Reminder: Research and Prepwork for Syrian Campaign Missions Early!

[Worrazen]

I might not be saying anything profound here, so I didn't want to labels this as advice, more as noteworthy.

 

I hope ED is doing this as things are happening, even if it's very long until such campaign missions would be finished, because it's much easier to have 2 or a few guys tasked with gathering the events as they play out in more or less "realtime" rather than going many years in future trying to research backward in time.

 

It is much harder to try to find various bits and details 5 years later trying to search back when so much info has been dumped ontop of that, you would need to spend a lot of time just getting the search engine to throw proper results but you would also need to know info about what you're looking for, keywords, times, and if you haven't followed the news cycles this is way harder, even for someone experienced it takes up to an hour sometimes to find some 5+ year old story or video.

 

Also folowing politics and news cycle is a full time job, this cannot be done by someone who has another job, on a rainy sunday afternoon.

 

Due to the increasing speed (connectivity) of the information passing from one point to another, to the increase in various irrelevant information and the increase in volume of overall information on the internet it will become harder to find key things later on, many of the videos get burried in history.

 

Doing this early, and gradually building up, rather than taking a fixed amount of time later, in a "let's find some info now in X months" is just a sure way things would be missed, maybe many details of little significance, but still, details are what determines the end quality of a product.

 

One of those interesting details is when some random internet people (most probably 4/8 chan or reddit, that's where most of the talk about this was atleast) were posting via Twitter to one of the Syrian Army field commanders, that they found what looks like to be a training camp in one of the satellite shots, he forwarded it to one of the Russian officers, said they'll see what they can do, and after a while the Russian DoD Twitter account announced they confirmed the destruction of an ISIS training camp with the provided sat image of the same exact training camp the one that the internet people suggested. Wow!

 

I recalled this a few months ago, I wanted to find it again cause I didn't save that at the time it was happening, even if I knew what to look for yet it took me more than 30 minutes of serious search engine effort to find it and had to really think to remember one of the keywords, most people don't have that kind of patience or willpower to do go on a 30 minute hunt like this. These 30 minutes is total, I didn't count the inactivity and other stuff, it was stretched over several hours.

 

This would ensure an accurate campaign later on ... but this could work on the nevada map to in some fashion if the map is far far away, using the lake as if it was sea.

 

The Russian DoD (Минобороны России) youtube channel is one where things should stay, most probably stuff here won't disappear or get burried ... but you never know, but still, to get to older videos, you need to keep, as of the new YT GUI, first need to add "/videos" to the end of the URL to get to the uploads section, one more thing the new GUI does to make things harder to find, then you need to keep always scrolling down and clicking "show more", scrolling down and clicking "show more" for ~20 more videos and that's extremely impractical when you might want to go 5 years back. However there's at least some remedy,

Youtube-dl has the ability to directly download all videos of a YT channel, and with an "archive" option to only download newer ones, meant keep an archive up to date.

 

But I won't go over all the various channels right now, way over complicated.

 

Lastly, everyone should beware of various monetization reuploaders who take various videos and mislabel, mistitle and even modify them to appear differently (mirroring) these days it requires extreme caution as pretty much any video could be misleading in some form, this is all thanks to the youtube's make-money-online, which attracts a lot of people who don't care about anything else except viewcounts, but also because they don't crack down enough on these bots, yes a person can have around 200 or more fake channels on there.

 

 

 

 

EDIT: Now I'm having thoughts that I'm not even sure 100% if some DCS campaigns are trying to be real-life ... at least the one I read the description many months ago I now remember was "ficticious", I just didn't yet get to fly/experience the game that much to get to Campaigns so I didn't look it up much. I kinda wanted to delay to get serious into campaigns before I know the aircraft well and get a new joystick ... indeed the holdup was because there's not much double-throttle joysticks to choose from out there.

Edited September 24, 2017 by Worrazen