IL-2 Korea Career Service Record

[Arrow_1974]

IL-2 Korea Career Service Record — a pilot's file for your career, plus an awards fix

Gentlemen and of course Ladies,

I have been flying careers in IL-2 Sturmovik: Korea and wanted the sort of record the
paperwork would have kept: what my pilot shot down, who he shot down, what he was
decorated for, and what the flak did to him on the way home. The game holds all of it and
shows very little of it, so I built something that reads it out.

It comes with a second thing I did not plan on. While chasing a medal that never arrived I
found real bugs in the game's award definitions — six decorations that cannot be granted at
all, one of them broken in two separate ways. The installer offers the fix as an optional
component and I would encourage you to take it. More on that below.

It is read-only. It never writes to a career file and cannot cost you a campaign. Careers
only for now — scripted campaigns and single missions are not read (yet).

WHAT IT SHOWS

The pilot
 • Rank insignia, squadron badge, date of birth, status and health
 • Skill, discipline and courage with their boosters — the characteristics the game tracks
   but only half shows
 • A portrait you can add yourself, cropped to a passport frame

Combat record
 • Aircraft, vehicles, railroad, armaments, buildings and shipping, broken down by target
   type
 • Confirmed victories — every air-to-air kill of the career, numbered, with the opponent's
   aircraft, his name, the date and the altitude
 • Air kills by type, split between those shot down and those caught on the ground
 • Combat efficiency: best sortie, victories per sortie and per flight hour, average
   engagement altitude, mission and career score

Mission debriefings
 • Take-off and landing times from the flight log, and how the sortie ended — landed,
   landed damaged, force-landed with the aircraft written off, bailed out, or failed to
   return
 • A combat log per sortie: what was destroyed, when, by whom, at what height
 • Battle damage in the same timeline — when you were hit, how many strikes in that pass,
   how much of the aircraft was gone by the end of it, and what did it where the game
   recorded that. Roughly nine times in ten the game logs no attacker, so I show nothing
   rather than invent one.
 • Every pilot on the mission, each with their own damage timeline

The squadron
 • The full roster — portraits, rank, highest combat decoration, status, victories,
   sorties, hours and characteristics — sortable on every column
 • Click a pilot for his own record; click a medal for the full-size art and the game's own
   description

INSTALL

 1. Run the setup program. It asks for your language first — that becomes the application's
    language, and you can change it later from any page.
 2. Choose both components: the Service Record and the Awards Mod.
 3. Point it at your IL-2 Korea folder. Setup usually finds it. It is the folder containing
    data\Career.
 4. Enable modifications in the game — Settings, General, Enable modifications. Without
    this the game never looks at modded files and the awards mod does nothing at all. Setup
    warns you if it sees the setting switched off.
 5. Fly a mission, then open the Service Record. The first launch takes a few seconds while
    it reads the game's art and text; after that it is instant.

It opens in your browser and puts a small star in the notification area, by the clock.
Right-click that when you are finished with it — closing the browser tab leaves it running.

Uninstalling removes both cleanly. The mod is additions only — nothing in your game is
overwritten or replaced, so deleting the files simply returns the game to reading its own
archives. Your careers and the medals already in them are untouched either way.

Note that verifying game files in Steam removes loose mod files. If your medals stop
appearing after a game update, run setup again.

WHY THE AWARDS FIX MATTERS

Short version: in the stock game you can never be decorated twice for the same kind of
action, and the first decoration comes down to a dice roll rather than the sortie that
earned it.

The game evaluates awards down two separate paths, AwardInProc and AwardByDef. Six USAF
decorations are dead on both:

 • Silver Star, 2nd award
 • Silver Star, 3rd award
 • Distinguished Service Cross, 2nd through 5th award

Their AwardInProc carries a condition, noAwards=1, that never becomes true in a career, and
their AwardByDef is RND<0, which never fires by design. Neither route can ever grant them.

One of them is broken a second time, independently. The Silver Star's 2nd award requires
that you already hold the Silver Star — but the file names the wrong one:

    601019    RequiredAward = "603018"          should be 601018
    601020    AwardRemove   = "(ExAw=603019)"   should be 601019

601 is the Air Force ladder. 603 is the Marine Corps. So the Air Force's second Silver Star
waits on the Marines' Silver Star Medal — and those two ids have names in the locale files
but no award definitions at all, so the prerequisite points at nothing. Either fault alone
is fatal. I confirmed it the slow way: a controlled test with three clean airborne kills and
no competing award, and nothing was granted.

The base Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross do arrive in the stock game, but
only through AwardByDef — a 10% roll against your career total, not against the sortie you
actually flew. In my own career the Silver Star landed on that roll the day my career total
first reached three victories, while the sortie that earned it was ignored. The Medal of
Honor is not guarded and works as intended; it simply asks a great deal — six airborne
victories in one sortie, or five while wounded.

