How to simulate a light armoured vehicle The Australian Light Armoured Vehicle (ASLAV) is an eight-wheeled, 13,450-kilogram monster, which bristles with a grenade launcher, a pair of machine guns and a 25 millimetre M242 “Bushmaster” chain gun. The ASLAV can carry six troops in addition to its three crew. Two of the latter ride inside the vehicle's turret, where the …
I remember reading in New Scientist of a military aerial combat simulator for the military... trainees were rather taken aback when kangaroos stopped hopping and started firing surface-to-air missiles at them.
It turned out that the developers had felt an urge to decorate the landscape with some native fauna to aid realism, and done so by reusing some existing assets, ie code for enemy infantry. Unfortunately, whilst they had changed the graphics files of the troops to resemble hopping marsupials, they hadn't updated all behaviours.
( Penguin - another animal exclusive to the Southern hemisphere)
It's a great story, and has some basis in fact, but the reality of it is apparently a little more mundane. The devs did it as a joke; it was something visible right away (not an embarrassing hiccough during demonstration or after deployment); and it was at an early stage of development (when the projectiles were still, IIRC, beachballs rather than missiles).
I always wonder about some of these sims, considering how complex they are, whether they actually do save money over just taking a LAV ("eight-wheeled-thunderbox"!) out on the range for some training. I can understand it when it comes to jets, they cost a fortune, and if your trainee gets his low-level training wrong then the jet becomes a very expensive pile of wreckage, but it's not like an ASLAV is going to crash and burn!
I suspect these are high-maintenance vehicles. When I visited a Marine base I got the impression that maintaining the vehicles used for training there was a full-time job for a significant number of people; military gear like this is often built with the assumption that it won't travel a huge number of miles in its lifetime before being either destroyed by enemy action or written off in a mishap on rugged terrain, so being used day in and day out for training tends to consume spares rapidly.
So, are these sims designed to be compatible with all of the other simulation gear out there? I read somewhere that some helicopter and fixed-wing simulators can talk to each other and participate in the same virtual war, but about about ground and sea assets too.
Then, they could add in government simulators, where you have to conduct military deals with virtual suppliers and negotiate overpriced equipment and constant u-turns.
Or failing that, a nice game of chess.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. I'm working hard on my proofing - we work without a net here in the APAC eerie. For those of you who wanted more detail , I'm sorry if the story is a little light-on. The story had to be vetted and the deep technical details weren't available for predictable reasons, but I felt the story worth a go anyway.
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