The majority of these reflect a particular application that my former place of employ was trying out. They are a reasonable way of approaching the issue and offer a lot of good developmental steps towards an even more in depth program.
That's interesting because the points I outlined constitute the framework my buddies and I are using to build a simulation of the Dune universe. We're building the game using PHP coding which apparently can do anything. It's cheap (but not so easy).

Is it affordable? (not only in the sense of cost but also in consideration of is it worth it)
I've always wondered what makes military simulators expensive (off-hand, I read somewhere that to operate a carrier in a simulation runs up to a million dollars a day). That's absurd. Is most of the cost in the hardware? I've found very sophisicated online simulators that are very cheap to make and operate.