What the mod changes
 • Removes the 'noAwards' condition from the affected USAF valour awards, so the sortie you
   flew is what decorates you
 • Corrects the two 603 references to 601
 • Bands the valor tiers by score, so one outstanding sortie awards one appropriate medal
   rather than three at once
 • Makes two decorations reachable that exist in the stock file but had no route at all

The communist ladders have 'noAwards' in places too, but always inside an OR branch, so they are
harmless and I have left them alone.

Three decorations added
 • Senior Pilot Wings and Command Pilot Wings — the qualification badges the stock game
   leaves out
 • Medal of Honor with Oak Leaf Cluster, for the second award
 • A missing promotion step, so rank progression no longer skips a rung

New artwork is drawn into the game's own award atlas, and every decoration carries a name
and description in all six languages.

LANGUAGES

English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Русский and 中文  — the same six the game ships.
Medals, ranks, mission types and target names come from the game's own files, so they read
exactly as they do in the career screens next door.

Each career can also be set to its own language, independently of the application. A German
player flying a USAF career can read that man's record in English — his medals, his rank,
his mission types — while everything else stays German.

REQUIREMENTS AND NOTES

 • Windows, and IL-2 Sturmovik: Korea installed. No Python or other runtime needed.
 • The Service Record never writes to your game. Pilot photographs and its own settings
   live under %LOCALAPPDATA%\IL2KoreaTracker.
 • The application ships no game content. It reads the art and text it needs from your own
   installation each time.
 • The awards mod is an ordinary set of loose files — four in the game's own folders plus
   the locale text, nothing overwritten. 

Feedback, bug reports and requests are all welcome — particularly from anyone flying a
communist career, since this has had far more hours against a USAF one. And if you manage a
Medal of Honor, I would like to hear about it. I have not managed it yet.

Clear skies.

Download Link: IL2-Korea Career Service Record (version 2.7.3)

Screenshots:

Edited Wednesday at 12:38 AM by Arrow_1974
New version 2.7.3

[hawax270]

Hi! I’m having a small issue with the installation. I’m trying to install the application in my Career folder, but the installer keeps telling me that it isn’t the main IL-2 Korea installation folder.

By the way, your application looks absolutely incredible! The whole concept seems really interesting, and I’m genuinely excited to try it out.

Hopefully you’ll know what I’m doing wrong. I’m really looking forward to your reply because I can’t wait to get it working and start using it! 😄

Thanks a lot for your work on this application!

If you need help for testing, send me an MP

Edited September 10 by hawax270

[Arrow_1974]

@hawax270 Your game folder is F:\IL2Series

Edited September 10 by Arrow_1974

[hawax270]

Not working, have you a discord ? 

[Arrow_1974]

UPDATE to ver. 1.1.1

WHAT'S NEW IN 1.1.1

 • Promotions on merit. The stock game promotes on sortie count alone, which makes rank a
   measure of attendance. The extended ladder uses the game's own career points, so the
   pilot who fought hard for fifty sorties outranks the one who flew a hundred quiet ones.
 • Two flag ranks for every nation — Brigadier General and Major General for the USAF and
   Marines, Rear Admiral for the Navy, Major General and Lieutenant General for the Soviets,
   Senior Colonel and Major General for the Chinese and North Koreans. Insignia and names in
   all six languages.
 • Your choice at install: the extended ladder, or the stock criteria with only the missing
   rung restored. Both carry the same medal fixes. Run setup again to switch.
 • Non-Steam installations work. The direct-purchase copy keeps the game one folder deeper
   than Steam does, and 1.0 refused it. Setup now finds either, and accepts a path pointing
   anywhere inside the installation.
 • No terminal window. The tracker sits in the notification area by the clock; right-click
   it to quit. Double-clicking it a second time just opens the browser again.
 • Missing in action. A pilot shot down over enemy territory and not recovered is not dead,
   and the game records him differently. The tracker now shows him as missing, with his own
   stamp, rather than as an unknown state.
 • Missions you send the squadron on without flying yourself are resolved by the game as a
   text summary. Their combat logs now name the pilot who made each kill instead of the
   aircraft type.
 • Two errors in the game's German naval ranks corrected: Commander is Fregattenkapitän
   and Captain is Kapitän zur See, not "Kommandant" and "Hauptmann".
 • Roster headings wrap and figures are centred, so the last column no longer runs off the
   page.

