LCS training strategy mixes education and video games.

• Author: Insinna, Valerie

Early in the morning, a sailor boards the littoral combat ship for training and begins inspecting the vessel for damage. Hours into his watch, a massive fire breaks out on the deck. The sailor grabs a nearby extinguisher and shouts out to his crew-mates for help.

Luckily for the sailor, he's not actually on the LCS, and there is no fire. He's safe onshore and playing a video game, albeit one designed for training.

The LCS is poised to be an uncommon vessel in the Navy's fleet. Its crew is smaller and its speed higher than other ships of its size, and its swappable mission packages equip it to accomplish tasks usually carried out by several ships.

The ship's training is planned to be just as unique, using simulators and virtual training rather than live practice aboard a ship at sea. But unlike the bulky, dated graphics associated with military sims, the training will incorporate high-fidelity imagery and the mechanics of role-playing games.

Earlier this year, Cubic Advanced Learning Solutions was awarded $300 million worth of contracts to provide video game-style training to sailors for the littoral combat ship crews. The company will create one set of courseware for each variant of the ship, as well as a third set of courseware to simulate missions such as anti-submarine, surface warfare and mine countermeasures.

Navy officials believe training in a virtual environment ultimately will be less expensive and more effective.

The virtual courseware will run on Cry-tells CryEngine 3, a commercial video game engine that is the backbone of many popular video game titles.

"If you've ever played Crysis or Far Cry or those games, there's a story, and you spend two, four, six weeks going through that story and getting to whatever the objective is with that story. ... What we're doing is actually adding structure to that same concept," said Bill Rebarick, Cubic's deputy general manager.

"If you're in one of those [commercial] role playing games, and you're walking along and you get ambushed by a bunch of Nazi zombies, your goal is to eliminate the Nazi zombies so you can move forward," he explained. Similarly, if you encounter a problem in the LCS virtual training, like a broken water system, "you have to now, in a structured environment, refer back to your standards and processes, work with other teammates in the game ... [and] do things through a Navy standard to fix that potable water system."

All sailors on an LCS must stand watch over a focus...