I only remember it hazily but it was just very funny in the moment; the lecturer was one of the most naturally funny people. It concerned as I recall it a combat flight (helicopter I think) simulator that had been unsuccessful and was being hastily tweaked as a demo for a civilian contract.
The story went that elements of the simulator were closely tied to ground attack scenarios, and that there was not time to remove all the code concerning enemy soldiers, so the models of the soldiers were replaced with models of kangaroos (same sort of height, walk on two legs).
On the day of the demo, there was some impromptu change to the script — they flew lower and too close to the ground or something — and the kangaroos fired at them with rocket propelled grenades.
I don’t believe the story is really true, but as a cautionary tale about reskinning demos it has always stuck with me.
The debunking, for those not immediately inclined to follow the link:
> “...we had not set any weapon or projectile types, so what the kangaroos fired at us was in fact the default object for the simulation, which happened to be large multicoloured beachballs.”
I also came across this one when I worked in the sim industry (supporting army training). In my own experience, lots of sim errors could manifest in vaguely humorous ways, such as landing craft sticking vertically out of the beach when they landed, tanks whose turrets span rapidly, etc. These were usually obvious in testing. The more challenging errors occurred when multiple sims were federated together, since specific errors were often intermittent and might only be noticed when you could see the different screens together. Examples typically related to weapons effects and visual representations, e.g. platforms being invulnerable to missiles fired from a different sim, or a platform or person that looked different depending on which sim was displaying it. These issues were collectively referred to as 'fair fight' problems because it meant that trainees in one sim might have an advantage other others.
