Oh yeah — I got to tour a bridge simulator while interviewing at some defense contractor (didn’t get hired, though, maybe they could tell I’d want to load a spaceship bridge simulator up on the thing).

It is kind of funny, I actually got a “seasick” feeling on it. The simulated “deck” didn’t move, but the image through the “windows” did, I think having grown up near the coast I’d been on enough boats that my brain expected the floor to start moving to keep up with the horizon.

I guess I'm sort of lucky that it's impossible for me to get seasick. Though I don't think it'll ever be useful in a situation like that.

p.s. first time I've seen a real em-dash in someone else's HN comment, very nice :3

I must admit I didn’t do anything clever there.

I’ve limited social media like hackernews to just my iPhone (at least picking up the phone is a conscious decision to take a break, having the social media in my browser is a big distraction). The phone just translates hyphen hyphen to em-dash.

> The simulated “deck” didn’t move

I have absolutely no experience with ships beyond small sailboats, but watching the video gave me a very strong ‘that’s not a ship’ feeling, and it all comes down to it being a rock solid environment.

It's possible to go much further.[1] This is the "USS Trayer", at the U.S. Navy's Great Lakes Naval Training Center. All U.S. Navy recruits go through an all-night test onboard. It looks like a real ship at night, outside and inside. It's even in water, moored alongside a pier. The ship can be navigated, go into combat, and take damage, including flooding and fires. It's deliberately very stressful.

All this is indoors and inland. It's in a water tank. It's a big simulator for an entire crew, a hundred or so at once.

The U.S. Navy does have bridge training simulators, but not enough of them. That's come out after some ship accidents due to bad coordination and ship-driving on the bridge.

[1] https://youtu.be/jibm7kyIGcM

The US Army does similar training. There are some dumb "video game" type simulators of vehicles, etc that aren't worth much (VBS 3). However, every Headquarters from Battalion on up to Division or Corps periodically gets out their tents and computer systems to do various Command Post Exercises (CPX). It feels a bit like being on the bridge of a ship when reacting to events and issuing orders and watching units executing those orders on the (computerized and analog) map.

Anyway, probably the Navy and these space simulators are a lot more fun though.