Virtual war: The army and technology

Posted at: Thursday 6th September 2007 by James Gorbold

James Gorbold joins the British Army at its high-tech Land Warfare Centre to see just what the military are doing with the most expensive computer games in the world.

Due to its sheer size and complexity, the CATT is the most advanced military simulator in the world, and with a £400-million price tag and a £600-a-day electricity bill, it's quite clearly the most expensive computer game ever developed. Knowing what keen gamers we are, the British Army generously arranged for Chris, Phil and myself to spend some time in the CATT, battling it out across a virtual European landscape against several other IT journalists. Having spent some time in the same vehicles in the real world, we can attest to the physical realism of the vehicle-specific pods, although, as Phil commented, getting into a real Challenger 2 is somewhat easier than boarding the simulator. In a real Challenger 2, the turret crew (gunner, loader and commander) descend through two hatches in the roof, while in the simulator, the turret crew have to crawl through an opening in the rear of the turret.

However, once powered up, it's clear that the CATT is no simple computer game. Even the most realistic PC games don't model the same level of complexity as the CATT - whether it's the three separate radio networks a tank commander has to simultaneously deal with, or a comparatively simple task such as firing off smoke grenades. Tank gunnery is also accurately simulated, requiring the gunner and commander to actively scan for a target, identify it, use the laser rangefinder and then choose the appropriate ammunition before opening fire. Once a round has been fired and hits a target, the simulation then has to calculate whether it has penetrated the target. Unlike PC games, which usually use only a few simple hit boxes to determine if the target is destroyed, the CATT simulation divides each vehicle into 12 hit boxes. After calculating which of these hit boxes the round has entered, it works out if the round has penetrated the armour, depending on the angle at which it entered the hit box. Only then can the simulation calculate the sort of damage the round would cause, from a non-lethal 'mobility kill' effect such as destroying a drive sprocket, to the full destruction of the target. However, despite this complexity, we found that our background as PC gamers enabled us to competently command a tank in less than a few minutes -although Phil managed to get his Challenger 2 stuck in a riverbed.

In addition, even though a few games (such as Aliens vs Predator 2) are capable of creating the occasional scary moment, nothing I've played comes close to creating the same hot, sweaty, noisy atmosphere as that of the CATT. This is even more incredible considering the comparatively basic graphics provided by the view ports. The virtual world you see through the viewpoints and aiming sights is no looker - it's roughly equivalent to a DirectX 7-era PC game. However, the MOD was keen to point out that 'the public would have the right to ask all sorts of questions if we spent too much money on the graphics'. Or as the British Army put it, 'The CATT is there to train troops in combined arms tactics, so the focus has never been on graphics, but on making it as realistic as possible. In fact, in many ways the software elements of the CATT are no more sophisticated than a PC game - what really sets it apart is the physical realism achieved by sitting inside imitation armoured vehicles, and its scale.'