Hello everyone,

this is a followup post to the Kubinka Maus situation, which is currently developing and it’s not closed yet. Today, yet another post appeared on official Kubinka web pages:

The post says following things:

- the restoration of Maus will proceed as planned (not as a part of any anniversary) in cooperation with company Wargaming
- Kubinka and Wargaming are “strategic partners and loyal friends, working together to save and popularize historical heritage of the Motherland”

(and that some official statement is to be issued in print or something)

Either way, I contacted a reliable source in Wargaming RU. What I got told about the background of the story and how it happened is the following:

It all started when some retarded sensationalist Russian newspaper printed an article, saying that Kubinka along with Wargaming will be restoring a fascist German tank as a part of the Day of Victory anniversary, which is not patriotic. Now, to understand what this means for Kubinka, you have to know two things:

- as we all know, Russia is – when it comes to press and its effects – not a free country, press rules are quite harsh and for example there is a new law (or regulation), that forces bloggers (!) with blogs above certain amount of visits per day (3000 I think) to register (!!!) – their content is reviewed and they can be fined for “slanderous info”, anti-patriotic stuff and such.

- Kubinka is purely government funded and controlled and with current moods, being associated with anything even remotely pro-fascist could have very real and nasty consequences, hence the “we are patriots” kneejerk

At that point, Kubinka employees panicked, closed the VK group and started deleting all the info from their portal about Kubinka cooperating with Wargaming (for example the original Maus announcement, it got deleted). Obviously, since we have Google cache, they failed, which made them panic even more. To make matters worse, one of the employees, who really dislikes Wargaming (but is a big fan of War Thunder) saw an opportunity to blow off some steam against Wargaming and the result was that angry rant (which got posted without his boss’ knowledge) plus the peaked patriotic tone, which comes out of fear of being associated with anything “fascist” in any way.

At this moment, Wargaming PR and law department are working to calm the situation down and to reach an agreement between both sides.

Hello everyone,

this info comes from Dom1n’s blog, thanks Dom1n for sending it to me. These features were found by player Bigoss5.

So, for example, there is a “horns” interface, hiden in the game – probably a leftover from the time when horns (as in, honking) were still planned. Judging from the menu, the horns were supposed to be customizeable – you can see how well that might have ended (burping, nazi songs, screaming etc.)

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Hello everyone,

this is actually pretty entertaining. Looks like things will be not as “hot” with the Maus restoration as Wargaming would have the world believe. At first, I ran into this post in the LJ community, reprinting the Kubinka Museum VK status.

For those who do not know – VK means “Vkontakte”, it’s basically a Russian Facebook service, a social network largely used in the CIS. Kubinka has a webpage there and as you can see, it’s quite popular (over 6000 “likes”). Yesterday, a status appeared on the webpage (by then it was still accessible to outsiders and not a “closed group”, you can see that in google cache):

It says:

“Central Museum of Armored Vehicles” of the Ministry of Defense of Russian Federation officially states, that the information of the restoration works on the tank “Maus”, which appeared in various mass media, is not true. It’s a perspective project, which is in the state of negotiations and approval. The Museum staff is outraged by the insolence, ignorance and absolute lack of patriotism of the employees of the aforementioned mass media.

The Museum will never prioritize the restoration of the German tank “Maus”, or any foreign tank to any of the Russian military anniversaries, let alone the Day of Victory celebration, which is the most important celebration for us. The restoration of the German tank is not “a great honor for us” as the journalists write, but a simple planned work. Restoration works on this projects, if they happen at all, will be carried out following the order of work.

Currently, the Museum, exclusively on its own, restores the legendary Soviet tank T-35 to be ready for the 70th Anniversary of the Great Victory, for which we are rightfully proud.

Furthermore, the information about our exclusive partnership with company Wargaming is not true. An “exclusive” partnership with any organization is out of the question, as the Museum is a public institution, that in the past cooperated and always will cooperate with all organizations and institution for the good of our Motherland within the framework of joint projects and programs, aimed at the Museum development, patriotic education and prevention of historical facts falsification.

With kind regards
Administration of the Museum”

This harsh text is apparently a reaction on earlier news articles (here for example), bombastically claiming the exclusive partnership of Kubinka with Wargaming. Bravo, WG PR department!

Shortly after this post, the group was closed for public (since this angry post got widely reposted on Russian forums and blogs) with one last message:

“Dear friends, the Museum is asking for your help with maximal spreading of the news, posted below (SS: the angry post). Thanks to the companies, that sponsor the spread of false information in mass media, the Museum loses its credibility and respect of its visitors and of all those, who follow our work. Thanks in advance! With kind regards, the group administration”

Looks like the future of the Maus restoration future is as gloomy as the proverbial Teutonic genius… if it will happen at all.

