4 ms·
Every mil company designs unique bespoke things often with some exceptions, and even the "open systems" mostly aren't open by any stretch of the definition. Ob
by esseph 20d ago
Every mil company designs unique bespoke things often with some exceptions, and even the "open systems" mostly aren't open by any stretch of the definition.
Obscurity is part of the allure, not a repulsive factor.
You don't want a hostile nation suddenly and easily understanding your systems.
- smalltorch 20d agoOn the other hand, its good to design systems where it wouldn't even matter if the hostile nation state knows exactly how it works. This is a principle in cryptography, but carries nicely to other things.
- timcobb 20d agoI feel like this is always the best design whenever possible.
- mc32 20d agoAlso you do not want them to benefit from your smart design choices. You want them to suffer from their bad choices and not learn from your success. (Yes, of course you could have bad design choices that you don’t realize someone else has solved more intelligently.)
- ufocia 20d agoBad design choice is probably why they open sourced it.
- graemep 20d agoHat sounds like a particularly weak form of security by obscurity
- esseph 20d agoLayers of an onion and all that. Often connectors are even proprietary. (This is partially to protect systems not from the enemy, but from the troops themselves...)
- touisteur 20d agoAsterix is an actual standard for radar data, coming from civilian radar systems. I wish it was updated somehow for 3d beam-steered (and moving) sensors, but still it covers most of the industry's needs... I keep hearing so many grumblings of replacing it (it is binary, unforgiving, quirky, very 80s...) and of course fragmentation is back in.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 20d agoI have to assume that so many people require access to the specs that an interested party can surely acquire them. World of Tanks has repeatedly had military personnel updating the technical specifications with details they have found in the secret manuals.
- yxhuvud 20d agoAre you not thinking about the wrong tank game? World of tanks has ancient tanks, not modern (game tank span basically end with the main battle tank making the game tank role division being made irrelevant).
- 0cf8612b2e1e 20d agoErr yes. War Thunder. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31605345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31605345
- esseph 20d ago> I have to assume that so many people require access to the specs that an interested party can surely acquire them. Those documents are often secret or top secret, or even more compartmentalized. There are training docs in wide use today that are not publicly findable on the internet, nor are they seemingly in the datasets of LLMs. I'm sure there are reasons for that, of course. What you're talking about would have an even higher level of obscurity and secrecy, and probably Compartmented Information access.