After the U.S. Army and Navy used the Xbox joystick to operate the new AbramX main combat vehicle and nuclear-powered attack submarine, the military application of the joystick has become more and more extensive. Homemade “spear” remote control machine gun system.
The “Spear” remote-controlled machine gun was launched by Ukraine in 2015. At that time, in response to the Crimean crisis, the battle in the Donbass region of Udon was very effective for special missions and resident defense.
The spear uses a 7.62X54mm PKM or PKT general-purpose machine gun. The original remote control device is operated by a camera with a vertical joystick, and the machine gun tower and the remote control device must be connected by a cable.
Recently, the Ukrainian Army has launched a new version of the spear remote control machine gun, using the newly launched handheld game console Steam Deck as the remote control device. It is connected to the machine gun tower with a wireless network, greatly improving the mobility, and the operation interface is more intuitive for officers and soldiers. convenient.
Steam Deck is Valve’s first handheld console. It adopts TSMC’s 7nm process AMD Zen2 micro-architecture processor with 4 cores and 8 threads, 2.4~3.5GHz. The operating system is developed by Valve based on Arch Linux and KDE Plasma 5. SteamOS 3.0.
The spear remote control machine gun is also the first military application after the launch of the Steam Deck. Peter Singer, a researcher at the New America Foundation, an American think tank, pointed out that game console companies spend millions of dollars to design User-friendly interface system and hardware configuration for complex game operations.
For the same increasingly complex weapon system, instead of spending millions of dollars to separately design the operating device, military enterprises should directly borrow the rich experience and products of the game industry to avoid spending a lot of money but not achieving simple and easy-to-operate effects.
The more weapon systems that the joystick can operate, the faster the younger generation who grew up playing game consoles can get started, and the time cost for the army to recruit and train new officers and soldiers will also be greatly reduced.
(First image source: ТРО Медіа)
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