea of an angular mil goes back to the Swiss engineer Charles-Marc Dapples in the mid-nineteenth century, and France adopted it for artillery around the First World War.

Sweden later moved to the NATO mil, and before 2007 its defence forces still used the streck, so it is now an obsolete military convention.

1 streck (Swedish mil) = 0.0001587301587 turns (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Milliradian; Wikipedia: Angular mil

Related conversions

See all angle units.