Submitted via IRC for Fnord666_
Each one of the US Navy's Virginia-class submarines costs about $2.6 billion. So, it should come as no surprise that it contains a lot of custom, high-end electronics and military hardware. The Navy is looking to save a little money on future submarines, and make them a bit easier to operate, by ditching some of that fancy custom technology in favor of a game console controller. According to Lockheed-Martin, the US government is in the process of outfitting Virginia-class submarines with Xbox 360 controllers to control the periscope.
[...] The idea to switch to gaming peripherals comes from Lockheed-Martin's classified research lab in Manassas, Virginia, which is lovingly referred to as "Area 51." Engineers and officers work together at this facility to find new uses for commercial hardware in the military. That could include hardware like the 360 controllers, Kinect, or a touch-screen tablet, but also consumer software like Google Earth.
[...] The Navy currently has 13 Virginia-class nuclear submarines to outfit with gamepads. Six new subs are already in various stages of production, and as many as 29 more might be built before a new vessel is ready for production in about 20 years.
Source: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/256049-us-navy-use-xbox-360-controllers-submarine-periscopes
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:18PM
Perhaps, but I expect better from tech news sites: I expect an audience that's actually technically competent, and knows enough to not shoot their mouths off about stuff they have no clue about, or at least when they do make comments, to actually have some humility and realize they're speaking from a position of relative ignorance. For instance, I don't presume to be an expert or even barely competent about structural or civil engineering, and any comments I make about bridge-related articles are not going to be worded in a way to make me seem like I am some kind of expert; I might bash politicians who make funding decisions, but I'm not going to second-guess any actual CivEs about the engineering aspects. But here, for some reason, we have people who think they're experts on defense sector requirements and military operations, but they don't even know what "COTS" stands for. Anyone who actually works as an engineer in defense would not screw that acronym up.