The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)

Re:The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018) by analognoise on Thursday May 28, 2020 @05:14PM (#23342737)

I've heard the US Navy is going away from screens; they were a bad idea, cause a lot of confusion and they're reverting back to analog switchgear because of the tactile feedback.

Ugly but functional might be the way of the future!

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Re:The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018) by aasasd on Thursday May 28, 2020 @05:41PM (#23343066)

Touchscreens are just evil in any sort of physically involved environment, e.g. a car or even a kitchen stove. You can have ‘good-looking and functional’ (with physical controls too), but touchscreens in such a setup are rather ‘good-looking and dysfunctional’.

Game controllers are the perfect example of ergonomically-tuned physical controls with sleek looks. And afaik the US military uses Xbox controllers in drone control or something like that.

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Re:The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018) by romwell on Friday May 29, 2020 @06:29AM (#23348330)

I hope one day we'll have shape-changing touchscreens which can grow physical buttons that can be pressed, and that could be operated without looking.

Something like a braille-capable touchscreen would already be a great improvement (concept art: [1][2])

This is technically 2.5D, and 3D would be even better (imagine a screen which can grow a joystick!).

While 3D-shape-shifting screens don't seem to exist even in SciFi, 2.5D displays are already being worked on, and would be a huge step up.

[1] https://www.yankodesign.com/2017/01/26/touchscreen-how-about...

[2] https://www.popsci.com/new-touch-screen-design-could-display...

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Re:The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018) by hoseja on Friday May 29, 2020 @02:31AM (#23346862)

I'm just hoping this won't bite the Crew Dragon in the ass one day.

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Re:The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018) by paleogizmo on Thursday May 28, 2020 @05:51PM (#23343194)

I recall that there were some pretty long threads here after the US warship hitting some commercial vessel. The big issue wasn't using a screen but that the designers had taken advantage of having screens to create a multi-functional interface so one station could serve different functions, or functions could be moved between stations. Flexible, but confusing. I think the move is not to analog control, but back to single-purpose controls. Also, even if mechanical controls replace touchscreens, I'm sure that there will still be an optical encoder and field bus behind everything.

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Re:The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018) by pbhjpbhj on Friday May 29, 2020 @10:23AM (#23350270)

Why not physical analogue controls that are motorised like in some aeroplane controls. You can turn the dial, or the computer can turn the dial - and supposedly (737Max aside) allow physical control to override.

Being able to replace a physical station seems a great benefit in a warship.

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Re:The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018) by jayelbe on Friday May 29, 2020 @06:14AM (#23348243)

https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

It was a really good read!

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Re:The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018) by closeparen on Thursday May 28, 2020 @07:02PM (#23344072)

I think of it this way: tactile controls for operation, read-only screens for situational awareness, touch or keyboard/mouse for configuration. Just don't put them on real-time critical paths.

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