The fundamental unit of distance in Marathon is something that I'll call (for lack of a generally accepted term) a point - it's 1/1024 of a WU, 1/8 of a texture pixel.
The fundamental unit of time is a tick - 1/30 second. I'm pretty sure that Pfhorte uses these units directly; Forge tries to present them in more human-readable formats, although this introduces some problems such as round-off errors. (Within each WU, there are 24 point positions that are physically impossible to enter in Forge, since it only allows entry in multiples of 0.001 WU).
Platform speeds are especially problematic: when Forge tries to convert the true points-per-tick value to a WU/second value for display, it does so INCORRECTLY - it divides by 30, when the correct conversion factor is 34.133333. Platform speeds therefore always appear a bit too fast in Forge. For example, the .567 WU/sec speed that appears as the default for many platform types, is actually 1/2 WU/sec (rounded off, since exactly 1/2 WU/sec is not an integer in points/tick).