Download: IL2 Korea Career Service Record v. 1.1.1 (link outdated)

Edited September 12 by Arrow_1974
Newer version available

[Patricks]

11 minutes ago, Arrow_1974 said:

UPDATE to ver. 1.1

WHAT'S NEW IN 1.1

 • Promotions on merit. The stock game promotes on sortie count alone, which makes rank a
   measure of attendance. The extended ladder uses the game's own career points, so the
   pilot who fought hard for fifty sorties outranks the one who flew a hundred quiet ones.
 • Two flag ranks for every nation — Brigadier General and Major General for the USAF and
   Marines, Rear Admiral for the Navy, Major General and Lieutenant General for the Soviets,
   Senior Colonel and Major General for the Chinese and North Koreans. Insignia and names in
   all six languages.
 • Your choice at install: the extended ladder, or the stock criteria with only the missing
   rung restored. Both carry the same medal fixes. Run setup again to switch.
 • Non-Steam installations work. The direct-purchase copy keeps the game one folder deeper
   than Steam does, and 1.0 refused it. Setup now finds either, and accepts a path pointing
   anywhere inside the installation.
 • No terminal window. The tracker sits in the notification area by the clock; right-click
   it to quit. Double-clicking it a second time just opens the browser again.
 • Missing in action. A pilot shot down over enemy territory and not recovered is not dead,
   and the game records him differently. The tracker now shows him as missing, with his own
   stamp, rather than as an unknown state.
 • Missions you send the squadron on without flying yourself are resolved by the game as a
   text summary. Their combat logs now name the pilot who made each kill instead of the
   aircraft type.
 • Two errors in the game's German naval ranks corrected: Commander is Fregattenkapitän
   and Captain is Kapitän zur See, not "Kommandant" and "Hauptmann".
 • Roster headings wrap and figures are centred, so the last column no longer runs off the
   page.

Download: IL2 Korea Career Service Record v. 1.1.0

Odd, I downloaded 1.1.0 almost 6 hours ago? That one (zip) is 19,771 kb, this one is 23,158kb... ?

 

Edited September 11 by Patricks

[Arrow_1974]

@Patricks Sorry - I incorporated the new stuff in 1.1.0 and didn't increase the version. Call the newest one 1.1.1 - I edited it in the post above as well as the filename itself

[Viking1]

FREAKING fantastic -- just WOW. This looks amazing. Exploring it now. DO you mind if I mention this utility in a print article for PC Pilot?

 

 

[Swoose]

Wow! Fantastic! Very impressive!  Just what I wanted.  Terrific graphics.   I especially like how you can sort your pilots by skill level.  That will really help with assigning positions.  Now if only you could find a way to identify who among my 57th ShAP NKPAF IL-10 pilots are returning back to base with ordnance instead of putting steel on target that would be great.  I need to report them to the regimental commissar for wasting the workers' and peasants' ammunition! 😜

[Viking1]

I'm still a little stunned. Honestly though, I'm also stunned that something like this wasn't part of career mode on release. An opportunity to involve us as Commanders in a much richer way, but now you've done the work anyway.

One thought, and probably will be debated, but I'd love to see my Commanders full flight hours as if there was no time warp. So flight time total and average time woudl be way, way higher. Not sure if those numbers are even in the db I guess probably not.

Also, oddly, the program is picking up my dead commander for the 25th FIS but my current COmmander who replaced him isn't showing up with his records... Heres the stats I was referring to above.

Edited September 11 by Viking1

[Viking1]

And a few more minor suggestions - if you never make a single change this is FANTASTIC work...

I love being able to easily sort my pilots by their kill numbers.. if there was an APP back in WW2 this would have been it!

 

Edited September 11 by Viking1

[Arrow_1974]

Guys - thanks for the positive feedback. And further suggestions. That is exactly what this mod is keeping alive. I am looking into every single suggestion you made and come back with a solution or an explanation why it is not possible. Just give me a little bit time. This mod is still very "young" and for sure bugs or strange behavior may occur. The more people use it,  the more feedback I get and can make the mod more robust regarding "edge" cases.

@Viking1

Quote

DO you mind if I mention this utility in a print article for PC Pilot?

Of course not 😉😎

Edited September 11 by Arrow_1974

[Viking1]

I wish some things were NOT dependent on points... like Purple Heart. But maybe some would not wnat this to change?

Many are actually in RESERVE.. and Wyatt is wounded (needs Purple Heart)

Maybe I missed it but can I find out how many of my aircraft are in repair and how long I will wait  🙂 and when any new ac are arriving.

My Commander has 3 confirmed victories but he has sent a few others limping home lol

 

Edited September 12 by Viking1

[Arrow_1974]

WHAT'S NEW IN 1.2

Most of this release comes out of one set of screenshots. @Viking1 posted four of them from
a career that had gone further than mine, and every one showed something the game does
that I had not seen. Thank you — this is exactly the feedback the thing needs.

