Use case
Gunnery skills trainer – leveraging battle skills of tank crews
In a nutshell
- Set of Gunnery Skills Trainers for soldiers and entire tank crews.
- Budget-friendly combination of proprietary, tailor-made and COTS software
- Efficient project delivery due to experienced and certified project management
The challenge
Main battle tanks come with increasingly complex systems. Dominating this technology while using it most efficiently is key to mission success and therefore poses the major challenge for tank crews. An army customer from a NATO country was looking for a seamlessly integrated training at the individual, crew and platoon level for its main battle tank fleet in a synthetic environment. His troops were well-trained and his fleet consisted of medium-aged vehicles that had been upgraded continuously over the years. Major shifts in global threat scenarios and significant advances of available training technology shaped customer requirements.
The solution
After contract award the customer and Rheinmetall formed a project team that performed a detailed training needs analysis and elaborated the functionalities of the gunnery skills trainer. Individual crew stations are used to teach and develop the skills of tank crew commanders, gunners, and drivers. For crew and up to platoon team level, individual crew stations are linked over a local network to form vehicle crews and subsequently platoon team sized vehicle groups with the ability to network and share data via wide area network with different locations across the country. Rheinmetall's proprietary scenario generator TacSi allows to mimic realistic scenarios with intelligent behaviour. Integration of game-based visualization software Virtual Battlespace (VBS) enables reuse of existing databases and exercise scenarios.
The benefits
The customer achieves various training objectives with only one system. Infantrymen use the gunnery skills trainer for basic training, return during their careers for recurrent training and can even use the system for effective mission rehearsal of tank crews. Through practice in the gunnery skills trainer the tank crews gain hands-on knowledge about the tank's specific capabilities, combat procedures and team work. The training systems are specifically designed for preparation of training on the real tank and therefore shorten the total training time. By integration of COTS visualization software the customer's procurement organization could achieve significant savings of development time and development costs. The cooperation between customer and Rheinmetall enabled efficient project management and ultimately led to fast commissioning of the systems.