Rokko

Something that occurred to me today: By reaching Kupyansk and the Oskil river, the Ukrainians should have extended the reach of their HIMARS by a good 50km or roughly 60% of their total range, yet there weren't any reports of large Russian ammo dumps getting blown up since then within this newly in-range area. This would seem to indicate that the Russians proactively dispersed even those "super-depots" that were well away even from the current front line, which seems sensible but also atypical for them. But perhaps they were already factoring in weapons systems like whatever hit Saki airfield or ATACMS. In any case, it would be interesting to know just how far out their logistics are limited in this manner. It surely can not help the situation at the front and each km added means twice that number for round-trip routes.

It will be interesting to see what exactly the repercussions will be, I don't think some further economic sanctions are going to cut it here. Maybe put a Kaliningrad blockade back on the menu, or send modern air-dropped ASW weapons to Ukraine (covertly) or declare to sink any Russian sub spotted anywhere near critical pipeline infrastructure. I doubt the EU has enough teeth for any of these, but they would be resolute responses.

I think "will" was meant as a noun in this sentence, as in willpower.

I've read an interview with a German parliamentarian from the Greens recently. One paragraph stood out to me, which hints at one potential reason for the German unwillingness to deliver German MBTs and IFVs. Basically he blames Poland. I don't how valid the claim is, for all I know it may be BS politics, given that most of the government is still repeating the "let's not provoke Putin or else he might invade another country" line (with which army though). But his response indicates to me that was probably involved with the details of negotiating these various deals, and it does seem like the logistical concerns may have at least some merit. Source: https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/ukraine/id_100054452/ukraine-juergen-trittin-dafuer-zahlt-deutschland-jetzt-einen-sehr-hohen-preis-.html In any case, I think there is a decent chance the SPD may yet be bullied into delivering MBTs, eventually.

Thanks for the clarification. In the video above it's clearly not airbursts that are used, no? Now in hindsight I couldn't say if I've misinterpreted previous videos or not, but it still seems that airbursts are much less prevalent. Yeah, that's clearly airburst. I hadn't seen this one before, so thanks for (re)posting.

I think if this happened to me in a CM turn, I would still consider this platoon as a write-off. More likely than not there's more shells coming from where the first three came from and the guns are basically already dialed in. Now that you say it, though, I don't think I've seen any footage of airbursts at all from this war so far, which seems odd.

Too close for comfort.

I've read in German news media some weeks back that there were issues with barrel wear. Unsuprisingly the Ukrainians had used these system to a much greater extent than anyone ever before and the barrels had become worn rather quickly. There was also some mention of using "special munition" (SMart rounds?) with larger than the maximum recommended charges in order to use them at greater range.

I am not sure if it has been mentioned before, but this channel does regular interviews, mostly with Muscovite(?) zoomers and millenials, but I thought it gave some valuable insights into a certain subsection of Russian society, i.e. young urbanites, so definitely not representative of the whole country. What these videos show particularly well is the utterly destitute state of Russian civic culture, with standard answers like "I'm apolitical", "these things are decided at the top", "we have no say in it", etc and a general disconnect from reality ("the rest of the world is envious of Russia's wealth and resources"). Some other interesting videos are the somewhat regularly posted (every few weeks or so) "are you affected by sanctions yet?" videos, which most people tend to answer with no, even if all acknowledge issues such as severe price increases. This one answer I found particularly funny:

A few weeks ago the official line was that sending Gepards is no good because the ammunition is no longer produced in Europe and would have to be imported from Brazil or something. Probably just some more German weaseling, now that everyone and their grandmother is sending 155mm SPGs and the previous line of "we only send what our allies send" no longer works. What a disgusting country... (that I happen to live in). Oh well, maybe we they can at least send another company's worth of MG3s...

I saw a BBC report on the fate of the 331st Guard Airborne Regiment earlier today, quantifying some of their losses via Russian social media. Seems to confirm the view that a good portion of Russian airborne forces are pretty much combat ineffective by now.

Interesting take by a DNR recon guy on the situation in Mariupol from two days ago. I found it odd that he says there are no Russian forces, since I thought the 150th MRD was also fighting in Mariupol, but maybe he is just referring to his sector.

