The Steam Deck is an excellent game console. What we did not know, however, was its military utility in the midst of the war in Ukraine, with supporting video.
The Steam Deck, Valve’s PC DNA hybrid portable console, is rightly considered to be a very good product. And even if other technologies of this type are on the way, such as the famous ASUS Rog Ally that we’ve been talking about for a few days, the Steam Deck is currently alone in its category. And beyond the video game for which it is designedit is also used on the front of the war in Ukraine. Explanations.
When a game console becomes a tool for the war in Ukraine
The Russian-Ukrainian war that has been raging since 2014 is a terrible human drama. And to win the war everything is good on one side or the other. In addition to firearms, drones or even combat vehicles, we have just learned that the Steam Deck is also part of the Ukrainian arsenal to fight against the Russian army. So, as reported PC Gamera video of TPO Media shows Ukrainian soldiers using a Shablya turret, operated remotely by a Steam Deck. Simply put, the Shablya is a pivoting platform on which any light anti-personnel weapon can be mounted. In the example of the video, the mechanism is surmounted by a PKM machine gun and we can distinctly see an operator using it while handling a Steam Deck. Because yes, this famous combat turret notably uses a camera system and can even be controlled up to a distance of 500 meters. The craziest thing about this story is that this all follows a 2015 crowdfunding campaign ($12,000) to fund and maintain 10 Shablya turrets for the Ukrainian military.
The Steam Deck, very affordable technology
The video therefore offers a quick overview of how the Steam Deck is used via its interface with the turret. Actually, a video stream is simply used on the screen to allow identification of the target. PC Gamer spoke with Aric Toler, a researcher from Bellingcat (an NGO of investigators) who notably helped uncover a leak of classified military documents on Discord last month. The man explains in particular how the Steam Deck can be very useful militarily speaking. According to him, the excellent controls and the use of an OS that is fairly easy to modify allows you to take advantage of a control module that is much less expensive than a more conventional tool (like the one used by the American army, for example) . It certainly looks like a hack but it seems to work very well.
On our side we wonder what Valve thinks of all this.
