Documents / Official release
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 1 November 2010 and numbered DIA-08-1011-002, was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office. It is one of a series of advanced technology reports produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications program. It draws mainly on the book Frontiers of Propulsion Science and speculates about breakthroughs such as control of gravity and inertia and faster-than-light travel. It then proposes a provisional cockpit design with six-degree-of-freedom controls, virtual displays and no windows.
From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 11/1/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD examines how cockpit design might change if future aerospace vehicles were ever to achieve major propulsion breakthroughs such as control over gravity and inertia, “propellantless” flight, or faster-than-light travel. The report does not describe an existing or emerging vehicle class. Instead, it asks what such hypothetical capabilities would mean for piloting, displays, controls, and human factors, and it argues that the biggest design challenges would come from full six-degree-of-freedom motion, operation across multiple flight regimes from near-surface flight to orbit and deep space, and the possible separation between the craft’s actual motion and the crew’s internal physical sensations. It combines those assumptions with established human-machine-interface principles and with maturing inputs such as gesture, voice, and brain-machine control to outline a provisional cockpit centered on intuitive displays, stress-tolerant physical controls, and a virtual surround display.
UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'FOR OFFI@IAI:: WSE ONl::Y A key feature of virtua l displays will be the inclusion of augmented reality. This means that key elements in the field of view are highlighted with color or framing to draw attention 37 to them. This includes adding obvious border lines to objects for which the pilot needs to be aware . Similarly, a virtual display of the environment outside the craft could be augmented to revea l cha racteristics outside the range of normal human vision such as infrared and ultraviolet light, or objects too small or fast to normally be noticed. Graphical and Alphanumeric Representations Pictorial displays in combination with alphanumeric displays have been found to be an effective way to convey information to a pilot. A pictorial representation of the item or cond ition being controlled (maps, artificial horizons, graphical representations of vehicle stores, and others) takes advantage of the interpretation paradigm of physical models, and thus enhances comprehension and allows features to be recognized with less effort. Although reading alphanumeric displays are more time consum ing and workload intensive, they provide more accurate values and are more easily relayed verbally to secondary users (i.e., the value can be read aloud). It has also been found effective to place the alphanumeric values in the upper-right corner of the graphical display. Other lessons include the following: 38 • Using consistent text, format, placements, axes, and other parameters. 39 Consistency has been found to be more desirable than optimized displays. 40 • Displaying parameters relative to their expected va lues rather than just displaying the alphanumeric va lue. Some indication of the criticality of an off-nominal reading also needs to be displayed. • Using zero-value points as a reference and showing range settings on graphical displays to indicate how a given value compares to the desired or pred icted value; all ranges should be roughly the same size if possible. • Displaying nonessential symbols as half-intensity helps declutter displays. Enunciators Historically, all the major alarm indicators for a system were grouped together into what is called the "enunciator panel." Usually, this panel is an array of rectangular lights with each representing a possible alarm or critical-state variable (e.g ., 5 x 5 arrays of 25 discrete alarm channels). Frequently, the lights use the tripartite color convention, blink to alert, and are connected to an audible alarm. There is usually some means to acknowledge the alarm and thus stop the distracting blinking and noise without ca nceling the alert status indication (e.g., goes from blinking with audible alarm to just lit in red or yellow). Old hardware displays unintentionally maintained a manageable number of alarm states as an inadvertent, but positive, consequence of the difficulty of adding enunciator segments. With computerized systems, however, th is number can grow to be overwhelming. Conversely, with computerized systems, analysis of vehicle operations can reduce a large number of variab les into a composite key status variable for alarm states and offer pre-determined options of emergency responses to the pilot. Hence, the concept of an enunciator can be quite useful if following t hese recommendations: 25 UNCLASSIFIED/fFOA. OFFICIO ls. Plili ONls.¥
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 57 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.