The British system makes (or made) it obvious what things like heptillions are:

hept = 7; illion = powers of one million
heptillion = million^7 = 10^42

You tell me that quickly what the American version is :P .

I think that a British -illiard was an -illion times 1000. So 1 milliard = 1,000,000,000 = 1 American billion.

We should all just switch to SI prefixes
1000 = kilo
10^3 = mega
10^6 = giga
10^9 = tera
Then we can talk about megabucks and gigabucks