Fixed
 • "Did not return" on every mission. If you end a mission from the menu once you are
   home, the flight log never records a landing, and the tracker read that as lost — on a
   record whose own totals said 36 returned, none lost. It now takes the game's verdict on
   the aircraft and uses the log only for the landing time.
 • "Hit 5× F-51D". That was the pilot's own bombs and rockets going off under him. The
   game logs own-ordnance damage with the attacker being your own aircraft; it now says
   "own ordnance" instead of naming your type as the enemy.
 • "Mission -7". The game numbers scrambles and other unscheduled missions downward in
   their own series. Shown as "Unscheduled mission 7".
 • "noname" appearing as a victim on ground vehicles — gone.
 • Forty-seven "active" pilots in a nineteen-slot squadron. The game keeps a reserve pool
   behind the line-up — on strength, never flying — and the tracker called all of them
   active. They are now marked "reserve", sorted below the line-up, and the roster reads
   "47, 28 in reserve". A pilot in a state I have not seen yet shows "state N" rather than
   nothing, so you can tell me the number.
 • Player killed, career carried on with a successor — the record still showed the dead
   man. The tracker now follows the game's own pointer to the current character. The
   roster highlights him alone, his record opens with "Took over the career", and the
   predecessor keeps every one of his debriefings when you open him from the roster.
 • The "missing in action" entry in a pilot's incidences printed its key instead of its
   text.

Added
 • Planned flight time beside the flown hours. Warping to the target does not advance the
   clock — the game moves you — so a pilot who warps logs about 15 minutes for a 55-minute
   route. The new figure is the full route as briefed: on my career, 33 hours planned
   against 9 flown. Both are shown; the logbook keeps its honesty.
 • The victories panel now carries the pilot's name, so it is clear whose they are.
 • The Combat Efficiency rows that link to a debriefing now look like links.

Not yet: Viking1 also asked how many of the squadron's aircraft are in repair, how long
they will take, and when replacements arrive. The game keeps all of that — a plane table
with repair states and a supply table with what is on order — so it is possible, and I
will look into it for a later version.

Unit citations — three awards to the squadron as a whole
 • Distinguished Unit Citation. The unit's Distinguished Service Cross: extraordinary
   heroism in a single action. Awarded for one mission in which a squadron at full
   efficiency destroys eight aircraft, or twenty-five vehicles and vessels — three and
   eight are typical, so this is a big day, not a milestone.
 • Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation. The long-service one, given by Syngman
   Rhee to nearly every UN air unit — USAF, Navy and Marines. A hundred squadron missions at
   full efficiency.
 • A second Distinguished Unit Citation, worn as a bronze oak leaf cluster on the first.
 Citations appear on the career page beneath the pilot, since they belong to everyone on
 the roster. Names and histories in all six languages, artwork drawn into the game's atlas.
 The game's file format has a flag for squadron awards that its own notes describe as
 "conceived, never used" — it works, and this is the first use of it I know of.

 

Download Link: IL-2 Korea Career Service Record v. 1.2.0 -> outdated

Edited September 15 by Arrow_1974

[Viking1]

Awesome, great changes and improvements!

Two obvious typos here in results... for when you next make changes 🙂

 

[Swoose]

On 9/11/2026 at 4:54 PM, Swoose said:

 Now if only you could find a way to identify who among my 57th ShAP NKPAF IL-10 pilots are returning back to base with ordnance instead of putting steel on target that would be great.  I need to report them to the regimental commissar for wasting the workers' and peasants' ammunition! 😜

Doh! LOL!  The answer was right in the app!  In the Mission Debrief details you can see minute-by-minute attack results, e.g. target destroyed and by whom.  Amazing.  I agree with others that the developers should consider incorporating this mod into the stock game.  Swoose

[Arrow_1974]

WHAT'S NEW IN 1.3

The squadron's aircraft
 • An Aircraft panel above the roster — Viking1's question: how many are in repair, how long,
   and when new ones arrive. It shows what is serviceable, in the shop, in reserve, received
   and written off over the career; each aircraft under repair with its condition and the
   day it comes back (the game's own date, not a guess — repairs run from half a day to ten,
   and not in proportion to the damage); everything on its way and when — aircraft,
   replacement pilots, fuel, ordnance and equipment; and the squadron's stores in the same
   terms and units as the game's Resources screen, with the requests still available.

 • Every airframe's history, folded under the panel: tail number, status, sorties, the
   pilot who usually flew it, how many others did, what was destroyed from it, how often it
   was in the shop, and — for the write-offs — the day it was lost and with whom. You will
   find the machine one man has flown 39 times out of 39, the pool aircraft with four
   pilots, and the squadron's top-scoring airframe, which is not necessarily the CO's. The
   tail numbers are the game's own: FF-148 on a Mustang, FU-101 on a Sabre.

 • Loadouts. Each debriefing now says which airframe you flew and what hung under it — "2 ×
   AN-M64A1 500 lb, 6 × HVAR 5"" — with the fuel fraction and the mission's range; the
   mission detail shows the same for every pilot on it, in the words the hangar uses.

Download: IL-2 Korea Service Record v1.3.0

[Patricks]

Defender says "Virus Detected"..?

