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: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @09:56PM (3 children)
My telescoping cock shoots straight into your ass before retracting. You can't even figure out who or where I am, but I am there and your ass is mine!
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by c0lo on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:21PM (2 children)
I confess myself... disappointed.
Where's the awesomeness of d¡ck n¡ggers, you technical illiterate troll?
At the least, you could wait for stories so bland you can have you frost piss 2-3 hours after publishing, that would show some moral motives.
Fuck off, you poser. You are useless, can't even contribute to the growth of S/N lameness filter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by edIII on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:23PM (1 child)
Same here. I miss the trials and tribulations of the bathroom coder. At least he maintained some sort of software on git....
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:52PM
Dick Bathroom Stall-Man [github.com] doesn't use git.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:28PM (10 children)
A while back the military or maybe Congress decided it's a bad idea to design and build custom computers. They went for COTS (or COT, I don't recall).
This had the result that some contractors designed special-purpose computers then called them COTs.
I once interviewed at such a company. They were designing a box to pack the most MIPs into as small a volume as possible, I expect for military aviation.
That company build nothing but COTs. Their COTs systems weren't anything like PC clones.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:12PM (9 children)
The perils of Common Off The Shelf Technology were what I immediately thought of when I read TFS.
To get in the frame of mind to consider this, permit me a thought experiment.
Think of what it means to design something that has to work in Outer Space.
It has to work in extreme conditions (heat, cold, pressures, radiation), and by "work" I don't mean "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" but rather actually continue to function, because it may or may not be technically possible to visit the Outer Space site and replace the part, but if you have to do that, it means the part was found not suitable for its application.
Has to work in extreme conditions, has to not need replacement.
Now it's perhaps easy to visualize this for something In Space, but maybe not for military use. The military, after all, does (most of) their work here on the planet.
But the same guidelines apply: Has to work in extreme conditions, has to not need replacement.
Has to work in extreme conditions because the military works in places (open desert for months/years at a time, under the sea, etc.) that, for example, the xbox wasn't designed for (think "climate-controlled living room").
Has to not need replacement because places that the military goes with their equipment (open desert for months/years at a time, under the sea, etc.) are hard to get to--the trip to make to deliver a replacement may well be as difficult and expensive as the trip that's using the item needing replacement, and in the meantime the military fails at readiness because parts are not working.
I have no problem visualizing a ruggedized olive drab green or sand-brown xbox-looking controller with a rugged, high-dependability housing and cable and connector that's used to control military equipment. But I just can't visualize an off-the-shelf xbox controller lasting any time in an extreme environment: heat, moisture, repeated heavy use*, exposure to oils and/or sand, radiation, heavy use that would wear out the cable/connector strain reliefs and connection points, random failure from manufacturing defect, a long list of problems waiting to happen. Would they carry dozens or hundreds of replacements for every one in use? These are the problems that MIL-SPEC [wikipedia.org] was designed to eliminate.
---
* "Hey, man, I have seen gamers put controllers to the test! Repeated heavy use, for sure" -- Yeah, in a living room, with a trip to Crappy Consumer Controllers Cache or whatever game store you buy replacement controllers from less than a day's journey away and costing somewhere less than a million bucks to reach. Doesn't count.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:24PM (5 children)
Has to work in extreme conditions because the military works in places (open desert for months/years at a time, under the sea, etc.) that, for example, the xbox wasn't designed for (think "climate-controlled living room").
Wrong. This has to work in an environment not very different from a living room. This is a submarine; submarines are not found in the open desert. And this is used on the bridge, where people are, not in the seawater. It doesn't need to withstand extreme climates.
Has to not need replacement because places that the military goes with their equipment (open desert for months/years at a time, under the sea, etc.) are hard to get to--the trip to make to deliver a replacement may well be as difficult and expensive as the trip that's using the item needing replacement, and in the meantime the military fails at readiness because parts are not working.
Wrong. The military carries spares of stuff all the time. You don't think they're going to have 5 more of these dirt-cheap controllers in a storage bin on-board?
But I just can't visualize an off-the-shelf xbox controller lasting any time in an extreme environment: heat, moisture, repeated heavy use*, exposure to oils and/or sand, radiation, heavy use that would wear out the cable/connector strain reliefs and connection points, random failure from manufacturing defect, a long list of problems waiting to happen.
This is the bridge of a submarine, not an extreme environment. Bridge officers don't wear environmental suits; the crew's areas are climate-controlled. There's no more moisture than there is in a teenager's basement. There's no sand on a submarine bridge (do I really need to inform people of this here? This is pathetic.) There's no radiation on a submarine bridge to worry about, or else they wouldn't have people there. Heavy use? What do you think teenagers playing these systems do with them? Handle them delicately? If it breaks, big deal; pull it out and go get the next spare from the spares locker and plug it in.
Honestly, the idiotic nay-saying I'm seeing in these comments has really made me embarrassed to be a commenter on this site.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:48AM (2 children)
Yeah, these are xbox controllers. They're going to need more than five spares. They're probably going to have to come up with an alternative to that shite non-replacable lithium battery system, too.
Plus, I'd love to be a fly on the wall when the officer of the deck or whomever tries to press the left arrow on the d-pad and the frigging thing goes right.
Yessir, xbox controllers. Not what I'd want to control my periscope. Well. If I had a periscope. :)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:55AM (1 child)
They're probably going to have to come up with an alternative to that shite non-replacable lithium battery system, too.
