Vintage Tank Simulator Drives Around a Miniature Landscape

So, you think your iRacing sim rig is rather outrageous, huh? Certain, it is obtained a full-motion base and it is run by a serious scorching-rod of a Computer, but I’m in this article to convey to you that your rig is crap and that the Swiss crafted the final sim rig in the 1970s —to educate soldiers how to generate tanks. Why they’d will need to, I just can’t say (this is Switzerland, after all), but it’s awesome anyway.

So, mainly because computers sucked in the 1970s, making a reasonable coaching simulator working with computer graphics wasn’t definitely an solution. It would have looked like a shittier Nintendo Virtual Boy, possibly induce a ton of complications, and not genuinely be a gain to any individual. In its place, people enterprising Swiss crafted a enormous, area-sized terrain model and fitted a little 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 about the scale-model landscape based mostly on the driver’s inputs. The cockpit sits on leading of hydraulic cylinders that jostle the driver as the tank drives in excess of several terrain, incorporating realism to the working experience.

This video clip by YouTuber Tom Scott shows how the program performs and what the team at the Swiss Armed service Museum experienced to go by to get the simulator working all over again. Spoiler notify: it’s powered by a Raspberry Pi. Wild, I know.

The greatest component of all this is that you can go to the Swiss Navy Museum in Comprehensive-Reuenthal, and they’ll permit you check out it out — throat mic, headset and all. That they’d let the public try out this, with it staying the only performing device in the whole world, is fairly wild.

Also, I have to get some of these dope Alpenflage coveralls. Phone me, guys.