Edited September 15 by Patricks

[Arrow_1974]

@Patricks
 

Thanks for reporting, and sorry for the scare. That is a known false positive: "Wacatac.C!ml" is Windows Defender's machine-learning heuristic, and it fires on unsigned programs built with PyInstaller (the tool that turns the Python application into an exe) — it even flags PyInstaller's own source download from PyPI on my machine. The Service Record is Python and Flask in a folder; it never writes to the game and there's nothing in it that phones anywhere.

Two things I've done: rebuilt the release with a freshly compiled launcher, which is what the heuristic actually reacts to, and submitted the file to Microsoft as a false positive so the cloud verdict clears.

The re-uploaded 1.3.0 is also a bigger release than the one you downloaded — it now has the Operations Map: the game's own briefing chart, read from your installation, with every mission the squadron has flown drawn on it, every air victory where it happened, and the bases you flew from. Each mission debriefing has its own map with the briefed route and the kills of that sortie. 

This is the SHA-256 of the new setup exe, which you can check against your download with certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256, or by uploading it to virustotal.com:

b42f93888d3e125cb8cbbea63505fa72a055d0fba958edcae24a332727204f4c

If Defender removed your copy, Windows Security → Protection history → Actions → Restore, or RECOMMENDED just download again. A signed build is on the list for a later version.

Download-Link: IL-2 Korea Service Record v1.3.0 -> outdated

Edited September 17 by Arrow_1974
new version available - DL removed

[Patricks]

3 hours ago, Arrow_1974 said:

@Patricks
 

Thanks for reporting, and sorry for the scare. That is a known false positive: "Wacatac.C!ml" is Windows Defender's machine-learning heuristic, and it fires on unsigned programs built with PyInstaller (the tool that turns the Python application into an exe) — it even flags PyInstaller's own source download from PyPI on my machine. The Service Record is Python and Flask in a folder; it never writes to the game and there's nothing in it that phones anywhere.

Two things I've done: rebuilt the release with a freshly compiled launcher, which is what the heuristic actually reacts to, and submitted the file to Microsoft as a false positive so the cloud verdict clears.

The re-uploaded 1.3.0 is also a bigger release than the one you downloaded — it now has the Operations Map: the game's own briefing chart, read from your installation, with every mission the squadron has flown drawn on it, every air victory where it happened, and the bases you flew from. Each mission debriefing has its own map with the briefed route and the kills of that sortie. 

This is the SHA-256 of the new setup exe, which you can check against your download with certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256, or by uploading it to virustotal.com:

f46d66d78eeff5c5c781466834c88a2949e44aa33903ef69537c521a814b2d0f

If Defender removed your copy, Windows Security → Protection history → Actions → Restore, or RECOMMENDED just download again. A signed build is on the list for a later version.

Download-Link: IL-2 Korea Service Record v1.3.0

 

 

 

Thanks, I assumed as much, just wanted to alert you. I just overwrote the original zip file with this new one, no issues at all. Thank you!

[Arrow_1974]

My dear fellow pilots,

1.4 is out. Everything below is new or corrected since 1.3; what the tracker and the mod
already did is in the earlier posts and has not changed.

THE RIBBON RACK

Every pilot now wears his ribbons. Under the portrait on the service record, and in the
roster's pilot card, there is the rack as it would sit on his tunic: rows of three, highest
precedence top-left, the short top row centred, with the devices on the bars — bronze and
silver oak leaf clusters, the V, the bronze and silver service stars of the Korean Service
Medal — at the sizes the regulations give them, and a unit citation with its gold frame.
Unit citations are worn on the right breast, so they form their own small rack beneath the
decorations.

The order of wear is the Army's of 1950–53, which the Air Force followed until it had a
manual of its own. One thing that surprises people: the Purple Heart sat *below* the
Commendation Ribbon then; it moved up only in 1985.

Soviet and North Korean pilots have racks too, on the 24 × 8 mm bar those armies used
(the American bar is 1⅜ × ⅜ in., a different shape, and the rack shows it). A second or
third Order of the Red Banner is a second or third order, worn as another identical bar —
there were no clusters in that system. The North Korean Orders of Freedom and Independence
and of Soldier's Honor have a different bar for each class, as the originals do. Chinese
pilots get no rack, on purpose: the People's Volunteers' awards were pin badges, and the PLA
wore no ribbon bars until 1955. I would rather show nothing than invent something.

