Rheinmetall unveiled its new synthetic naval training platform “Total Ship Trainer” at the IMDEX Defence Exhibition in Singapore.

This is a fully networked and integrated solution for the realistic land-based training of an entire ship crew, which will be delivered to the Thailand Navy next August following the final acceptance activities to be completed in July.

According to Rheinmetall, the best possible operational readiness equals premium training, which is impacted nowadays by scarce resources, reduced ship availability for training purposes, and the crew’s need for rest and recovery periods.  

Mission and manning concepts for modern and complex surface combat platforms require a new and innovative approach to operational preparation. The challenge is to establish holistic crew training under real-world conditions in a synthetic reality. Thus, a new generation of naval simulators offers interdependent crew training in a fully integrated simulation environment.

Rheinmetall’s system in question integrates different team trainers to full mission training, taking into account the main tasks on board a common warship. Accordingly, the following areas of action are represented: Bridge, Combat Information Center, Engineering Control Station, Battle Damage Station, and Virtual Ship for local operations.

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In July 2021, Rheinmetall Electronics was awarded the contract to build Royal Thailand’s Naval Mission Training Center (NMTC). In this project, Rheinmetall is not only supplying the simulators, but is also responsible for the construction of the two-floor training building at the naval base in Sattahip, Thailand. The project also includes interconnection with other Royal Thai Navy facilities and the training of teaching personnel.

The two-floor NMTC includes 20 simulator systems in “full-mission” and “part-task” configurations, all managed by a centralized instructor area, as well as four associated classroom trainers and a briefing/debriefing auditorium. 

One of the two floors of the new building accommodates all the simulators mentioned above, which are inter-networked so that all relevant teams of a complete ship’s crew can be trained with each other simultaneously. Responsible for this extremely high simulation performance is a novel server system based on virtualized high-performance servers.

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In total, the NMTC can fully train the entire crew of two ships of different classes in different operational scenarios and up to six ships working together using part-task trainers.

In addition to the system integration, the Thai naval instructors’ training has also taken place in Germany since October 2022 and was successfully completed on all individual simulators of the Total Ship Trainer configuration and on the server system in January 2023. Subsequently, the training system was again optimized with regard to the customer’s user requirements.

In mid-April, the entire system was loaded on a sea transport heading to the Sattahip naval base, where its integration phase began. Final acceptance by the customer is scheduled for July 2023 with official delivery planned for August.

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