What's your job about?
I work in Weapons System Performance for the Maritime Warfare Centre (MWC) as a Software Engineer in the Department of Defence. Our group’s role is to ‘provide independent performance assessment of maritime weapon systems’. Within MWC, I am a member of the Underwater Weapons Team which is responsible for analysing all torpedo exercise firings from Submarines, Surface Ships and aircraft for the Royal Australian Navy. Basically, if a torpedo was fired during an exercise we determine what happened, when and why.
To perform our analysis across a wide range of weapons and platforms developed by different nations and companies we design our own analysis software in-house. My day-to-day role in the team involves large amounts of software development, continually updating our tools with new features or to support new types of data. This is all in support of weapons firings and major exercises, where upon completion of the exercise we acquire all the data from the various platforms involved, process it, and build a reconstruction of the events using our internal tools. We then analyse the events the exercise using this data to build a picture of what happened and investigate anything unexpected. Finally, we create both videos and reports for the crews involved to understand their performance as well as providing data for our Navy co-workers to use in developing future Navy tactics.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
Working at Garden Island means that we have half the fleet docked outside our window every day. Being so close to the waterfront allows you to get up close and personal with Navy ships and see the systems you analyse. Also by working within Fleet Command, we are heavily focussed on the current fleet rather than future projects. This means you can see the impact of the work you do rather than working on project where your decisions take years to have an effect.
What are the limitations of your job?
The biggest limitation to my job is scheduling. As weapons firing often require multiple vessels to be in the same place at the same time and operational requirements come first, plans can often change at short notice. This could mean a firing could be delayed at the last minute which can be frustrating, or it could mean dropping everything because one is now taking place on the weekend. Once the firing is done, this means again dropping all other tasks and making sure the analysis and reports are done on time to ensure the results are meaningful to those involved.
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