THE AWARDS

Eighteen more decorations, all things a USAF pilot in Korea could actually wear:

 • The Bronze Star with the "V". Army regulations of 1950 put a bronze V on the ribbon of a
   Bronze Star awarded for heroism — worn once, however many valorous awards followed; every
   further Bronze Star, for valor or merit, added a cluster. The mod now tracks both: how
   many, and whether one was for valor. The V is earned by the sortie that was hard rather
   than the one with the biggest score — one enemy aircraft in a fight that went badly, a
   strike of twenty-five or more targets pressed through the flak, or a mission finished
   wounded — each with a chance, never a certainty. Three tiles: V, V and one cluster, V and
   two.
 • Silver Star, fourth and fifth awards (three and four clusters). Real, if rare — Robin Olds
   had four — and needed, because an aggressive pilot fills the first three in weeks.
 • Distinguished Unit Citation, third and fourth (two and three clusters), and the ROK
   Presidential Unit Citation with one, two and three clusters at 200, 300 and 400 squadron
   missions.
 • Distinguished Service Medal — the Army pattern, since the Air Force had none until 1960 —
   for a commander who has reached general rank and held the squadron for half a year. The
   one decoration the flag ranks from the promotion mod can earn.
 • National Defense Service Medal. Created 22 April 1953 for everyone in uniform since June
   1950: nothing happens for two years, then the whole roster gets it on one morning.
 • Commendation Ribbon with Metal Pendant, and three clusters. The Air Force Commendation
   Medal did not exist until 1958; in Korea airmen received the Army's, green with five white
   stripes. It is the award below the Bronze Star for the man who does the unglamorous work
   well — the wingman who has flown his missions, held his position and brought his aircraft
   home. Fifteen missions and a one-in-five chance each sortie after that; clusters at 45,
   75 and 110.

Every one has its name in six languages, a description in the medal screen (three written
fresh, the clusters pointing at their base decoration as the game's own do), and artwork in
the mod's own atlas rather than squeezed into the game's.

CORRECTED

 • The Distinguished Unit Citation could never be earned. 1.3 defined it on one mission's
   kills, which is how the DUC was historically given — but the game's squadron-award path
   evaluates an empty sortie record, so every per-sortie value is zero there. I found this by
   watching a 15-vehicle squadron sortie earn nothing, then reading the game's own code to be
   sure. The DUC now marks the point where a squadron at full efficiency has destroyed 50
   aircraft or 600 vehicles, vessels and buildings — a milestone rather than a day, which is
   the only shape the engine allows. My own squadron earned it on 23 April 1951, so it works.
 • The Silver Star and Distinguished Service Cross are now single-sortie awards with a
   chance rather than a certainty: two kills, 60 %; three, 80 %; four or five for the DSC.
   A pilot can no longer collect a Silver Star and a DSC for the same fight.
 • Why a `noAwards` guard never works, if you have looked at the awards file: the plain Air
   Medal is re-granted and retired again every sortie once a pilot holds a cluster, and that
   silently clears the flag for everything below it in the file. The mod avoids the token;
   the note is in the file for anyone who mods it further.

ALSO

 • Earlier rungs of a ladder are no longer lost. Behind each ribbon in the awards list there
   is a small arrow; it unfolds the decorations that ribbon replaced — the plain Silver Star
   under its cluster, the five Air Medals under the silver cluster — each with its own
   dates. The squadron's citations show every rung on one row.
 • Rank descriptions. The game has none. Click any rank insignia and there is now a
   paragraph on it — what the insignia was, where the rank stood, and what a pilot of that
   rank was doing in Korea — for all 32 ranks of the four nations, in six languages. The
   Chinese ones say honestly that the PLA had no ranks until 1955 and the game applies them
   backwards.
 • "Close the Service Record" in the header. Closing the browser tab leaves the tracker
   running in the tray, which even I found non-obvious; this stops it properly.
 • The "highest combat award" on the roster now ranks the new decorations correctly (the V
   ladder above the merit Bronze Star, the Commendation below the Air Medal).

Existing careers pick the new rules up at the next day rollover; nothing needs restarting.
The awards file changed shape considerably this time, so if you edit it yourself, diff before
you merge.

DOWNLOAD

IL-2 Korea Service Record v1.4.0.zip — the setup program (tracker plus the optional awards
mod) and a README. Also on the Releases page of the GitHub repository.

About the long code in the README, for anyone who wonders what it is for: it is the
setup program's fingerprint. Every file has one — change a single byte and the fingerprint
changes completely — and this is the fingerprint of the file I built:

    22f504032cf5a2a6e0a5ca6c5f072696746dc04d0b1b997f5df720f3d62b95fa

If you want to be sure the file you downloaded is the one I uploaded — not damaged, not
swapped by a file host, not tampered with — open PowerShell in your download folder and
type:

    Get-FileHash IL2_Korea_Service_Record_Setup_v1.4.0.exe

It prints the fingerprint of your copy. If it matches the one above, letter for letter,
you have my file. If it does not, do not run it, and tell me. You do not have to do this;
it is there for the careful.

The setup is still unsigned — the free code-signing application is pending — so Windows
Defender may want a second look, as it did with 1.3. The fingerprint is the answer to that
as well: it says the file is what it claims to be.

[Swoose]

It just keeps getting better and better!  Thanks for your work on this @Arrow_1974

[Arrow_1974]

Version 1.5.0 is currently in development.

So, what can you expect?

• Various small bug fixes

• A new Career Helper tool, accessible directly from the career record detail page

The Career Helper will give you a few additional options:

• Revive fallen comrades — but only if you do it on the same day they were lost.