What in the fuck are you talking about? These are simple wired controllers. 5 spares, 20 spares, what does it matter? They don't take up *that* much space. They'll probably even have crewmen buying their own higher-quality high-end controller instead and plugging that in. These things are all compatible; it's just a simple USB connection and a dead-simple API.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:52AM
The real problem is if some gamer encounters a faulty controller and is retarded enough to borrow the periscope spares or even the periscope one... ;)
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 21 2017, @11:36AM (1 child)
Everyone wants to look smart. Everyone wants recognition. Everyone wants to be seen every now and then no matter how hard they try to hide. We're always going to see this behaviour no matter where we go.
(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.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:26PM
BTW, COTS stands for Commercial Off-The-Shelf. Seriously, if you don't even know that, you have no business pointing to mil-specs.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:27PM
To be fair, this is on a submarine. The oils, dirt, sand, etc. are well mitigated already, and the environment in the control room is controlled. The size of the 360 controller is fairly small compared to other equipment, and I don't see any reason why they couldn't have two replacements ready to go out of sealed packages.
I get your point otherwise though.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:36AM
Good replies by other commenters.
It's SOOOO much cheaper to use COTS than MILSPEC that you still come out ahead even if the COTS gear breaks more often. It's easier to find multiple suppliers as well, and the development costs are not borne solely by the DOD, as it would be with military-specific equipment, but instead are spread across the entire military + commercial market. Cheaper price per unit.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:30PM
So, instead of IDDAD (or IDDQD), they'll have to enter the Konami code?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:11PM (7 children)
So they are going to install controllers from the XBox360 in, train for, etc. on a weapon system that will be in production for twenty years and probably still in service in 2050.... but the XBox360 is already out of production and only a custom order will be able to produce a new controller in five years. Genius. Bet they end up paying $100 ea over the life of the sub.
Why not a standardized Bluetooth HID device?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:16PM (3 children)
You don't think they'll just buy a whole crate of these things and keep them stored?
You can't use Bluetooth on a submarine; it has to be wired, for security.
And the Xbox controllers use a simple API; there's already a bunch of compatible controllers out there. They really standardized on the interface, not the controller.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:56PM (2 children)
You mean somewhere in close vicinity to the slots for the armageddon keys, there's now a USB port connected to a general purpose computer running DirectX componets... on Windows maybe? Sound good, what could go wrong?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:56AM (1 child)
Most likely, it's a system running INTEGRITY from Green Hills. It could also be a Linux system. Interfacing with an Xbox360 controller isn't exactly difficult. Do we really not have any software engineers on this site?
(Score: 1) by WillR on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:11PM
*adjusts foil lined pith helmet*
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:30PM (2 children)
1. I bought replacement controllers for my N64 [ebay.com] earlier this year. They cost less than the original controllers by a wide margin (whether you adjust for inflation or not).
2. Instead of paying a factory to re-tool and make me a custom run of two N64 controllers, I just bought them off ebay.
3. Yes, system released in the 1990s, controllers cheap commodity hardware in 2017.
4. Controllers for the original xbox [ebay.com] from 2001 are going for about $11 on ebay right this minute, despite the "out of production" thing.
4. Therefore, "xbox not in production a long time" is not "the problem here." It's not even likely to be "a problem here."
5. Note that this does not mean that this is a good idea; it probably isn't.
6. But spending $100 on a $6.7 bazillion dollar submarine is probably not in the top 100 reasons why this is a bad idea.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fishybell on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:55PM (1 child)
Better than that, moving to a Xbox 360 controller is effectively as equivalent to moving to any generic USB HID device. In case of supply issues, they will have to remap new controller buttons, and probably need a new wireless receiver, but Microsoft didn't reinvent the wheel on this one.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @01:00AM
FINALLY!! An intelligent post on this subject here!
You're exactly right; these controllers are not ultra-proprietary, like the game consoles from the 80s and 90s. There's already compatible 3rd-party controllers out there (and have been for a while), and the protocol is dead-simple from what I've read about it. If the MS controllers turn out to be too crappy, it'll be trivial for them to just switch to another supplier.
And these controllers aren't wireless BTW. They're just simple wired devices; you can even see this in the first photo in TFA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:05AM (2 children)
As long as they don't do this... "Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Select Start"
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:50AM
"Which social media would you like to share to today?"
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 21 2017, @11:40AM
Exactly. Last thing you need is a trollish big brother who keeps ramming his sub into the rocks to purposefully waste his lives so he can steal yours. Fuckin multiplayer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @01:55AM
That's some real cutting-edge work, LockMart. And this is one of their PR-spam-grade success stories. I wonder what their failures are (obviously top-secret).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:30AM
What is this, a submarine or a movie about submarines?
"- Clonk!
- What was that?
- Hit a boat? That display went poof, damn HDMI. Oh, re-auth loop. Give it 30 seconds, sir, or we slap it. That works.
- Well, whatever. Damages?
- The coffee mug hit that other display... it doesn't seem to react anymore, I can't change to that screen.
- Brain of ship designer totally scrap! Wirte it down in the log!"
But don't worry, I also saw a similar thing applied to local tanks, all
militaryworld is going full retard. Tactile feedback when you got eye problems? Dirty gloves? Who cares? Just keep bouncing around with touch screens that look non reinforced... maybe you ram the enemy tank... like in videogames.There was a lot of pork barrels moving, I'm sure. The company behind is a classic of that.
I'm so waiting for a Stuxnet like fuckery from COTS cables (remember, USB now has chips, and you could also sneak it in supposedly dumb one), gamepads and all other crap. Spy agencies go to meetings like Def Con for the booze, not the info.
(Score: 2) by datapharmer on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:03PM
In other news military saves $10 by getting used controllers on Ebay shipped from Hong Kong. What could possibly go wrong?