Thanks to Jose T. for this one – check this stuff out, this is probably the most hilarious theft of WoT material I have ever seen. Here’s a FB page of “Tank Storm” – presumably some mobile tank game. The logo on the page itself… I think I’ve seen that before…

But wait, it gets better. The uppermost page status:

Uhhhhh Hydra? Shield? I think I’ve seen that before somewhere… and the game trailer?

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Source: ČT News (via P.Linhart, thank you)

Hello everyone,

do you know what happens to the T-55 tanks, when they are phased out? Sure, they can be scrapped, but they can be also used in heavy industry. Steelworks in Ostrava, Czech Republic (belonging to the Arcelor Mittal company), used obsolete T-55 tanks as bulldozers to remove the slag from under the steel furnaces.

Basically, the company bought the obsolete training T-55 tanks from the army and the Czech workers then heavily modified them by adding the “home-made” bulldozer blade, the blade mount (the large thing on the front of the tank), modifying the cabin to withstand the heat (installing heat protection, thicker glass) and adding new filters to the engine, because the environment is very dusty.

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

an interesting thread came up on EU forums and it might theoretically help some of you to increase FPS/reduce lags. EU player Lord_Percy_Percy (why do I have the feeling it’s some sort of Blackadder reference?) made a log of the network, CPU and hard drive activity during his lags on his computer (dual core i5 pc with 4GB RAM) using Sysinternals Process Explorer.

He writes about it (edited the typos):

The game froze on the large single spike and the sequence of six. Notice the massive increase in IO and processor power. And what was going on when this happened? A child process of wot.exe called AWESOMIUM.EXE fired up and hogged the resources. Note the reduction in processing power when I quit the game to check the systems resources log.

Interesting, is it not? It seems to support the theory some people were posting and which I said before – “Awesomium” can screw up you running World of Tanks (further hint at that direction is the information from one of the WG EU staffmembers, who allegedly wants to include this in his report for Minsk). For those who don’t know – Awesomium a browser interface, used in World of Tanks to display certain tooltips and such – whether that’s the only thing it is used for, god knows.

Fortunately, it can also be safely deleted or moved – go to your World of Tanks folder and in sub-folder /res/, you will find the “Awesomium” directory. Move it somewhere else or delete it, the game will still run without it (I did it myself). I suggest you keep the folder stored somewhere else however, as the patch system (launcher) could (when a new patch comes) detect its absence as compromised client integrity and start downloading the client over again, which is probably not something you want.

Author: sp15 (US server)

Part I: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/03/07/swedish-tanks-part-i-strv-m21-29/
Part II: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/03/12/swedish-tanks-part-ii-strv-m31-strv-fm31/
Part III: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/03/15/swedish-tanks-part-iii-landsverk-l-100-and-l-120/
Part IV: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/03/21/swedish-tanks-part-iv-landsverk-l-60/
Part V: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/03/27/swedish-tanks-part-v-strv-m37-and-strv-m41/
Part VI: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/04/08/swedish-tanks-part-vi-sav-m43/
Part VII: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/04/18/swedish-tanks-part-vii-strv-m42/
Part VIII: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/05/08/swedish-tanks-part-viii-pvkv-m43/

By 1944, Sweden had access to a fairly large, but mostly outdated tank force. Most of the tanks in the Swedish army were 10 ton light tanks and the new Strv m/42 medium tank was already becoming obsolete. Therefore, it was decided to start a new series of projects to replace the aging Swedish tanks.

Besides the plans for upgunning the Strv m/42 with a 75mm autoloader and a 10,5cm TD based on the Strv m/42, there were also plans for two new vehicles in the 30 ton range. The first one was a new medium tank, that was to be further development of the Strv m/42, with a long 75mm gun and a more powerful engine, the vehicle was also meant to be wider and to have an overall lower height.
The 2nd project was to be a new tank destroyer, that would be similar to the Pvkv m/43 but with much heavier armament. The vehicle was to carry a modified version of the 10,5cm L/50 anti-aircraft gun, and the frontal armor was to be “especially thick”.

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Hello everyone,

it’s past midnight and as I promised, I bring you the second randomly chosen winner of a Super Pershing, this time from the group that “liked” the FTR FB page after the event announcement. And without further ado, it’s…

Mateusz Bierka

Congratulations! Please, you (and the Round 1 winner) contact me via PM at the FTR FB with your username and server to claim your prize! I sent you a “password” via PM to your FB account, so please check your “Other folder” as well.

This concludes the event. For those who didn’t win – thanks for participating, but you better keep FTR page “liked”, because next month, a 1 year FTR anniversary is coming and you wouldn’t want to miss that now… would you? :)

Have a good night all of you (or evening, or day, or morning, depending on your timezone).