• Add reward points — with significantly more awards now available through the mod, I thought this could provide a little relief if needed.

• And probably the most interesting addition: optional flight-time extrapolation when using mission warp.

With this option enabled, the Career Tracker will estimate the actual flight time that would have passed during the portion of the mission you skipped by using warp. Personally, I don't think pilots should be "punished" with reduced flight hours simply because they use the warp feature to speed up longer missions.

More details on how this works will be posted once Version 1.5.0 is ready for release.

[Arrow_1974]

Pilots,

1.5 is out. As before, everything below is new or changed since 1.4; the earlier posts
describe the rest, and none of it has changed.

THE COAT

Click the ribbon rack on a service record and the tunic opens: a photograph of the coat the
man would have worn, with his awards on it as the regulations of his army placed them. Two
buttons switch between service dress and full dress.

Service dress is the ribbons — for a USAF pilot the rack over the left pocket with his wings
above it, four to a row when he has more than nine (regulations allowed three or four, and a
man with four rows of three would have pushed his wings into the collar), and the unit
citations over the right pocket, which is where the Army put them and the Air Force kept
them until it had a manual of its own.

Full dress is the medals themselves, hanging from their bar, four to a row, each higher row
over the drapes of the row below, the clusters, the V and the campaign stars on the drape at
the sizes the regulations give them. The Medal of Honor is a neck decoration, so it hangs at
the collar on its pad, the ribbon passing under the shirt collar. The unit citations have
no medal and stay ribbons on the right. The twelve medals were drawn for this to one scale,
so a Bronze Star is not the size of a Distinguished Service Cross.

Soviet and North Korean pilots get their own coats — the M1943 kitel with the standing
collar and the Air Force's blue piping, and the KPA tunic — and their own rules, which are
the Soviet rules of 1943 (the Korean People's Army took them over with its Soviet
advisers), and quite different from the American ones:

 • The Hero of the USSR is worn above everything on the left breast, and always in kind —
   it was never replaced by a ribbon bar, even on the everyday tunic.
 • Orders and medals that have a ribbon (Lenin, Red Banner, For Courage, For Battle Merit;
   the two Korean medals) hang on pentagonal mounts over the left pocket, on one common bar,
   the senior nearest the centre of the chest and lying on top where they overlap. A second
   or third Red Banner is a second or third order, with its numeral, and takes its own place
   on the bar.
 • The orders that have no ribbon at all — Suvorov, Nevsky, the Red Star; the Korean Orders
   of Freedom and Independence and of Soldier's Honour, both classes — are screw-back badges
   and are pinned over the right pocket, senior nearest the centre.
 • Above them, the military pilot's class badge, which appeared in 1950, and above that the
   wound stripes of 1942, side by side if there are several; a centimetre between each.
 • In service dress the bars go over the left pocket — the bottom row just above the flap,
   never on it — and the bars of the right-breast orders on the right side, which is where
   the 1943 rules had them (they moved to the left only after 1955).

All the Soviet and Korean pieces are the game's own artwork, brought to one scale; the coat
just puts them where they belong. The Chinese still get nothing, for the reason given last
time.

THE CAREER HELPER

A second program, installed beside the tracker and opened from the button in the header.

The tracker itself never writes to the game — that has been its rule from the first day —
and the Helper is the deliberate exception: a small window that changes the career file, and
only that, with a backup taken before every single write (kept outside the game's folder, so
the game can never mistake one for a career; the last twelve are kept). It refuses to run
unless the awards mod is installed, because everything it does assumes the mod's data.

Three things it can do.

• REVIVE A PILOT. When an AI pilot is killed or goes missing, the game writes his state and thedate into the career on the spot. The Helper can undo that — but only on the same career day, before the next day's rollover has processed the loss, and never for the player. Pick the man, and choose whether he comes back having bailed out (the aircraft stays lost) or with his aircraft restored. It is there for the cases the sim gets wrong: the wingman who "died" because the AI flew him into a hill on the taxiway, or the loss you caused yourself by an Alt-Tab at the wrong moment. Use it as you would a house rule.  

 

• AWARD POINTS. Adds points to the squadron's award pool, which is what the game spends when you grant decorations for your squadron members. 

