It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these! Here’s a link to the previous edition.

Q: I found these on EnglishRussia, and there is a KV-2 turret on the IS chassis. Can you tell me more about this?

A: It is a movie prop, and one of dubious quality at that. If you look further, you can see “KV-1″ tanks that won’t fool even a casual observer. For instance, their guns are clearly immobile.

Q: Is there some pattern to gun calibers? Several nations seem to use the same ones, 20 mm, 37 mm, 75/76 mm, 105 mm, etc. 

A: A lot of gun calibers are in multiples of inches. 37 mm is about 1.5 inches, 76 mm (76.2 mm) is 3 inches, 152 (152.4 mm) is 6 inches. Doubling your shell’s diameter has an easy to calculate effect on its vital properties, such as weight. This lets an engineer get close to the desired performance, in theory. Of course, as he starts fine-tuning the performance, the diameter will change, so it won’t be exactly the multiple of an inch anymore. As modelling methods improved, the need to take old shells as reference ended, and modern shell designers don’t have to start with multiples of an old thing. Drastically different modern ammunition design doesn’t help either.

Q: I am curious about the Object 770. It was designed in 1957, and falls within the WoT time period. Why did its development end, and can it appear in WoT?

A: A 130 mm gun that penetrated 280 mm at 1000 meters, with a semi-automated loading mechanism providing up to 7 RPM, 138 mm front hull armour at 60 degrees, 290 mm of turret armour at 30 degrees, a 1000 hp engine at 55 tons (18.2 hp/ton puts it in the same range as the T-54)? Way too rich for WoT, given what the inferior IS-7 went through to make it in. Couple that with an optical rangefinder and dual plane stabilizer (hello, fantastic gun handling!), and the fate of the tank for WoT is sealed.
As for its development, it was a radically new heavy tank design, in an era where heavy tanks were on their way out. Maybe intelligence whispering about powerful enemy tanks and guns on the horizon like in the late 1930s could have saved the project, but in the 1950s, there was no such enemy, no such guns, and no such tanks.

Q: Were there rival designs to the T-34, and could any of them fit into the Soviet tech tree as a tier 5 medium?

A: There were two tanks that could be described as rival designs of the T-34: the A-20 and T-34M. The old gun, thin armour,and unnecessary convertible drive made the former inferior (as reflected in WoT’s tiering system). The many design improvement of the T-34M made it a vastly superior tank for reasons that are not reflected in WoT, but the superiority is clear: the T-34 was scheduled to end production in 1941, and the T-34M would take its place. The new tank design was so promising that engineers rushed to work on that instead of the “old news” T-34, to the point that Stalin had to personally intervene to get them off the fancy new stuff and back on a tank that actually existed in metal and could fight off the hordes of fascists currently pouring over the border.

The A-43 could be a tier 5 (and would be a tier 5 without science fiction stats on that AA gun), but this is WoT, so let’s get creative! A very long time ago, I did a Buff My Tank for the T-28 and mentioned a number of buffs, not even including the return of the 85 mm gun that the T-28 used to have back in the day that tiers 4 through 10 occupied the same matchmaker tier. Since we need a whole new tank, let’s take the T-29, a T-28 with a Christie suspension (that Koshkin, the T-34′s creator, also worked on). The speed would be a little higher than on the T-34 (the T-29-4 could reach 60 kph on tracks). The armour would be much less, but you could increase it up to 80 mm from the T-28E for balance purposes (still more historical than the WTE-100). The result would be a faster tank that trades armour for speed and the mad DPM of the T-34′s 57 mm ZiS-4 for increased alpha. It could be interesting to play.

Q: Do you know anything about the 57 mm gun on the KV-1?

A: GABTU’s wishlist for the KV includes only bigger 76 mm guns. Various scattered mentions in sources, reputable or otherwise, include vague, non-committal statements like “we should put a better anti-tank gun on the KV”, but I have yet to see a definite statement of association between the two, aside from some alternatively gifted authors.

That’s it for this time! Send more questions to tankarchives@gmail.com, and I will answer them!