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Originally Posted by PeriscopeDepth
I've read that diesels are handicapped sensor wise because of their size and lack of power. Basically, they can't carry the whiz bang sensors the nukes can and run the computers that power them because of these limitations. Have you heard anything like this?
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That's the first time I've heard it. I'm probably not the best person to ask, though. My knowledge of naval architecture is limited. I know that in all warships there is always electricity issues any time they want to add a new gizmo, but usually they are able to work something out. I suspect it all depends.
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What kind of programs do you guys use at work for simulation? Off the shelf stuff like Harpoon or puprose built? Understand if you can't talk about it.
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It depends. I don't use Harpoon at work, although I've talked with a coworker about using Harpoon Pro for certain types of things. It really depends on the questions we're trying to answer.
Often, the best thing to do is just sit down with Excel and make a spreadsheet. You can build surprisingly sophisticated things in Excel. We made a really cool sonar search Monte Carlo with Excel once. You just had to plug a transmission loss curve in and you could get pretty good results in comparison to what the "official" models did. There's also a whole universe of mathematical models that have been build for various things ranging from barrier searches to cruise missile exchanges. There's Koopman's search theory, and any of the other stuff stemming from military operations research. There's Lanchaster models, although we don't do that so much.
Sometimes we use MATLAB as well. I use Maple for some stuff, because I'm odd that way.
There's other things too, though. We have a modeling language called GCAM, which allows one to build wargames up to the campaign level. There's models like NSS, which is less flexible than GCAM, but is good for what it was designed to do. There's a model called CAPS which is for ballistic missile defense. I always thought that one was kind of cool. There's AREPS for modeling radar problems. There's EADSIM which is a lot like CAPS but more detailed. Sometimes we even build our own. There's a girl at work who built a really cool model of hypersonic re-entry bodies. I was jealous of that project. I wanted to work on it too.
There exists a ton of different computer models for dealing with different sorts of things. Sometimes we use different models to feed into other models. Other times we use canned values, or even just make things up that look reasonable because nobody really knows. It all really just depends. What do you want to know? How well do you need to know it? Etc. etc.