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3D Army Land Navigation Courses

oe.tradoc.army.mil

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Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#31

Post by nradov »

dmos62 wrote: post #16
closewith wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They taught us to triangulate using pencil and ruler, but no one has time for that when it's starting to get dark. I was a military land nav instructor (although not for the US military) and this was one of our biggest challenges, especially once smart phones become common. People would consider position fixing to be an unbearable waste of time and would inevitably waste hours of time and effort because of it.

Sad story. A few weeks ago, a few US tankmen got lost in a Lithuanian training grounds driving a M88 recovery vehicle. They drowned in a swamp. Took most of a week to find and excavate them (they were under meters of mud). Last I heard the investigation is ongoing, but a theory is that their GPS was malfunctioning due to Russian or Belorussian GPS jamming and the crew failed to navigate without GPS. Russian GPS jammi…

That's entirely possible. I use Strava a lot and sometimes challenges or segment leaderboards show activities that are obviously invalid. And then when you look at the details you see bizarre GPS (GNSS) tracks in Eastern Europe or Russia that are characteristic of jamming or spoofing. GPS is great but it's really dangerous to rely on it for primary navigation.

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#33

Post by gonzoflip »

Very cool. I did a few points, I will be using this to brush up on my land nav. The hardest part of land nav for me when I was in the infantry was pace count and maintaining my azimuth while moving, this makes those both super simple, but a very neat game, thanks for sharing.

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#35

Post by mdaniel »

the loading screen says "Game may take a few minutes to load depending on the internet connection." but the dev tools say

> You can reduce your startup time if you configure your web server to host .unityweb files using gzip compression.

Seems like an easy fix and it's not exactly like that information requires 3l33t skillz to find

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#36

Post by UncleEntity »

teeray wrote: post #26

I didn't know the objective, so I created my own simple one: get to the lake because I'm thirsty. Then I created another one: get back to where I started so I can bring water to my injured companion.

Back when I was in the army the objective when doing individual land nav was: go hide in the woods until around the time to go back. Of course there was a bit of walking because we never started and ended at the same place so you had to have some familiarity with finding your way in the woods. Once in a while they would go out and change the point numbers around, usually when it was an actual test, so you had to know actual land navigation skills if you didn't want remedial training on the weekends.

The last land nav course I ever did was in the reserves and in the mountains. Instead of traipsing through the underbrush I just followed the fire breaks and occasionally took azimuths off surrounding mountain peaks and only missed one point because I didn't feel like hiking up the steep hill it was on top of.

Not too sure I see the value in online land nav but I also learned it before GPS was really a thing.

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#37

Post by gonzoflip »

0xEF wrote: post #7
thaumasiotes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no doubt, but that supplementary material isn't present here.

That might be part of the game; how resourceful are you? Can you find the information needed to play it without someone handing it to you? That's interesting, if true.

Generally the expectation is that with a map, compass, and protractor a member of the Army should be able to navigate a land nav course(the simulation is very similar to the real courses). In practice, it's much more likely that a combat arms soldier would know how to use this than someone that works in something like cyber operations.

In my time in the Infantry we spent a significant amount of time working on honing landnav skills, both theory, and practice.

*Edit* Also, there is already a manual for everything you do in the military.

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#38

Post by xeonmc »

xeonmc wrote: post #9

How to play: 1. scattered throughout the level are flagpoles with two-letter names on the flag 2. you are given a list of numeric coordinates which are locations to a subset of the flagpoles, in the format (map section)(xx.xx)(yy.yy), as well that of as your starting point 3. the objective is to navigate to those coordinates to record the two-letter names of those flags. A UI will open when you walk up to each flag a…

On a side note, I feel like this could be recreated as a Minecraft mod, it already has procedural terrain, the waypoints can be placed procedurally as well, and the maps can be generated from height data automatically.

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#39

Post by inanutshellus »

closewith wrote: post #22
polyvisual wrote: post #19

Possibly the longest email address I've ever seen! usarmy.jble.tradoc.mbx.eustis-tboc-dtl-helpdesk@mail.mil

usarmy (U.S. Army) jble (Joint Base Langley-Eustis) tradoc (Training and Doctrine Command) mbx (mailbox) eustis (Fort Eustis) tboc (Training Brain Operations Center) dtl (Data Transmission Lab) helpdesk (help desk) mail (mail) mil (military domain) Tells you everything you need to know.

Note also the significance of the dots vs dashes in their taxonomy. Once it gets to "mailbox" it's all dashes, signifying no more breakdown by the overarching system beyond "we finally hit a mailbox designation".

I presume that dashed bit is what we'd think of as a normal email address.

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#40

Post by mxfh »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #12
noduerme wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I'm surprised they give you the option to move forward deterministically; that's not actually a thing that humans operating outside can do. Absent distant landmarks?

You can do a pretty good job if you can see mountains, or the sun.

The path generation is pretty nonsensical though, nothing here follows the terrain, they are only good as some sort of blurry guides.

The formatting of the MRGS coords is horrible.

Just give the easting and northing is blocks please like 1234 5678.

Feels like 90 of the time is wasted on parsing this and making sure your in the right square kilometer.

Also the waypoint could give you there ID when getting near them, so you could just assign them to the waypoint number, having to type seems overkill.

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