A closer look
United States Navy Virginia-class nuclear submarines utilize standard, off-the-shelf Xbox 360 controllers to operate their extremely advanced photonic mast systems, which are essentially the high-tech digital replacements for traditional periscopes. The military realized that integrating a thirty-dollar video game controller was significantly cheaper and required vastly less training time than designing a proprietary thirty-thousand-dollar joystick from scratch. It is both hilarious and mildly terrifying to realize that the most lethal underwater stealth vessels on the planet are being steered by the exact same plastic hardware you used to aggressively scream at teenagers during late-night multiplayer lobbies in 2009
