This 1970s tank simulator drives through a tiny world
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Published 2022-10-17
Camera: Tobias Buchmann
Producer: Sebastian Capeda at Viven viven.ch/
Editor: www.davestevenson.co.uk/
Audio mix: Dan Pugsley cassinisound.com/ (my microphone failed inside the very noisy simulator, he did an incredible job!)
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All Comments (21)
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Just in case I haven't been plugging it enough: I have a new podcast! It's called Lateral, it's about interesting questions, and the first episode is available right now, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WysuFh0bNg
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There's something about seeing this massive training simulator from the 70s, thinking how much technological effort must have gone into programming a computer to have an entire map and to simulate what being in a tank would feel like from it... and then "We rebuilt it on a Raspberry Pi". Just goes to show how far computers have come, I guess...
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"We had to rebuild that on a Raspberry Pi" This puts things in perspective
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Hearing that it's running on a raspberry pi is the biggest flex for the pi foundation.
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That’s exactly how I learned to drive a tank in 1980. In Germany. The instructors even put action figures on the map. Was super fun
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I love that it took Tom less than a few seconds to go directly from "I should be on the correct side of the road" to I'M A TANK
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Driving a tiny camera around a set is the coolest concept for a simulator that I’ve ever seen!
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The Raspberry Pi part was so unexpected. „Yes this was the most advanced Technologie of the time. But it can also be recreated on this device programmers use in their free time for fun“
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Now you know it. If youre in Switzerland and have a tank, you are allowed to drive in the middle of the road.
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Until a few years ago I worked for a company that build military flight simulators. The older guys told us about how the simulators used to look very similar to this one: With a model plate and a camera moving over it. An interesting anecdote is that apparently spiders loved to crawl into the cupboard the plates were stored in and surprise the pilots. From the perspective of the camera they would look like hundreds of meters tall monsters.
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I really liked the tank guide's last sentences: "Here it's like a game. This job is not a game."
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I'm so glad these guys went through the pain of putting this back together and getting it functional. This is so awesome
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I used to be a tanker in the 80's and spent many hours driving in this simulator called FASIP, a german acronym for "Fahrer simulator für Panzer", it is really fun but also demanding because the requirements were very high. Note that there was also a same simulator for turret and gunnery called ELSAP.
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i really like the editorial choice of ending the video with the old veteran saying "it's like a game but this job is NOT a game", gave me goosebumps.
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I'm a miniaturist and through the whole video I couldn't stop thinking about what a fun project it would have been to build that little model village.
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I wish this was still a thing. Like if you could go to arcades and drive/ride this. There’s something magical in that miniature physical world.
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We had exactly this type of flight simulator at McDonnell Douglas in the 1980s and earlier. It had a coastline, and there was a sticking-out point of land with a lighthouse on top of it. Through one of those weird glitches that happen sometimes, the lowest "altitude" that the camera could "fly" was just a bit too low in that one area, and if pilots weren't careful they could knock the lighthouse off of the board.
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As a lover of miniatures and dioramas, this is just the coolest, cutest thing.
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I wish there had been more footage of the scene down at ground level in the miniature world, that looks fascinating!
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The enthusiasm Tom has for simulators is impeccable. He's such a great inspiration that now I really want to try this tank simulator myself.
