3D Army Land Navigation Courses | Hacker News Reader

3D Army Land Navigation Courses

oe.tradoc.army.mil

99 pointsb_mc246 comments

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 asking if you want to fill in the answer.

4. you are given a map with the corresponding xy grids delineated, place the mini flags according to the given coordinates to help locate yourself on the map. (remember that your starting coordinate is given to you as well)

5. the game ends when you have filled out all of the coordinates' corresponding two-letter names, at which point the correct answer will be revealed for you to compare.

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.

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).

How to play is explained here [1]

By the way you can run the games locally. Just download all files.

For the forest game you would have a local directory:

   ├── Build
   │   ├── Build_7_30_F.asm.code.unityweb
   │   ├── Build_7_30_F.asm.framework.unityweb
   │   ├── Build_7_30_F.asm.memory.unityweb
   │   ├── Build_7_30_F.data.unityweb
   │   ├── Build_7_30_F.json
   │   └── UnityLoader.js
   └── index.html

then just run the following in the directory

    python3 -m http.server

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a74KM792gbo

And how do you download the files?

1. One can use the browser's devtools (press F12 when browsing the site) to figure out the needed files.

2. Create a list of the files (files.txt).

https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/landnav/forest/Build/Buil...

https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/landnav/forest/Build/Unit...

https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/landnav/forest/index.html

3. Download the files using the browser or a downloader:

      wget --input-file=files.txt --show-progress --directory-prefix=forest --force-directories

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.

The objective is 'train our AI'

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.

See Catching Features (first released around 2006) for the orienteering version of this. It still has weekly competitions with up to 100 or so regulars playing.

As another commenter suggested, orienteering is great as a sport/running variation of this. Orienteers are some of the brightest and fittest people I know.

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.

looks like gateway address between SMTP and X.400

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.

Can highly recommend orienteering racing if this seems like your kind of thing

Orienteering is a fantastic sport. I've been doing it my entire life.

The orienteers I've known have been some of the brightest and fittest people I've ever met (going to Cambridge, Oxford), doing all sorts of interesting things, and are some of the best runners you can find. One of my closest orienteering friends was disappointed in running sub-2:40 in his first marathon.

And practised by nearly all Western miliary as a military sport for that reason.

This looks really cool. But I'm stuck on understanding the setup. I spawn at a known point defined as 32QAU04710542. I have a list of "given" points that I'm trying to reach, all beginning with 32QAU0 and then ranging from 3500715 to 5790531. And I have a map.

I assume I'm supposed to locate these points, including the known point, on the map. And I'm hoping the names of the points will help me do that. But I don't know what they mean or how to find them on the map.

I assume the game is meant to be played with the knowledge of some supplementary course and material.

the coordinates seem to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System

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.

> 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)

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.

This seems to be run by TRADOC, the US Army's TRaining And DOCterine Command.

I assume that it is intended to facilitate the Army's Land Navigation (LANDNAV) training for Soldiers. MGRS is the standard format for all US Army maps.

I did the Duke of Edinburgh bronze silver and gold when I was a kid, back before smart phones. Only one person on the team could reliably navigate, and he was mostly just basing his assessment on our position using compass and tree line.

They taught us to triangulate using pencil and ruler, but no one has time for that when it's starting to get dark.

> 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 jamming is a constant occurance in the region and training happened near the Belorussian border.

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 don't know about the standard navy officer school but the naval academy only stopped teaching it for like a ten year period and then brought it back.

Funny enough though serious rec sailors are the most likely to know it well I think. They are much more likely to be in a situation where it's necessary and they have fewer shipboard obligations compared to a naval officer so more time/boredom to use futzing with it. It does take practice.

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.

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.

I need a Navigation Course to navigate the course.

All I've done so far is read guax's link on the coordinate system, but I think the intended workflow goes like this:

1. Plot the point where you currently are on the map.

2. Flag that point; you only get two Grease Pencil Points, but you need to remember this forever.

3. Plot the point you want to get to. Flag that one too. (You'll need to clear the grease pencil in order to do this. Flag your location before you do.)

4. Set Point 1 to location and Point 2 to destination. Open the protractor and read the azimuth from Point 1 to Point 2. This is based on Grid North.

5. Apply the adjustment between Grid North and Magnetic North.

6. Use your compass to orient yourself along the correct azimuth. The compass uses Magnetic North. You had to make all the measurements with your fat, stubby fingers, so hope they were accurate.

7. Start walking, tracking the distance you've gone.

8. Encounter obstacles.

9. Step off the track.

10. Wander into the wilderness and starve.

(You also get a notepad; I assume the notepad is there to give you some hope of recovering if you plan out the path around an obstacle carefully.)

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

>> 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.

> 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.

A key thing may be overlooked right at the beginning: you're supposed to enter a conversion factor of paces per 100 meters. Easy to miss and will leave you feeling like everything is too close together. Also the way the counter works when you're walking around is baffling.

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.

If you have a widescreen monitor or a wider-than-usual browser, the "begin" button may not be visible.

Edit: And if you resize your browser window mid game without playing fullscreen, the flags placed on the map move.

Going up a few directories reveals more games: https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/

And there is even more games! https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/oegames/

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

can't move the camera around?

I like the skybox of the desert and the cricket sound

This seems like the kind of thing that Grok could one shot creating.

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