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you asked for it… I hope you are 60+ already 
(only joking)
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You see the gravity of my statement when I tell you I have not yet reached the age of 60 by quite a long shot… 
Vietnam and Guadalcanal would keep me busy far into retirement 
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Somewhere, If I can still find it, I have every air operation that happened in 'Nam. Long story.
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Tell us more 
Well, if memory serves it’s all on a tape drive (think small 8-track tapes). The player hasn’t been seen in over 20 years. The tapes? Who knows. However…
It was (and still is called OPERA) data, and seems to be available here:
I recall writing some code to parse those files so, somewhere on that site (I think that page), is the data description.
We had to order it from the source, Cira 1995 - This was the Internet, version 0.5 Beta timeframe 
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Does that include the Air America stuff? or the clandestine incursions to Laos and mayhaps even China?
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Yes, I saw a ref to that a few minutes ago while digging. Didn’t save the link but I’ll look again.
This link I came across but didn’t investigate:
The Main page, or close to it:
Ooops, I stand corrected: the stuff I got back then was called:
Combat Air Activities File (CACTA) - that sounds better. And the records (they are text files) look familiar.
A sample:
the place it links to is either unavailable to me (non-us) or at all.
https://aad.archives.gov/aad/fielded-search.jsp?dt=1863tf=F&cat=all&bc=sl
Huh, the link you posted didn’t work for me either. Try he CACTA link above. I’m in the US.
Here’s the juicy bits (CACTA files) we wanted way back then. Problem is I don’t recall the codes, and haven’t found them on the site yet. If anybody ever does a SEA map then this is a treasure trove of info on mission creation.
Each record contains data on a mission, one sortie of that mission, and one or more incidents of different types that occurred during the sortie. If more than one incident of the same type occurred during the sortie, a separate record for each incident exists. Each record is divided into groups of fields, known as “sets.” There are eight possible sets and the information in each set includes: control set data with the date, mission and unit identifier; fixed set data with the branch of U.S. service or country of Air Force, country of origin, mission name, target location, type and number of military aircraft, war damage, and target terrain and weather; and up to six periodic sets of repeatable data including enemy defense data and mission altitudes; formation of aircraft, military tactics and enemy attacks; ordnance type and tonnage; results of the attack; aircraft lost or diverted, and flight crew status; and comments.
Guess I’m dumb but I’m only getting metadata out of that thing, not the stuff itself.
Found a link to the codes. When I saved/opened them it brought back memories - I hate writing text parsing code…
https://aad.archives.gov/aad/fielded-search.jsp?dt=1894&cat=all&tf=F&bc=,sl
Interesting. I d/l’d them all then went back to check and it won’t let me in. It’s a Gov’t operation == not the most efficient. Like a server/code issue on their end.
You’re not dumb. I see a lot of files there. Maybe you need to access the server from this side pf the pond - idk.
Funny part is, there were a lot of users that said if they had to pay for map upgrades all the time, they’d jump ship,
These are also the same users that post on other forums boasting their XP/FSX/P3D Collections, breaching the $1,000 mark easily…
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I’m actually against a world simulation, I think it will lack so much detail we are used to have. I’m not very impressed with msfs where we don’t have photogrametry. Flying over Sweden where I live is lackluster and just bland. Height map is very inaccurate, textures are smeared and blurry and houses look generic and not at all like it looks in real life.
If ED goes this way, I hope they think hard and long how to tackle this.
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