DW Pro
 

Hi Guys!

I went to the Surface Warfare Association's expo today to check out all the cool gizmos the Navy wants to buy. They had everything from gas turbine engines to radars, to SM-3 missiles on display. They also had Dangerous Waters (the professional version) on display at the Sonalyst's booth. It was pretty cool. I got to talk to the guys to work with it, and they told me about some of the cool things they've done with it, including interfacing it to other wargames like MAGTF XXI. I also voiced some of my ongoing gripes with the civilian version, but it was still neat.

I also got to turn donuts in the ocean using the Navy's LCS simulator that they had on display. 50kts baby! VROOOOOOOM!!!! It was much more fun than the DDG simulator, where you'd give it some juice and eventually it'd move.

<------ *is jealous*

In fairness it wasn't THAT cool. The place was very old-fart-in-a-suit heavy. I'm all about a nice suit and some cute pumps, but I thought it was a little bit uptight. Maybe that was just my impression. Actually, the first thing I noticed about the Sonalysts people wasn't that it was the Sonalyst's booth, but rather that they were office casual.

I totally geeked out with the General Electric guy when I asked about why the thermal efficiency of their turbines increased with their horsepower...

Any info from the Sonalyst people about whether or not they're going to do anything further in the civilian market? DW2 or something along those lines?

So what else did they say about DW Pro and about your gripes with DW lite?

Nope. Although, actually my impression was that there was actually a little more freedom to develop in the civilian market than the military market because they understand it a little better. They know about how much money the game will bring in and for how long and plan around that. With the military version of DW (all 18 of them) the attitude is "no contract, no development." That makes sense, because that's how it is in my company too. That's the war business in general.

DW Pro was neat. They used HLR to link it to all kinds of simulations, those designed specifically for the military and civilian ones. They said you could connect it to everything from Fleet Command to MS Flight Simulator. The other thing I liked about it was that they had a database editor for the Pro version. In my mind, that's the one thing I really wish DW had, because the existing database is really pretty limited. I mean... you can't even put out a full US Expeditionary Strike Group. There's only one type of Arleigh Burke... etc. If they put it out with the database editor, so that the community could add what they didn't have in there, it'd make the game have a longer run time, I think. He said they'd put out a ballistic missile defense version with the AEGIS console in it recently, and I thought that was pretty cool.

Basically I just talked about how I didn't think the sonar model was very accurate and they said something like, "Yeah.. we don't even want to go NEAR anything the Navy MIGHT think is classified." They said theoretically they could make it better, and had done it better for the classified versions, although I'm a little skeptical, knowing the state of the art. I talked to one of their managers, not one of their development team, so of course he's going to tell me they can do everything I ask for, just give us money.

um.... we do have a DB editor and the ability to add new stuff to it.


The ability to link to FC and flight sims makes me extremely jealous tho.

Fair enough. I just never really see anyone adding any new platforms, except playables at the expense of others. I guess the limitation is graphics. If I was creating a naval wargame, I'd go the Harpoon route of minimalism. But I guess that's a seperate discussion.

Fair enough to yours as well. I'll go yell at LW some more about the ballistic doctrines....

*

DW and Falcon 4 ? :rock:

Well... the thing is, I think early on people were way too worried about the techno-weenieness of the database and trying to decide what the specific numbers are for the various platforms. Personally, my first priority would have been to add in the glaring omissions. They have US LSDs but no LPDs? Only one kind of Arleigh Burke? How come there's only once choice of carrier air wing? Next I would have added near-future platforms because that is how you give the game longevity. A non-playable 774 class would be fine in my book. Add in an SSGN. Add in the F-35 variants. How about the LHA(R) class? At the time there was no LCS. LCS is a real warship now, but nobody seems to care. What about a DDG-1000 or two?

I'd rather see a variety of land-based ASCMs and ballistic missiles with anti-ship capabilities and cluster warheads than SSBNs that can shoot ballistic missiles. To me, these things are much more relevant.

Obsessing over "well... the beam pattern of the towed arrays doesn't look right" or "this boat is too quiet" or "this boat is too loud" because someone somewhere in some unclassified popular submarine novel read that someone did or didn't make a detection at X nautical miles is just kind silly to me.

Are antiship ballistic missiles that proliferative? I thought they were all still experimental with the Chinese the main developer.

The Soviets had them. The Chinese are believed to be developing them. A toy wargame is best developed around near future conflicts, hence I'd throw them in there for the sake of "what-if-ing." Maneuvering re-entry vehicles are old technology. The old Pershing II IRBMs had them.

I'm always shocked by how little military technology has progressed since the end of the Cold War. I mean... geez... the Kilo is 1980s technology and people are like, "Oh my god, it's so scary." Then the Chinese shot down that satelite and everyone was like, "Oh no! This is new technology!" Then we knocked one down with a leftover missile that wasn't even designed for the task, and didn't scatter space junk around the sky in the process. Hasn't anyone ever heard of the ASAT? That was 1980s technology too.

None of this is new. Everyone acts like it's the cutting edge of technology. If you want to see the cutting edge of technology, look at your iPhone or under the hood at Google. The US military is so far ahead of everyone else with what we had to fight the Soviets, that when the rest of the world comes out with something we've already had for decades people are stunned.

Some of the critisms are founded on experience and first hand knowledge. There are quite a few of us submariners who are trying to nudge this into something closer to a simulator and out of the long time scale arcade game realm. We just have to work with the framework provided by the developers.