SITE RECCE: VISUALISING THE PREPARATION FOR WT3: THE KAZAKH INCURSION
A couple weekends back a handful of the team headed out to Gelsim Ranch out at Millmerran to conduct a site recce in preparation for White Tiger 3. A site recce is an important part of planning any activity; it doesn’t matter how brilliantly you’ve planned on paper you need to get some boots on the ground and physically see the area you’re planning to work with. If you don’t have a physical walk around as part of your planning cycle, Murphy’s law will kick itself into action and that location you pointed to on a map will be completely inaccessible and infeasible for what you had hoped. Despite the majority of the team being familiar with the field, we headed out regardless to get this done.
As we walked the field and experienced the environment, imagination kicked in more than it would sitting in a group meeting at home. Ideas presented themselves, and the game day took a little more shape. If you haven’t been out to Gelsim Ranch for a while, there’s been a lot of work put in here over the years and it’s very easy to see.
We also took the time to meet with the Udovich family who own and operate the Gelsim Ranch. Gelsim Ranch is a well known location to the community, hosting a wide range of activities each year including events such as niche Vietnam role play heavy milsims, blank fire World War 2 reenactment and entry level milsims. When events aren’t running, Rob and his family are often found out on the Ranch anyway putting effort in conducting working bees and preparing the field for future use. As such we took the time to showcase some interesting tech relating to the running of these events, laid out our plans for the event day and had some business discussions that will remain secret, for now…
Some of the other activities we ticked off the list included mapping the entire site to an incredible level of detail, visualising the locations for several objectives, planning the structure of the camp location and visually stepping out the areas we want to set-dress for the big day. We also discovered some new locations previously not heavily utilised at other events and made plans to tie them in. This was all achieved using an android phone running ATAK, if this sounds interesting to you keep your eyes peeled for a blog post in the future about this software.
We took advantage of the beautiful environment we were in to film some content which you should start to see trickle in shortly, including a few helpful tidbits that should assist your packing and preparation for the event. When this was all completed, we then carried out a mock full mission profile in order to ensure all the new locations and procedures we want to incorporate at White Tiger 3 are viable, because we can’t let you guys have all the fun without us.
In all, it was a very productive long weekend away where we achieved many things. If you enjoyed this peek behind our preparation, be sure to let us know. As you can see Gelsim Ranch at Millmerran is a beautiful location and we are very excited to utilise it, and you should be very excited to attend at White Tiger 3 in July.
