Well, interesting but of somewhat limited usefulness so far. I could not get the game to recognize/show any changes that I made to the file during the current game session (even when I saved the changes to the file in notepad while alt-tabbed out from the game). The only way I could get the changes to show up was to save/exit the game to the menu (using the same name and saving over my same saved game), and then saving the changes to the file in notepad. Then, when I reloaded that saved game, hitting the "k" key showed the updated log file changes.
I didn't get a chance to sink anything or do anything in game that would cause the game to create another log entry on its own, so I'm not sure what would happen in that case. However, I suspect that it would cause problems since the game would change the log file with that new entry, but the copy you had open in notepad wouldn't have the game's changes but would have your own different changes, and things would get screwed up when you saved down from notepad after saving/exiting the game - looks like you'd probably have to do some complicated copy/pasting from your notepad copy into the game's newly-saved copy in order to capture both the game's automatic entries and your own manual ones.
It might be better/easier just to keep a scratch file open in notepad into which you could just alt-tab out and enter your manual diary entries in the correct basic format, without trying to edit the real log file during the game, and then just copy/paste (and number accordingly) those manual entries into the game's real log file after you finish your gaming session and save/exit. You wouldn't get to see those entries in the log in game during the session in which you make them, but they'd at least be there for the next and all subsequent sessions. I'll have to test this on one of my trash campaigns so I can end my patrol and see what happens (i.e., if anything blows up) when SH3 Commander tries to deal with the altered log file to create personnel files or whatever it does with these logs after a patrol.
At least this indicates that there are some possibilities here. Hopefully, JScones or someone will be able to come up with an elegant way of making this work
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