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3D Army Land Navigation Courses

oe.tradoc.army.mil

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Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#41

Post by mandevil »

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.

I suspect it's because in real life, you will have just sat through a death-by-powerpoint on principles of landnav for 90 minutes of some bored E6 reading off the slides to a whole bunch of even more bored E4's and then you get to play the game to practice.

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#42

Post by thaumasiotes »

mxfh wrote: post #40
thaumasiotes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, s…

> 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.

I assume the point of the simulator is to train the user to complete a similar exercise in reality, so I don't agree here - you have to write down the waypoint code in the real exercise, and it's not good for the simulator to encourage you to overlook doing that.

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#43

Post by thaumasiotes »

gonzoflip wrote: post #37
0xEF wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

They seem to be doing great work on that front. I was favorably impressed by the documentation attached to the tools in the game.

> To convert a magnetic azimuth to a grid azimuth, add G-M angle

> To convert a grid azimuth to a magnetic azimuth, subtract G-M angle

(emphasis original, but provided by underlining instead of italics)

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#45

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #43
gonzoflip wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Also, there is already a manual for everything you do in the military. They seem to be doing great work on that front. I was favorably impressed by the documentation attached to the tools in the game. > To convert a magnetic azimuth to a grid azimuth, add G-M angle > To convert a grid azimuth to a magnetic azimuth, subtract G-M angle (emphasis original, but provided by underlining instead of italics)

[deleted]

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#46

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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…

At least in the desert map, the "paths" drawn on the map seem meaningless (not visible in the world). I found my first flag simply by going in the right heading (after correcting for magnetic deviation) and going the expected distance (60 steps per 100 meters, I assume). I'm not sure that's how you're supposed to do land nav IRL...

Also, there are decoy flags that aren't on the list.

Edit: In the "forest" map the paths make sense but I'm pretty sure the map or flag coordinates are slighly off (with a flag being on a different side of a path than indicated by the coordinates).

Re: 3D Army Land Navigation Courses

#48

Post by closewith »

red_admiral wrote: post #28
dmos62 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't the Navy going back to teaching sextants and astral navigation, just in case in a conflict the enemy interferes with GPS? On land, I always carry a paper map while hiking and have a bit of a, shall we say, opinion of people who neither take a map nor could competently use it if they needed to. Especially on multi-day mountain walks with a night in a hut along the way.

I'm now a SAR navigator on a lifeboat and we now have a renewed focus on manual navigation as skills atrophied due to reliance on GPS plotting. While GPS in our AOR is rock solid, our plotters are not and frequently unavailable.
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