Source: world-of-ru

Hello everyone,

as you probably know, in patch 9.3, KV-1S is going to be split into KV-85. Let’s have a look at how KV-85 will fare compared to the old KV-1S (data for KV-85 come from a current supertest leak). For comparison, I am using Tank Inspector data (100 percent crew and such).

- the top gun remains the 122mm D-2-5
- DPM nerfed from 1525 to 1220
- reload time nerfed from 15,34 secs to 19,17 secs
- ROF nerfed from 3,91 to 3,13
- gun accuracy nerfed from 0,441 to 0,46
- aim time nerfed from 3,26 to 3,45
- accuracy spread after turning turret nerfed by cca 10 percent, various (quite strong) accuracy on the move nerfs, but the accuracy while moving maximum speed without turning was actually buffed somewhat, so we’ll see how exactly will this behave
- depression nerfed from -8/+25 to -3/+20
- weight increased from 43,97 to 46,5 tons
- the engine power remained the same, but hp/t got nerfed from 13,6 to 12,9
- forward/reverse maximum speed nerfed from 43/11 to 34/14
- terrain passability on soft terrain got actually buffed a bit, the others remain the same
- viewrange buffed from 330 to 340

Thanks to Shawn M. from South Africa (damn, nice to have readers even in Africa) :)

Here’s what happened according to Shawn and local news. This tank was transported on a rig, driven by a female driver (*insert generic sexist joke about women driving*), doing promotion tests in Van Reenen’s Pass. The combined weight of the truck, trailer and the Olifant tank you can see on the picture was allegedly as high as 105 tons. The driver was a newbie – she was going down the hill, when she shifted gears, which is something you don’t do in a 100 ton vehicle going down the hill. She panicked and slammed the brakes, the breaks immediately burned and the rig went into a slide, ending in a ditch. During the slide, the tank slipped off the trailer, did a barrel roll and ended up in the ditch as well. To complete the humiliation, the army could not recover the tank and they had to call a civil contractor for the job.

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Hello everyone,

you already probably know about the Tank Inspector software, a really good model viewer combined with a data sheet for each vehicle in the game. Very nice for leaking supertest info checking the tanks out, especially their armor models.

It’s Chinese creators haven’t ceased to develop new versions, that is known, but what you probably don’t know is that they are currently working on an upgraded Tank Inspector Pro version, with more functions. This is how its interface will look (fully customizable using plugins).

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Thanks to Ronineter for this one!

Hello everyone,

for those, who… like this sort of thing, a new episode of Girls und Panzer, this time with Italian tanks. And English subtitles.

http://kissanime.com/Anime/Girls-und-Panzer-Kore-ga-Hontou-no-Anzio-sen-Desu/Episode?id=71023

Hello everyone,

today, we are going to try to imagine, what the gamplay of wheeled vehicles and halftracks would look like and whether it makes any sense implementing them in the game.

One of the main issues with the cars and halftracks is that for a class of vehicles, they do not reach high enough, when it comes to tiers. The reason for this is that for all their firepower, the halftracks are very fragile vehicles and in game terms, they would roughly equal an unarmored Waffenträger – only worse: halftrack suspension does not have the terrain passability of a tank, nor it has its stability.

Gun-armed halftracks were in most cases stopgap or desperate measures to bring more anti-tank guns to bear (or to provide mobility for some infantry support guns for a low price yet with sufficient terrain passability). These vehicles were not fast in particular and often the limited stability of the chassis allowed for only a limited firing arc of the gun (to be fair, the lighter tank destroyers suffered from the same issues). The armor of a halftrack is, as you probably already figured out, negligible. A 20mm gunshield here, a 10mm armored plate there, any protection these vehicles offered was mostly against infantry weapons fire (and sometimes not even that). As I mentioned above, this is the same issue that the German tracked Waffenträgers suffered from, but, as we can see with the case of for example Waffenträger Rheinmetall-Borsig, it can work very well. The halftrack design is also relatively more compact. Basically, the halftracks (by their very nature) live and die by their guns and as such, they most likely are to end on tier 8 (the largest AT gun that I know of on a halftrack chassis was the 88mm L/71, but that was an extreme case). A typical case is here: this is the 88mm FlaK on a halftrack.

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Part 1: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/07/18/world-of-tanks-client-analysis/

Hello everyone,

Mr.Tiemo Jung is back with his analysis of the World of Tanks client. This time, he’ll be analyzing…

Battle Mode Rendering

(SS: the article is in its original form, I just fixed some typos)

This part will cover the battle mode rendering. The rendering is very similar to the hangar mode, so I will mostly focus on the differences to the hangar mode.

Data Streaming

The engine is almost constantly streaming vertex, index and texture data. It is mostly parts of the map and objects on the map (houses, fences, etc). The streaming system suffers from the same resource management problems outlined in the hangar rendering part. They allocate the required memory at the beginning of each frame and copy the data into it, and use it some frames later. Allocating resources on each frame results in unpredictable frame timings and sometimes stutters, especially if the data source (disc where wot resides) is slow, the copy operation blocks all calls until it’s finished.

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Hello everyone,

recently, Storm admitted that Wargaming is considering wheeled vehicles and halftracks  for World of Tanks. He however did mention that a significant obstacle in their implementation is the fear that these vehicles would not be very popular. Let’s have a look at what the popularity of this type of vehicles might be influenced by.

There are two large influences on the popularity of the vehicle: looks and gameplay. This part will focus on the looks, to, you know, lure you towards the idea, because I genuinely think that some of the armored cars and halftracks are really, really good looking.

Appearance sells.

That is not to be contested, it is logical enough. You wouldn’t eat food that looks like shit no matter how good it tastes (well, at least most people wouldn’t) for example. World of Tanks vehicles are actually no different. Some tanks look so ugly/ridiculous they are almost “cult” vehicles (AMX40), others are just really, really bland. What I am trying to say, in order to lure people to play the entirely new class of vehicles, they have to be at least attractive.

Most people imagine armored cars like this:

And you would be right. This is the Soviet BA-20 armored car and we’ll get to that one later. But that’s of course not all there is. Armored cars and halftracks can be sexy! Check this bad boy right here:

This is the T-13 Hornet B proposal, fitted with a 75mm gun. An American 8-wheel armored car, powered by a 265hp engine (for 7,5 tons, not bad). I don’t know about you, but I think this looks sexy as hell. A prototype was actually made (without the 75mm gun) and it could go as fast as 90 km/h.

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