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.
On the photos everyone looks busy, but I presume that the guys spent 30 years sitting in front of screens where nothing happen, except perhaps once every 3 months.
Designing these kinds of systems in the 50s and 60s must have been one of the all-time peak engineering experiences. Nearly everything on paper and drafting film, stacks of databooks, nomograms, slide rules, electromechanics everywhere, stratospheric budgets, hand wiring, manually machined parts and just generally making up and discovering things, from machining to physics, as you go along that we now consider fundamentals.
It's sort of a random collection of images. The first image isn't the command center at all.
It's network operations, which is obvious if you look closely.
For a few years after the downfall of the USSR and before 9/11, there were public tours. That was a happy, peaceful time.
Here's a partial tour from the 1970s.[1]
There is no one big control room. There are about a half dozen control rooms
with different functions. There are duplicate control rooms outside the mountain, and for a few years, those were primary and the mountain only had a skeleton staff. Not any more.
(Although Hegseth apparently wants to move some operations to Huntsville, Alabama.)
Modern photos are available. Modest sized rooms with flat screens on the walls, desks, ordinary monitors, and keyboards. About the only unusual thing is that there's video switching, so that monitors can be copied to a big screen, or someone else's screen, when something is happening and many people need to focus on one screen.
There's now a vast flood of crap AI art and mislabeled clickbait for the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. Sorting out the real from the fake is becoming harder.
(One of my career achievements from my aerospace days was managing to avoid being transferred to Colorado Springs to work on their networking problems.)
Seemed weird to me that they turned it into a secondary site; we were fighting relatively incapable-of-force-projection people in the mountains and deserts at the time, but even if Russia wasn't a clear threat in 2008, it seems like it should have been obvious EMP, conventional infiltration attacks, etc. would be reasonable threats in the future. Unless you're willing to go to fully dispersed command (and thus risk a commander at theater or below level launching on his own authority...), or run 24x7 airborne looking glass (which ended in 1990, and presumably was even more costly than modernizing Cheyenne Mountain Complex), what we had from 2008-2015 was clearly less survivable.
House of Dynamite on Netflix is a realistic (at least it feels realistic) look at the modern day equivalent. It’s fundamentally an exciting film but I also enjoyed learning how large scale human/technical systems operate during a nuclear crisis.
I got to go inside Cheyenne Mountain Complex back in 1988 when I was the project engineer for the DSP satellite ground network upgrade. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see any control room. In fact, I didn't get to see much at all. When we got there we were informed that the problem had already been resolved, so we just turned around and left.
But I did get to go down the tunnel and through the blast door.
If you ever get to Colorado Springs, in the shadow of Cheyenne Mountain is a state park, Cheyenne Mountain State Park. While it’s due to the dry conditions, all the trees and shrubs there look twisted and contorted, like a scene from Roadside Picnic.
Northern Europe had a very similar facility, a large "underground city" in The Netherlands near Maastricht, being used as a command center / information hub in NATO for the airspace. Unfortunately in the construction was a lot of asbestos, and it was completely dismantled. Small tours are given by former employees though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORTHAG_War_Headquarters_Canne...
> Near 100 per cent probability of continuing to function against multi-megaton weapons (i.e., underground location).
That of course wasn't possible, only a best effort. There was also the pseudo belief that ICBM missiles could be intercepted, and an entire system was designed and deployed (Project Nike), then decommissioned in 1974 due to it was a waste of money.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] threadComparing 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.
For a few years after the downfall of the USSR and before 9/11, there were public tours. That was a happy, peaceful time.
Here's a partial tour from the 1970s.[1]
There is no one big control room. There are about a half dozen control rooms with different functions. There are duplicate control rooms outside the mountain, and for a few years, those were primary and the mountain only had a skeleton staff. Not any more. (Although Hegseth apparently wants to move some operations to Huntsville, Alabama.)
Modern photos are available. Modest sized rooms with flat screens on the walls, desks, ordinary monitors, and keyboards. About the only unusual thing is that there's video switching, so that monitors can be copied to a big screen, or someone else's screen, when something is happening and many people need to focus on one screen.
There's now a vast flood of crap AI art and mislabeled clickbait for the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. Sorting out the real from the fake is becoming harder.
(One of my career achievements from my aerospace days was managing to avoid being transferred to Colorado Springs to work on their networking problems.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd1yLwzQGO8
"Closing the iris."
There will never be another SG-1
But I did get to go down the tunnel and through the blast door.
Correcting for K2, which is the semi-autonomous placement for oxygen attenuation, at a series of heights.
And K8, with the proper credential, accessed either on the southern face, which is the prescribed route for border authorities.
That of course wasn't possible, only a best effort. There was also the pseudo belief that ICBM missiles could be intercepted, and an entire system was designed and deployed (Project Nike), then decommissioned in 1974 due to it was a waste of money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nike