There is apparently video footage of Kadyrov with the commander of the 8th CAA Andrey Mordvichev who had allegedly been killed on 16 March. Can someone confirm this is actually Mordvichev? The foto of the guy I've seen floating around in media is this one and the two people don't look alike to me: I've also found this foto, which does bear a lot resemblance with the guy in the video: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOKhQY5XMAITQgv?format=jpg&name=small Edit: Also, what is up with this goofball Kadyrov? Is he actually near Ukraine this time around or did they really fly a Russian general back to Chechnya so he could produce more TikTok videos?

Sadly. no. While I can clearly identify the blob of bytes were all this information must be stored, it bears no resemblance to a normal .btt file and contains no clear text either, i.e., it's likely compressed data. The campaign script is extracted, however, at least partially, so you get rest/refit percentages, win thresholds and the overall campaign progression.

Glad to hear it. While unpacking some more random campaign files I found one that didn't work and fixed another edge case, so here goes v0.10.1 uncam-0.10.1.zip

Hello, I haven't touched CM in ages, having mostly lost interest in it, but today I had an itch and looked at the code I had written for the uncam tool and somehow ended up rewriting the entire thing in one setting. I fixed some issues and it should be possible to unpack CMCW campaigns as well as potentially campaigns of yet unreleased games, as long as BF does not muck with the file format. Anyways, I don't have CMCW so I can't test and there are no campaign files in the scenario depot. If it doesn't work, send me the campaign file (or a download link) and I can take a look at it. I don't even have a Windows PC anymore, so I couldn't test the Windows version either, so please report any issues. Best regards PS: If anyone wants the source code, feel free to ask but I didn't include it this time in the archive. uncam-0.10.zip

Thanks, unfortunately, no. There is a big blob of bytes in every campaign file that somehow encodes the core units of a campaign, but I have been unable to figure out how to extract that in a way that it can be loaded in the editor. The thing is, scenario files use some kind of compression algorithm (or maybe even encryption), i.e. you can save the same the same file a bunch of times and large parts of the resulting files will be different each time. It might be possible to make an empty scenario file and somehow glue in the core unit bytes at the right place and hope it loads, but I haven't done any experiments for that yet. In fact haven't done any work on the application in the last weeks since I'm pretty much 100% preoccupied with finishing my Masters thesis. Once that is out of the way I'll probably have time to do some experiments. For now, uncam can do two things really well, which Mad Mike's tool (I always forget the spelling) can't and that is extracting CMA and CMSF1 campaigns and his tool is the only one able to extract updated CMSF2 campaigns, so everyone should be covered.

Since this is somewhat related: The boxed version of CMSF1 had a map of Syria with all the forces involved in the fictional campaign and their operations depicted. Is this map somewhere in the documentation of the digital CMSF2 version? So far I haven't found it.

By the way, in the same mission the briefing said there will be air support from two Apache helicopters, but you actually get two F-16s.

Thanks for the reply, so it really is just an odd TOE. However, it seems the game is unable to reflect this when the off-map variant is selected, in which case you only get one type of mortar.

I noticed something strange while playing the 3rd scenario of the TF Thunder campaign (the one with the airfield). For fire support you get two Strykers with 120mm mortars, but they also have a mounted 60mm mortar team each. Is this correct, it seems a bit strange to say the least. When looking at the OOB in the editor the on-map variant of the mortar platoon looked odd as well, with mixed 120mm vehicles and 81mm teams.

Since I felt the same way about the colours in CMBN I made a little mod for myself, where I simply copied over all the summer textures from CMRT/CMBS over to Normandy, since I didn't like any of the other available terrain mods. If you are interested, I could upload it to CMMODS.

Thanks for the report. I've noticed this as well and think it should be easy to fix, will probably get around to it in a couple of days. The TF Thunder and Semper Fi campaigns were reworked for the initial CMSF2 release so they are the ones causing problems as of now, while all the other campaigns are still identical to their CMSF1 versions and can still be unpacked. As far as I understand, ScAnCaDe can unpack the reworked campaigns out of the box.

I've noticed this as well and don't think it is linked to the motivation setting. Seems more like a bug to me. Troops on hunt should not continue moving when fired upon and I'm pretty sure that did not use to be case.

These sort of issues are always what keeps me away from making scenarios. I hope the devs read this thread. Also, I too believe a comeback of CMSF1 type ditches would help at least a little, they're also much more easy to use than the "ditch lock elevation" feature (and are better gameplay wise for troops taking cover).