[davidp57]

Summary

Lot FEAT-FAT-COW: a CH-47 that lands in the field and becomes a forward refuel and rearm point for other helicopters. ED announced a native Fat Cow on 2024-04-19 and 2024-08-23; DCS 2.9.30.28738 still has none.

DCS cannot transfer fuel between aircraft, so the cow lays out a FARP scene next to itself whose warehouse holds exactly what it carries, and DCS serves it until it runs out.

• Spike first (ticket 01), measured in DCS with Zip: a runtime Invisible FARP has a warehouse (the countryside scene's comment saying otherwise is corrected), starts empty, serves a player already in game, enforces a finite stock set by script (partial service, then "Unable to comply"), and needs a supplier in range. The FARP Fuel Depot static alone supplies fuel and weapons: no vehicle, tent, ammo dump or bunker.
• Piloted cow (CH-47F): F10 → CTLD → Fat Cow. Load a loadout (fatCowLoadouts: fuel kg + items, split into crates by content) or Request a crate one at a time. Default loadouts, all with two 800 gal tanks (4 800 kg): four Apache ones at the top (40 or 60 Hellfires, laser and radar AGM-114L, with 30 mm), four under Russian (Ka-50 Vikhr + 2A42, Mi-24P Ataka or Shturm + GSh-30), two under Mixed; 6 400 to 8 200 kg, what a CH-47F lifts with 80 % internal fuel. Deploy the FARP; the crates stay on board; packing (or taking off) puts what was not used back into them and lightens the hold. Cow crates never show in Request Equipment nor Unpack.
• AI cow: always a CH-47, whatever the requester flies; requested from anywhere with a loadout picked in the same submenus, it comes airborne from the nearest friendly logistic zone on land, with a joining estimate. A player flight commands it from F10 only (Land here, Take off, Hold here, Join us, RTB); nothing automatic, after Zip's server test where it left whenever the leader hopped onto its FARP. Fat Cow status (phase, distance, bearing, ETA, stock) and FARP status (the Fat Cow FARP you are at).
• VMCT contract: a late-activated helicopter group declared in fatCowAICows ({ group, escort, loadout }); with an AI flight it lands and takes off with the leader on its own. Documented in docs/mission-maker/fat-cow.md.
• One FARP per cow (CTLD_FatCow_FARP_<n>), emptied on pack and added again at the next deployment, never destroyed: fixes the ghost FARPs and the AI cow blowing up on take-off (evening server run). Stock guard: every cow FARP re-synced every 10 s and on each birth; a count that went up (VMCT's GRASS refill) is put back, foreign weapons removed, FARPs of packed cows emptied.
• Settings fatCow*, catalogue 2.3.0 (shape + oracle), EN/FR docs (pilot + mission maker), FR/ES/KO translations (proposal for review).
• Small changes to the crate system: CTLDCrate.canBeUnpacked is false for a cow crate; getLoadedCrateWeight and _respawnStatic use metadata.massKg (a part-used cow crate weighs what it still holds); CTLDCrateManager:registerDescriptor and :loadIntoHold.

Test plan

• busted (local runner): 1417 passing; the only failure is the local runner's missing assert.truthy, as on develop
• ctld-tools pytest green; built CTLD.lua loads (smoke)
• Live, single player: ticket 01 spike (Zip)
• Live, Privé 1 (Zip as a client): piloted cow deployed near Akrotiri, Apache refuelled and rearmed
• Live, Privé 1, evening run with the squadron (v3): findings 1-6 in ticket 06, fixed here
• Live: ticket 06 part C (lot 1 fixes, Russian loadouts, warehouse item names to measure)
• pr-code-review on this PR before merge

Backlog: .backlog/FEAT-FAT-COW/ (PRD, tickets 01-06).

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