Photo: screenshot from Youtube/edited by autoevolution
Those bizarre military vehicles you’ve seen in video games might come true as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently researching a new class of armored ground units, based on a radically different approach.
So far, an armored vehicle was depending a lot on it’s body plates’ thickness and firepower to protect the soldiers inside. DARPA, however, wants to create a new breed of military vehicles that will slightly move away from this old concept, simply because weapons these days are getting too damn good.
The Ground X-Vehicle Technologies (GXV-T) program is aimed towards creating faster, more agile vehicles that are better at negotiating rough terrain, detecting and sneaking up on targets.
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Situational awareness is a major chapter in the project and it will be achieved using advanced cameras and sensors to feed large touchscreen displays inside the vehicle for the operator to use. He/she will have to rely solely on these advanced HUDs since there will be no windows or peep holes that decrease the vehicle’s body strength.
Climb aboard a tank these days and you’ll find out it has more buttons, switches and displays than a nuclear powerplant, not to mention the fact that you need at least three highly qualified men to operate one. This means another important thing to achieve with the GXV-T is user friendliness, so that every soldier could become an operator with minimal training.
As you’ll see in the video bellow, operating the new generation battle machine will pretty much resemble playing a video game on a tablet. Touch this to engage the enemy, touch that to switch to infrared vision, drag this to zoom in a bit and even swipe here to enter auto-pilot mode if you’ve had enough with the joystick.
Genius, but why do we bother sending people at war anyway. If you’re going to spend so much on sensors, displays and automatic systems, you could also hire Call of Duty players to remotely control some of these drones and skip the whole training part. Just make a video tutorial and promise them they can earn achievements instead of metal medals. In case all this sounds familiar, it's beacuase the story has been laid out in the famous sci-fi book and movie Ender's Game.
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