The Militant Days…
I used to work for the Australian military designing pilot training programs. Well, that was what I was s’pose to be doing anyway, but in fact a lot of time was spent just messing around as we waited for the bureaucrats to make up their minds. This is a mecha robot I slapped together out of MRH-90 helicopter parts. I thought it’d make a nice Speakerwrath cover. The military is a strange beast. Millions of dollars are spent on research and training projects that will never see the light of day. I was sitting in a room with 30 other computers that were never used for an entire year. The project I was working on is forecast for release in 2012 and I spoke to one of the programmers who is still working there and he said the project hadn’t progressed since I left a year and a half ago. Unbelievable! I’m convinced they spend the money merely to justify getting the same budget the following year. The reason why the chopper is called MRh-90 is because it was designed in 1990. That says a lot. Australia bought a fleet from the company Eurocopter back in 2005 and I started working on the training program in 2007. I was fortunate enough to present our prototype training program to the head of the German Army’s training technology centre. Despite my own feeling that our program was going no where he said it was a hell of a lot better than theirs – which they’d been working on for over 5 years. The problem for them is every piece of training has to get approved by four nations, France, Germany, Italy and Portugal. That’s a lot bureaucratic hoop jumping. Then when you look under the hood (so to speak) you discover the chopper is actually compiled of parts produced by a bunch of different companies. Rolls Royce make the engine, Boeing makes the cooling system, while someone else makes the seat belts etc etc The problem then is, all of these separate companies are probably quite capable of building the entire helicopter themselves and of course they’d love to because it’s such a lucrative contract, so this situation perpetuates a reluctance to share any information about the parts in case that information gets into the hands of the competitor. This reluctance then of course stifles us, as we need that information to be able to create any training material. Yadda yadda yadda thus creating the vicious cycle of zero progress.
I did hang out with a sniper for a day. That was a highlight. Apparently he could always shoot within 4mm of his target, even in the wet. He was the most relaxed person I’ve ever met. He had his hand up to go to Timor. I asked him why he wanted to go so bad and he tells me “So I can buy a house when I get back”. When you go to war you don’t have to pay taxes and you receive a huge pay increase. I felt so naive. I had completely overlooked that as reason as to why people would want to go to war.
Here’s a few MRH-90 designs…
The chopper was very cool though. The exterior was made out of a plastic composite that was filled with a liquid so if the chopper got shot, the liquid would become exposed to air and immediately solidfy. Thats some guyver shit right there.
Anyways enough rambling. Time to get back to drawing the Nawlz.
