New maritime warfare training system unveiled

MCTS simulates ship operations under battle conditions for new recruits to the navy

A new warfare training facility developed by BAE Systems has been unveiled by the navy in Fareham, Hampshire.

The £108 million Maritime Composite Training System (MCTS) has been six years in the making. It features banks of LCD screens that replicate the equipment used at sea and can simulate scenarios that sailors face in battle or on humanitarian missions. Unusually, MCTS can be used to simulate conditions on a wide variety of ships, including the latest Type 45 destroyers, as well as Type 23 frigates, Type 42 destroyers and assault ships. The system, which will help train around 1,000 new recruits to the navy each year, is also expected to be used to train sailors destined to serve on the new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, which are under construction by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance consortium.

The training centre at Fareham, which is linked to another MCTS system at the naval base at Devonport, Plymouth, can simulate a number of different types of scenario and ship operating systems from a range of vessels simultaneously. Sections of the centre can be cordoned off for smaller scale or individual training while entire operations rooms of ships can also be reproduced. The LCD panels feature photorealistic representations of navy equipment with touchscreen functionality. Instructors are able to vary the tempo of simulations in order to suit the level of experience of trainees.

Jeremy Tuck, BAE project leader, said: “This was a massive challenge technically. We have taken the combat systems of six classes of ship and we are hosting that in a commercial PC computing environment. It has been a complex challenge in terms of integration. The operational software on the ships is being hosted on the simulators.

“In the past one time of training system might have been developed for the Type 23; with MCTS if you want just Type 23s to be simulated, you can have that – but you can also have a mixture of types of vessel. It has great scale and flexibility.”

New scenarios could be programmed into the MCTS software to take account of evolving threats and operations in different parts of the world, Tuck added.  

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