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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing some OCR was used to generate this by the many "typos" throughout.

Comparing these images of the COC to what was reimagined for War Games really feels underwhelming. From the few images, it just feels very complex and overloaded with information that is just a lot to take in. Maybe it gets easier to deal with when that's what you do everyday, but it definitely has that feel of "designed by an engineer" instead of "designed by a UI professional". Essentially, it feels like every single UI I've ever made.

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My college roommate was stationed there from about 1997 to 2001 and I was lucky enough to get a tour as a civilian. They took us into the VIP room that overlooks the room shown in most of the pictures and then they ran through an exercise. In the modern era, the displays were much more focused. There were a set of large projection displays along the wall. In the center of the room, the personnel each had a workstation with more focused information for their specific task.

Attractive to look at and information dense for an expert are two very different things that I think modern UI design has forgotten about.

Everything is simplified down to a stupid hamburger menu if you want to do anything off the happy path.

I got to tour it in the early 2000s. It was even less impressive to look at then than what these pictures show, and many of the rooms were rebuilt to be even smaller. One of the conference rooms where generals and perhaps the president were supposed to decide the fate of the world in a crisis was so cramped as to resemble that one scene from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but with nicer furniture. It was also amusing to me that with all secret operations shut down (to accommodate plebs like me), the skeleton crew left to run the place were almost entirely Canadian.

> One of the conference rooms where generals and perhaps the president

I don't think the President would have gone to Cheyenne wouldn't have been time since Colorado is quite far from Washinton D.C - iirc the plan was always kneecap (NEACP[1]) once it was online (and it still is).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-4

Also, a large number of warheads would have been targeted at the mountain. No need to take the risk of having the commander-in-chief in that location. He'd be better off aboard NEACP to be sure. The risk of being shot down by enemy fighters would not be very high. It's hard to be shot down by an incoming MIRV. Even though Colorado is far from DC, I'd imagine they'd head west away from population centers to ride it out.

I suspect they'd go north (from DC or nearby) via a dog leg to the east, once you clear where the Canadians live (which is mostly bunched up on the border) there isn't much up there the Russians or Chinese would want to vaporise and they can dip south to refuel (assuming anything is left to take off to refuel).

Of all of the Clancy-esque fictional warfare I've consumed, I've never read anything about what these scenarios would be like. I'd imagine an armada of planes (or whatever you call the equivalent for planes) would be available as support to NEACP. Not just fighters for defense but fuel tanker support, possibly AWACs in case ground stations are taken out as well. But where they'd actually fly is an interesting question. They could go out over the Atlantic and turn south and be away from targets faster than flying over land. Of course, that's assuming they know where any hostile fleets would be to avoid. Lot's of options though, which is the point of being airborne instead of stuck in a bunker

Those types of books are where I learnt about kneecap back in the late 80s/early 90s as a kid, which is why I didn’t know it had been renamed post Cold War.

They obviously don’t discuss it for obvious reasons but given the options I’d say east then either north or south, Canada is nearer and air fields with sufficient length to be able to land (and is in NATO) which is why it’d be my guess at least to start with, loiter over an unpopulated area and at least the likelihood is reduced of been near a detonation is reduced, the continental US simply has too many targets, though with modern warheads been lower yield they’d likely be OK orbiting unpopulated areas out west I guess.

> Also, a large number of warheads would have been targeted at the mountain.

Yeah, the Loonies in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" keep pounding away at it with space rocks launched from the Moon. It worked in the end, overall.

There were no UI professionals in 1966

Yet a lot of the UIs of that era were rather more intuitive than those today.

Examples?

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