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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> “I can go to any video game store and procure an Xbox controller anywhere in the world, so it makes a very easy replacement.”

Or the Rec room.

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I fear the day when a controller in the rec room breaks, and they realize that the reverse is also true.

$30000/$30=1000 replacement '360 controllers.

Now you just need space for all of them.

I guarantee that for something as fundamental as the main periscope control, _everything_ is going to have replacement parts. That's why $30k is so expensive, it's not $30k, it's $60k or $90k or $120k. Now they have the kind of problem that's fun to have: for half or quarter of the cost of replacing that proprietary controller, they can have so many '360 controllers they won't be able to store all of them on board.

Surely there isn't that much room on a sub. I've heard horror stories of how cramped they are.

That is because the supply rooms are crammed full of XBox 360 controllers.

Food, actually. They cram food all over them. When the embark, they don't have room for all the food in the galley. So, it gets tucked into every nook and cranny.

They don't just get to stop at neighborhood grocery stores, after all.

This is true (Former submariner here). We store food in the torpedo room, engine room, fan rooms, etc...pretty much anywhere that won't impede dealing with casualty response.

Yeah, I grew up in a family of Navy and Marines. I'd do my service in the Marines. I also watch way too many documentaries. Submarines are firmly on my nope-list.

For anyone interested in this stuff who hasn't already done it, I'd highly recommend a tour of a museum submarine. I recently did the USS Growler in NYC and it was really neat. Highly obsolete, of course, but the general idea of being cramped and using every bit of space is timeless.

It was hard to imagine living in there for months at a time. One person in my tour group almost started freaking out just in the ten minutes we were inside.

On using every bit of space: I also recommend a visit to Johnson Space Center in Houston. If you are lucky you can catch a tour of the life-sized model of the ISS they have. It's interesting to see the different countries' engineering approach to "using every bit of space." The American modules are fairly well put together, generally non-surprising space saving solutions. The Russians appeared to just give up and hew everything out of solid blocks of some sort of light metal. Then you step into the Japanese module and it's just... perfection...

Wow, I was just making a joke and you responded with something really insightful that I have never thought about at all. I've toured one of the museum submarines a few years ago and it amazed me how cramped everything was. It didn't even occur to me how difficult food storage would have to be.

Thanks!

Great, now China's going to put malware into every Xbox controller on the off-chance it gets inserted into a USN submarine /s

This is something to worry about. USB hosts and devices identify themselves - malicious firmware embedded in the Xbox controller could check if it's connected to a real Xbox, compared to a Windows PC, or a submarine, and act (or misbehave) accordingly.

And what is the plan in 20-30 years' time when the submarines are still in action but the controllers stopped being made? I get the feeling we'll see Navy personnel bidding on "vintage" Xbox controller auctions on eBay the same way prices for original NES and Atari controllers are through the roof right now.

simply install "an USB firewall" into the periscope controller (not the xbox, but the usb host).

but my thought exacty: put a prepared controller to "game room" (sure there is such a thing on a nuclear sub). sabotage controllers. wait until one in "game room" gets plugged into periscope. Profit.

Make the periscope report to the controller that it's an Xbox.

Then you would just have to write the malware in such a way that it works fine on legitimate hardware but exploits a glitch that exists only on the military hardware. Maybe based on MS drivers VS Linux drivers (or whatever OS the navy uses).

USB hosts do not identify themselves to devices.

How does my iPhone know which PC I've plugged it into then? Even when iTunes isn't installed (so no "Apple Mobile Device" drivers) it seems to remember my privacy preferences on a per-host basis.

I'll concede that may be a feature of the allocation protocol running on top of USB (PictBridge?) but that still means that mutual identification over USB is still possible. I'm pretty sure it's in the USB HID spec that the Xbox controllers implement.

> I get the feeling we'll see Navy personnel bidding on "vintage" Xbox controller auctions on eBay

Replace Ebay with flea market and this is how in the second half of 199x some spare parts for Soviet/Russian space station "Mir" (and for some other space projects, well into beginning of 200x) were procured. With USSR falling and economy tanking/changing/"privatized in all senses and at all scales" many typical sources for space parts just disappeared and/or stopped working.

Surely they wouldn't just be using whatever firmware the controller ships with?

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