SDS International (SDS) has been awarded a contract modification by the US Air Force to complete development of a state-of-the-art Munitions Storage Virtual Trainer (MSVT) to support the Conventional Munitions Maintenance Officer Course (CMOC) and the Nuclear Maintenance Officer Course (NMOC) taught at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas.

Under the original contract, SDS’ Advanced Technologies Division, with assistance from Nova Technologies, was tasked to provide a realistic training environment needed to support the preparation of Air Force Officers for the management and leadership duties they will face during conventional and nuclear munitions maintenance and storage operations. As such, the MSVT was designed to have the flexibility and adaptability needed to support both the CMOC and NMOC in a capstone capacity to practice the students’ newly acquired skills while also providing the ability to exercise required judgments in a virtual environment. The current contract modification will shift the system baseline to the Air Force Munitions Command and Control system baseline, which is a SharePoint based system referred to as AFMC2 SharePoint, or AFMC2. This will ensure that students experience virtual training based upon the most current, main application used by Air Force Munitions Control personnel during normal operations.

The MSVT will consist of a commander/instructor station, a central display, and student stations representing the key munitions storage functions. The MSVT, operating on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, will provide realistic real-world scenarios eliciting student inputs, actions, and communications, and will provide intuitive interfaces that support student interactions from positions representative of what will be required of them in actual Munitions or Weapons Storage Areas (MSA/WSA). The MSVT will also ensure the actions of each student will affect the requirements and actions of the others. Since these interactions must occur within the virtual environment, the MSVT will include realistic and effective 2D and 3D representations of those environments provided by SDS’ high-fidelity, AAcuityÆ PC-IG. The MSVT will support automated station-operations and provide the required after-action-review (AAR) capability needed to support effective training. It will also allow the commander/instructor to effectively develop, control, monitor and update scenarios, including the ability to greatly enhance training realism by creating additional MSA/WSA sites using a dynamic MSA/WSA creation tool to be developed by SDS.