@Casuir
I've unpacked the cas's in pack.dat and the game won't run
with these alone using the no_animdb = true switch that Caliban
told us about. The jpg of his unpacked /animations directory showed
evt files present so I'm wondering if this is required but I don't know
this. We know that skeleton.dat ISN'T unpacked on his system because
he didn't find any of the type names present for any file extension.

Not really a big problem because its easy to repack the cas's after
modifying them, it's more of a "if it can be done then try doing it" thing.
GrumpyOldMan suspects that the no_animdb switch may not be present
in the retail version and that could very likely be the case.

Missed your post re strat_navy and fs_camel. These are the handles
or type names for different groups of animations. They extract out of
skeleton.dat just like the cas's come out of the pack but they don't
seemed to be used that way. That's why I asked for the experiment
to be done, to see if they were really filenames or just handles like
GrumpyOldMan thought. (I picked those two because the corresponding
cas's aren't named that way, so we could avoid a bunch of false hits
to have to sort through.)

Thanks for digging up the old post by Jerome, there's some food for
thought there. I'll to dig again with this new info.