1970s

The 1970s were an important decade for our company. The first Saab Training Systems laser simulator, the BT 39 was released followed by the BT 41.

1970

A new generation of target equipment powered by electric batteries was developed in 1970. This comprised electrohydraulic tank targets, electric pop-up targets and radio control systems.

1972

In the early 1970s, the need to reduce firing with live rounds for safety and cost reasons increased. This need led to the development of the first Saab Training Systems laser simulator, the Saab AA Gunfire Simulator BT 39 anti-aircraft artillery simulator. The simulator was a one-way system with passive reflector units on the target. The sequence of the reflections made it possible to measure the range to the target, to evaluate the tracking accuracy and calculate the number of hits.

1973

The BT 33 Artillery and Mortar Fire Control Simulator was introduced in 1973. It was the first training simulator of its kind available anywhere in the world. The simulator became a popular training device and was sold to many countries.In a classroom, projectors were used to display the terrain image on a huge screen. A number of symbols could be superimposed on to the terrain image. The data of the artillery projectiles were fed into the central computer unit and the results were presented on the screen. The terrain was programmed into a magnetic core store that had to be loaded from a punched tape before each training session. The data were about 8 kb and took about 10 minutes to load!

1978

In the late 70s Saab Training Systems started developing a laser simulator system, called BT 41. This simulator could compute the actual ballistic path of a simulated projectile or missile and simultaneously search for targets in the vicinity of the simulated projectile as it flew down range.