Måns

With Battle Staff Tools you can now produce proper maps with the correct scale and MGRS grids. Online now, and always available for offline use with a license if you want to handle classified information. #BattleStaffTools

@orbatmapper A0? You are thinking too small. (Also A0 is a stupid size since you can’t print it in landscape on a 44” plotter, and once you go 44” wide your length is almost infinite, or at least 30m.)

@spatialillusion You'll need A0 support for the really large ORBATs

If you create a very, very, very large ORBAT in Battle Staff Tools you might run into that you can’t save it as PNG since it exceeds the maximum canvas size. I have now made a fix that scales it down to fit into 32767x32767 pixels.

Out of tokens for the week so felt like a troglodyte sitting there typing it all out.

Spent the morning doing a change to my download script that packages the worldwide equipment guide. The very large json files are now also stored gzipped and that should make the loading slightly faster over slow network connections.

Well that was a very interesting meeting. To be continued.

The US has been building operational-level battlefield management systems for decades. The question isn't whether we need something like Delta, because we do (every western military does), but whether we need Delta itself, or for the reasons people assume. We don't. The real American problem sits at the tactical level. It's the fusion of sensors, misc tech, drone video feeds across multiple platforms and vendors, the security classification boundaries that strangle information flow before it reaches the people who need it, and the absence of a single screen where a small-unit leader can pull up ISR products, understand the ground, rehearse the mission, execute it, and keep using the same system throughout without bouncing between four systems run by three vendors at two clearance levels and an officer gatekeeping it. This is where Delta, or rather the idea of Delta, becomes useful to study. The Ukrainian leadership has gotten things wrong in regard to what the west needs for their militaries. Most countries do not need the product in and of itself. They've pitched Delta as a product to be adopted when the actual export is the operating model behind it. Delta's value isn't its position on the operational-tactical spectrum. It's the architectural and cultural choices Ukraine made under the pressure of a real war: Web-based delivery means updates are done in hours or days instead of the multi-year cycles that the American programs of record are trapped in. Bottom-up integration means whatever drone, sensor, or radio the unit actually fields can be and does get integrated into the system in days or weeks- not whatever a prime contractor decided to support three+ stupidly spent budget cycles ago. A single system that crosses echelon boundaries means team leaders, squad leaders, and platoon leaders see what the brigade sees when the fight demands it, rather than waiting for information to be hand-carried down through three layers of staff and then transmitted on a radio or an overly large BFT type system. These are the real lessons that Ukraine should be teaching the west and using as leverage. The software is a downstream part of it. The American problem diverges from the Ukrainian one. The US carries structural weight Ukraine doesn't. FVEY intelligence-sharing. Source and method protections built over decades. SCI compartments holding TTPs that took a generation of operations to develop and still get continuously modified. Our procurement system (American and most of the West's) is optimized for accountability and large-vendor risk management rather than the speed of modern war and streamlined budget constraints. Delta works in part because Ukraine isn't trying to share intelligence across five+ nations, isn't safeguarding a sixty+ year old SIGINT system/enterprise and isn't routing every acquisition through a process designed in the Cold War. Any American styled Delta equivalent runs and will run straight into these walls, and the walls aren't software problems. They are purely policy, classification architecture, and acquisition culture. American politicians and the revolving door between flag officers and prime contractors have made this fight nearly unwinnable from the inside. Again, the US doesn't need Delta. It doesn't need another operational battle management system either. We have all of those, and they are layered on top of each other. What it needs is a foundational shift where layers are built on Ukraine/Delta's principles: rapid iteration, open integration of whatever the force actually carries, and institutional tolerance for cross-echelon visibility. Until this is implemented, and until classification architecture and procurement culture can move at the speed of the threat rather than the speed of a politician's investment trades or a general moving offices to the private sector, any system built on the current foundation will inherit the same constraints we're trying to escape. Delta isn't the answer. What produced Delta is.

@SapperJaeger Milsymbol is quite flexible when it comes to adding custom symbols, but it can of course be done in many ways.

@spatialillusion yes, but also has some non-standard symbols -- I would say, it has many, but don't believe it is enforced

Does anyone know if Delta is using milsymbol? I have heard rumors but nothing confirmed.

Built a new version of warp-tiler, the fastest way to convert your raster data into tiled formats. Polished the UI and included the latest JPEG2000 improvements that makes conversion at least five times faster.

product manager using their 16” M5 Max Macbook Pro to ask Claude to clean up files in a folder

The whole ORBAT rendering engine in Battle Staff Tools is quite modular and can be used in other software projects. Contact me for more information.

Built a demo-thingie for a demo-thingie. (Might add some functionality to Battle Staff Tools.)

Ukraine’s DELTA system - there should be a lot of EU/US BMS/C2 system suppliers looking worriedly over their shoulder. @spatialillusion x.com/i/grok/share/a…

Looks like our real world dataset runs indicate a 4x speed increase. That is definitely not bad.

Computer is running long run A/B tests, body is doing bench.

@subniten Annars är okomprimerade zip-filer min go-to för de flesta lösningar. Fantastiskt format när man väl byggt sin egna läsare och fungerar både lokalt och från web servrar. Är ju lite likt din tar lösning.

@subniten Läs stora block och bygg ett index så att man inte måste börja om och söka genom hela filen varje gång man vill hitta något utan kan gå direkt och hämta rätt byte range. Sen träffade tyvärr verkligheten och slutresultatet var inte lika bra som mitt benchmark.

When you never give up on finding additional performance and decide to try to implement your own version of a jpeg2000 reader to see if it is possible to 10x the performance.

Initial tests showed great results and 8x performance gains, then reality hit and things were worse than before. Making a new version with some changes to see if we can fix it. Learning a lot!

@subniten Här är det mer som när du sen ska läsa enskilda små filer ur din tar-boll, om du inte har ett bra index så måste du söka efter var varje fil börjar och det är då det blir väldigt ineffektivt.

@spatialillusion Damn, vi använder GDAL i en produkt, det är alltid dåligt att läsa små block. Liknande problem när man ska kopiera en filmkatalog med många filer/underkataloger över nätverk, jag brukar göra en tar-boll och sen kopiera den, kan kapa en timme eller två i den miljö jag sitter i.