Britain’s Royal Navy Inducts Advanced Ship Simulator

The Royal Navy has received the most advanced ship simulator featuring photo-realistic recreations of key harbours to train bridge teams. The upgrade to the replica bridge at Britannia Royal Naval College (BRNC) features photo-realistic recreations of key harbours such as Portsmouth and Plymouth, immersing trainee naval officers, budding navigators and experienced ship's teams in an almost-real world as they hone their ship piloting skills safely on dry land. There are four bridge simulators to train navigators and bridge teams - two at HMS Collingwood and one each at Dartmouth and Faslane, all of which have been in use for several years. "Whereas in the past you'd just see a row of houses, now there are specific buildings," explains Lieutenant Sam Stephens, head of navigation at Dartmouth. The simulator features the front section of a generic warship's bridge, plus giant display screens in a 180-degree arc to recreate the outside world and is powered by the equivalent of ten high-spec gaming computers. The system can also recreate a lookout's view through binoculars, while the 'ship handling' characteristics - length, beam, displacement and the like - perfectly mirror most classes of ships in the fleet (the main exception presently being the new Type 45 destroyers). As well as locations and harbours, which can be loaded in a matter of seconds (the Portsmouth Harbour file is 630 megabytes - enough data to fill a CD), the computer recreates pretty much all sea and weather conditions one of Her Majesty's Ships might encounter: driving rain or snow, hurricanes, sandstorms and fogbanks.