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A visit to Spain


Ssnake

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Just came back from a visit of a Spanish mech brigade near Badajoz, close to the border of Portugal. They had a brigade command post exercise (700 men involved in total), with 75 Steel Beasts machines generating the incidents and tactical development of the situation. Was pretty interesting. They had a number of command posts set up all over the base (which had no direct access to SB Pro).

 

Apparently the generals rated the exercise as a success (as far as the use of SB Pro to drive the events was concerned; can't say much of the mission itself). Of course it was also a bit intimidating, seeing so many people depending on the reliability of SB Pro as the software. Fortunately, no crashes. :)

 

I could take some scenes with the video camera, will cobble together something for YouTube eventually (probably only after ITEC, though).

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Like I wrote, can't say much about the exercise itself. I was more interested in

a) that it happened in the first place,

b) the scale of it, and

c) how it was organized/conducted

 

I always had the vision that SB Pro could be used as an event generator to "power" a CPEx, and of course I heard of similar events from other customers. But actually seeing it all in one place was a different thing. It drives home the degree of responsibility that we have with respect to the stability of our program code, particularly given the fact that Steel Beasts was never designed to run brigade level exercises; our idea in 1997 was about the company level, and one level up plus "a bit" for reserve.

 

So here we are, 20 years later, receiving feedback that 15 companies per side are not enough, that the customer would like to use bigger maps than 100x100km², and all that ideally in high resolution terrain. It remains to be seen if those are realistic expectations.

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Well, we built in ample reserves during the design stage. 20 years ago we wouldn't have believed that the reserves were robust enough for such a task, but then again the proof that it was possible to run BDE level exercises was made more than ten years ago.

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For OpSec reasons, I am not allowed to tell.

I can however confirm that it was not about Gibraltar, just in case that anyone is seriously excited about this issue. The amount of hysteria about this rock is somewhat alarming. Our ability to conduct a measured and rational public debate (no matter what the topic) seems to be shrinking every day.

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8 hours ago, Ssnake said:

For OpSec reasons, I am not allowed to tell.

I can however confirm that it was not about Gibraltar, just in case that anyone is seriously excited about this issue. The amount of hysteria about this rock is somewhat alarming. Our ability to conduct a measured and rational public debate (no matter what the topic) seems to be shrinking every day.

 

Understood. Perhaps they were re-running the siege and trying to do better than Wellington.

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On ‎4‎/‎27‎/‎2017 at 10:03 PM, Ssnake said:

Just came back from a visit of a Spanish mech brigade near Badajoz, close to the border of Portugal. They had a brigade command post exercise (700 men involved in total), with 75 Steel Beasts machines generating the incidents and tactical development of the situation. Was pretty interesting. They had a number of command posts set up all over the base (which had no direct access to SB Pro).

 

Apparently the generals rated the exercise as a success (as far as the use of SB Pro to drive the events was concerned; can't say much of the mission itself). Of course it was also a bit intimidating, seeing so many people depending on the reliability of SB Pro as the software. Fortunately, no crashes. :)

 

I could take some scenes with the video camera, will cobble together something for YouTube eventually (probably only after ITEC, though).

Congratulations to Esim, this could be a very important milestone. Hope other nations sit up and take notice.

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Steel Beast is extensively used in the Spanish Army, even in combination with other sims like VBS 2, VICTRIX  and sometimes creatiing exercises in diferent geographical locations with different units. Infantry, Cavalry, Armour..

Here is a link of some recent excercies (translated to english) LINK

 

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