Vintage Tank Simulator Drives Around a Miniature Landscape

So, you imagine your iRacing sim rig is quite outrageous, huh? Guaranteed, it is acquired a entire-movement base and it’s driven by a authentic sizzling-rod of a Computer system, but I’m below to convey to you that your rig is crap and that the Swiss built the final sim rig in the 1970s —to teach troopers how to travel tanks. Why they’d need to have to, I just can’t say (this is Switzerland, after all), but it is amazing anyway.

So, due to the fact desktops sucked in the 1970s, developing a practical coaching simulator using computer graphics was not seriously an alternative. It would have appeared like a shittier Nintendo Virtual Boy, likely induce a lot of head aches, and not genuinely be a advantage to any person. Alternatively, individuals enterprising Swiss created a enormous, area-sized terrain model and equipped a tiny digital camera to a motorized gantry. The tank-driver-in-education sits in a recreation of a cockpit, functioning a steering wheel, pedals, and switches, and the digital camera moves close to the scale-design landscape primarily based on the driver’s inputs. The cockpit sits on best of hydraulic cylinders that jostle the driver as the tank drives over a variety of terrain, introducing realism to the practical experience.

This online video by YouTuber Tom Scott displays how the process performs and what the workforce at the Swiss Army Museum experienced to go by way of to get the simulator operating again. Spoiler inform: it is run by a Raspberry Pi. Wild, I know.

The greatest aspect of all this is that you can go to the Swiss Armed service Museum in Complete-Reuenthal, and they’ll permit you attempt it out — throat mic, headset and all. That they’d permit the community try out this, with it becoming the only operating unit in the complete entire world, is quite wild.

Also, I have to get some of individuals dope Alpenflage coveralls. Get in touch with me, guys.