And then an underslung camera pointing downwards watches you drink it- if you don't have your pinky out, the helmet activates shock pads and implodes, killing you instantly.
One does not simply go to war without tea making facilities in place. Good for the moral. I am not even joking, Standard practice for the British army.
The finnish version helmets of a whole platoon can be combined so they form a fully equipped sauna with television and many recordings of hockey matches. There are few things like sitting in sauna and watching hockey.
the Air Force version of the helmet would have satellite connected wi-fi internet and built in console of soldier's choice. And Air Conditioning.
Netflix and Viaplay for those 16 hour bombing flights. I mean, come on, nothing to do, have to eat special stuff that "stays inside", eg. you don't have to take a dump during flight.. all sorts of inconvenience and.. BORING! Yea, sure, flying is fun but going in a straight line with autopilot for 8 hours is hardly flying. 8 hours of boring, 1 minute of super intense, then another 8 hours of boring. It would actually make a ton of sense if they could, say, practice hitting the right target the whole way there, all sorts of simulated SAM alarms etc. Better yet, make it like Ender's Game, the pilot doesn't even know what was simulated and what wasn't
Well its even more boring for f-117 pilots. The plane drops the bombs not the pilot. Pilot is pretty much just there incase something happens like a malfunction.
"on this training exercise you will fly to x location and drop these practice bombs on this house full of terrorists and return home" all the while the pilots don't know that the bombs are real ones and not practice bombs. and the pilots think the house is just built for the training and to their knowledge is empty.
Considering the tech I saw some, um, "people", using in Afghanistan back in 2007 I'm still surprised to see such bulky single lens NVG being used. NVGs like those have a super limited field of vision, really killing that peripheral vision, even if the actual clarity has gotten really sharp. Plus, they displace your visual sense of position just enough to through you off unless you've trained a shit ton, which granted, anyone in the military who uses NVGs probably has anyways. But still, it's been eight friggen years. I didn't think there was that much of a lag.
FDF is weighing options between various NVG designs for next purchases, the affordable ones with wide vision can apparently have poorer focus and so. Also, the good NVG gear like what Seal 6 are using are so expensive that they're well beyond the scope of any common infantry, special ops only and only if they're that well funded. And, talking of military equipment, M-113, come on! But really, militaries use what they have. Unless 100% of your troops have NVG equipment, you're not going to be discarding old equipment in favor of new equipment. Instead, you rotate the older ones to units with lesser priority on the upgrade charts and there's usually some elite units that get stuff first and the rest get their old stuff in descending line. Eventually when 95% of troops have NVG gear you are arriving a situation where cooks and support staff are getting the oldest NVG goggles around. Because, at the end of day, the difference between best and worst NVG gear is nothing compared to difference between NVG or no NVG gear. And for things like being on defense even a narrow field is good as long as you can see clear and shoot with it since you're in any case going to have a relatively narrow cone of fire assigned to you.
This is all true, it's just surprising to me that the stuff I saw hasn't started to reach the realm of even entering into service with other levels of troops. I would have thought that by ten years it would have been doing what you described, but its still as restricted as ever, I guess, because I really haven't seen them showing up anywhere.
These, combined NV/IR sights with panoramic vision and very clear picture in the wide 97 degree field of view. It is clearly by far overwhelmingly the best choice out there. It also costs 65,000$ per unit, I mean, single piece. Equipping a single squad of infantry with these costs 585,000$, or 1.8 million $ per platoon or 290 million $ for a brigade. Compared to something like Which is still very powerful, far beyond that of civilian models, has 40 degree field of view and still costs several thousand $ per unit. It still costs roughly 20-40 million $ to equip a whole brigade with them. So, those are some of the reasons that they're not as commonplace as soldiers and commanders would like them to be. Equipping even 30% of ground forces with something decent costs a hell of a lot. Also, when you get deployed without NVG, you are likely to buy some shitty piece from ebay for 200-500$ cost. Those things are really substandard compared to military versions, often based on 30+ years old tech.
I'm aware of all of this. I'm just saying, I'm surprised the price of such things hasn't fallen faster and other technology taking their place as top tier priced items by now.
Look up a document on how many work phases, what standards are required etc. to produce a single night vision device. It has - Expensive rare materials - Very high standards of precision manufacturing in laboratory setting - High quality optical elements - Very high R&D investments - Military grade durability All of that means that it's never going to be simply a matter of economy of scale, in fact if it were produced in mass quantities it is probably that several of the rare elements etc. might see their prices actually surge since they are so difficult to come by. Sure to some point the price will drop but it would be quite difficult to make them really cheap. Compare to cars or aeroplanes, it's about the sheer amount of work hours that go into those devices, regardless if it's human hours or robot hours, even those robots cost a heck of a lot of money considering that the refinement level is very high. Think of pilot helmets, they're usually custom made per individual, hence they're expensive - lots of work on top of really expensive parts and materials. I fear the whole economic structure would need to be different for these things to be easily affordable. Think in terms of purchase power being 10 times of what it is now with massive automation of the entire economy, massive improvements to overall production efficiency and highly effective mineral extraction methods. It is possible to imagine an economy where a common person could easily purchase several space shuttles with delivery vehicles every year. It just would require intense exploitation of robotics just to get started on that line. Think of Asimov's Solarian society, average citizen commanding dozens of coordinator/supervisor robots each commanding in descending line thousands of robots to the point of individual average citizens commanding hundreds of thousands of robotic workers and running their own economies and engaging in trade with other citizens. (I suppose I got carried away somewhere there)
