My day at the helm of a (virtual) battleship under attack

Times

08-08-2025

In the Napoleonic wars, the period from sighting the enemy to engaging could be hours. By the Second World War, for a warship with rudimentary radar facing a Stuka dive bomber that had dropped to minutes.
Today, the time between spotting a hypersonic missile and having to decide what to do about it is less than 12 seconds.
If you cut it too fine, I am told before entering Britain's naval warfare simulator, while you might still hit the missile, its debris will keep going and you will have turned a hypersonic missile into a hypersonic shotgun.
All of which might go some way to mitigating what we shall refer to as 'the incident'. Or what, if I were really the captain of a Type 45 destroyer, would become the sort of event that would gain the suffix '-gate'.
Mimesis is the BAE Systems software now routinely used to train any British sailor with a warfighting role. As I sit in front of the software — software that, I will later be relieved to find out, does not include graphical representation of 180 holidaymakers screaming as they plummet in a fireball to their doom — Paul Morris explains that programs like this are necessary in part because other forms of training are increasingly prohibitive.
'We have an inability to replicate advanced threats in the real world at a reasonable price,' says Morris, who for the purpose of the simulation is my first mate/cabin boy (I am hazy on naval terminology) but in real life is systems lead for Mimesis. 'But I can blow up as many ships as I want in the synthetic world. I can fire missiles for free.'
A few miles from Bae Systems' Hilsea base are Portsmouth docks, where Admiral Nelson prepared the crews for the Battle of Trafalgar. In that battle, ultimate victory was less to do with superior ships than superior drills. The English crews endured endless gunnery practice, so that the French and Spanish would later fail to endure their endless barrages.
But firing a cannonball is a lot cheaper than firing £3 million defensive missiles at even more expensive incoming offensive missiles. 'It would be rather expensive to do for real,' says Morris. 'Plus, if we start raining ballistic missiles down on the south coast, people will get really upset.'
While simulators have been used for 20 years or more, they are increasingly intricate and increasingly integrated, allowing multiple ships and crew to work together. Mimesis, which most recently trained the crews of the new aircraft carriers, now includes the effects of weather on radar and the idiosyncrasies of different seas. In the Gulf, for instance, sonar can stop working in the afternoon as the sea heats and forms a separate upper layer.
The simulators are, normally, classified. By necessity, they contain all the performance data of our ships and weapons, as well as our best guess at those of potential enemies. BAE allowed The Times rare access, partly to aid recruitment of potential coders by advertising its existence. But does it accurately replicate reality?
This is not a computer game. There are no graphics of aircraft carriers rolling in the waves, only radar screens. But then, in a modern conflict, where actually seeing your enemy means something has gone catastrophically wrong, this is what battle looks like: dots on a screen at distance.
As I assess my first scenario as captain, those dots are, worryingly, moving to less of a distance. The radar screen, I realise, is full of incoming planes. It is time to display leadership.
Look. Sometimes as captain you have to make the big calls. Civilians, safe in their beds, can judge at leisure. But when the threats are coming from all compass points, and you have already burned through half your missiles, it is the man in the bridge who has to decide.
That, at least, is what I tell myself when the cabin boy informs me the 'threat' I have efficiently dispatched, with elan and authority, was, in fact, a civilian airliner. It looked threatening, Morris explains, because it had a faulty transponder.
As the passengers plunge into the sea and simultaneously plunge Britain into a diplomatic catastrophe, it is as good a lesson as any in why the Royal Navy is so keen on its crews going through these simulations.
Morris looks less disappointed than gleeful. He had expected that of his novice captain. With the sort of presumptuousness from an inferior rank that, back when Britannia ruled the waves would have had me warming up the cat o' nine tails, he gently takes my headset away.