• CORRECTED FLIGHT TIMES. This is the one that needs explaining, because it changes numbers you look at every day. The game credits a sortie with the time you actually spent in it. If you fly a mission in real time, that is the truth. If you take off, climb out and then warp to the target and back — which is how most of us fly a 90-minute Sabre patrol — the sortie is written into the career as twenty-five minutes, and everything that grows from flight time grows from that: the pilot's hours, the squadron's, the Air Medal that can be earned on hours, the Soviet pilot's class badges that are earned on nothing else (20, 40 and 60 hours — a Soviet pilot who warps never sees one), the logbook that says a man with 40 missions has 18 hours. Worse, the clock inside the mission does not know about the warp either, so the log says you shot down a MiG at 08:04 on a mission that took off at 07:40 and would not have reached the Yalu, the border river where the MiGs were before 08:30. The Helper puts the plan's time back. For every mission it reads the flight log the game wrote, finds the warps — a warp is where your aircraft covered five kilometers or more between two fixes at better than one and a half times the speed the briefing gave that leg, which distinguishes a warp from merely flying fast — and re-times the sortie to what the route would have taken at the briefed speeds, plus the allowance the game itself adds for take-off, join-up and landing. A pilot who returned is credited with the planned duration. A pilot who was lost is credited with the time up to the moment he was lost, shifted by whatever warps came before it, since he could not have been lost at a place he had not reached. The events in the log — kills, hits, the bail-out — are shifted the same way, so the MiG now goes down at 08:41, where it happened. Missions with no flight log (there are a few, if you re-flew one and the older log was replaced) fall back to the plan's duration alone; the Helper shows for each mission whether it was timed from the log or from the plan. Nothing is written until you say so. The Helper shows every mission with its original and corrected time side by side, and "apply" writes them all. The change goes into the sortie, the pilot, the squadron and the mission's end time, and a record of the originals is kept in a sidecar file beside the tracker's settings, so it is fully reversible — months later, if you like: "restore" puts every original figure back, to the second. That record, and the backups, survive an uninstall — they are about the game's files, not the tracker's — so a clean reinstall still knows which careers are corrected and can still restore them. A career is either corrected or it is not; there is no half-way. Once you have applied, the career stays corrected: each mission you fly afterwards is re-timed the first time the tracker reads the career after the flight — backup first, as always, and it steps back and waits if the game still has the file open. I did it that way deliberately, because the alternative — corrected hours up to May, raw ones after — would be a file that lies in a way you cannot see. Restore undoes the lot and ends it. Two things follow from this that you should know. First, the tracker has a switch in its header, "corrected times", that shows the corrected figures as an overlay without touching the game at all — you can look before you decide, and a career you never apply to is never written. Once you have applied to a career, the switch locks on for it, since the corrected figures are then the ones in the file. Second, the game hands out some awards on flight time. Applying hours can therefore earn a pilot an Air Medal the next day that he would not have had. The Helper lists every award granted since the correction and lets you withdraw any of them; and when you restore, the ones that the added hours alone earned — the condition met with the credited hours and not with the pilot's own, no kills or sorties that would have earned it another way — are withdrawn automatically, since the hours that earned them are gone. It tells you which before it does it.

ALSO

 • A "friendly fire" line in the incidents. The game logs an event for a friendly object the
   pilot destroyed — I found it after bombing a parked C-47 at K-47 on 12 April 1951 — and
   the record now shows it, in red, with the object's name. It costs nothing in the game
   beyond the shame.
 • The "highest combat award" column of the roster sorts by precedence now, not by the
   award's name — a Silver Star above a Bronze Star rather than "B" before "S".
 • A mission flown twice takes its newest flight log, by the timestamp in the file's name,
   instead of whichever the folder listed first.
 • Two framed unit citations side by side keep both their frames.

DOWNLOAD

IL-2 Korea Service Record v1.5.0.zip (outdated - newer version available) — the setup program (tracker, Career Helper, and the
optional awards mod, which has not changed since 1.4) and a README. Also on the Releases
page of the GitHub repository.

The fingerprint of the setup program, for anyone who wants to check the file they downloaded
against the one I built (see the 1.4 post for how):

    fda89298b27d683b6bd9888a477d461b82f50dfd0a2dc2ccf3cb35240a14ccab

    Get-FileHash IL2_Korea_Service_Record_Setup_v1.5.0.exe

Still unsigned; still waiting on the signing foundation. Defender scanned this build clean
here, and the fingerprint tells you it is the same file there.

That is where I'll leave it for now. The tracker is in a decent state and I don't plan to add features for the time being. If you run into anything odd — a figure that can't be right, a medal that shouldn't be there, a page that won't open — tell me and I'll fix it. When more campaigns appear (so far there is only the stock "Home for Christmas"), I'll add a campaign tracker for them, as I did for Great Battles.

Enjoy the mod — and the game.

Edited September 23 by Arrow_1974
DL Link removed due to newer version available

[Patricks]

On 9/15/2026 at 2:13 PM, Arrow_1974 said:

• AWARD POINTS. Adds points to the squadron's award pool, which is what the game spends when you grant decorations for your squadron members. 

 

 

 

The overall lack of Award Points has bugged me in the past, thanks for adding this feature!

Edit: One issue I have is you can't have "MODS" on for most multiplayer servers, but I "think" that as long as I run it once (after adding points through your app) with MODS ON, then restart with them off, the points were applied. I'm not sure if they would apply with MODS OFF as I didn't try?

 

Edited September 20 by Patricks