New Scenario, late 1942, South, Settlement 79

[Renaud]

I guess this belongs in scenario talk, but since JC brought it up here...Google Earth is a good backup resource particularly when all else fails. I have used it in my 22nd PZD scenarios. The topo is useful.

One thing to be aware of is that rural cultivation and population is more intensive now. I found large areas of my scenarios which were definitely just empty fields, wilderness or forest in the 40's now show up as vast patchworks of cultivated fields in Google Earth. In connection with this, there is also a lot of new irrigation, dams, flooded valleys, etc. Sometimes towns where action occured are now at the bottom of reservoirs.

Soviet ethnic cleansing also results in a lot of confusion with where towns are or were. Entire towns were depopulated, relocated to siberia, renamed to russian sounding names, etc. Makes it a challenge to locate places sometimes. For the Crimea I used combinations of 1920's soviet military maps, modern maps, pre-soviet Tartar maps, and Google Earth. Translating cyrillic is also fun, hehe.

The nice thing about russia is that some cities are virtually the same since WW2. Rostov is still quite recognizable from 1930's soviet maps for instance.