as you all well know, the RU251 tank was announced a very long time ago (January 2013!) as the upcoming German tier 8 light tank. It’s been a year and the vehicle is still not there, leaving the German light tanks end with the less-than-popular Aufklärungspanzer Panther.
Now, I made some inquiries regarding the fate of this tank, because this is not the first time this has happened. Basically, Wargaming has been trying to get any info on that vehicle for ages, but it was rebuked several times by German government. This did not only happen with the RU251 by the way – the same thing happened with the Leopard Prototype B, that’s why we don’t have it in the game and that’s why it’s very unlikely this vehicle will become German hightier premium.
As I said, I asked the EU player Madestcat, who made some inquiries.. Don’t ask for details, but he asked here and there and the answer he sent me was this:
Auf Nachfrage habe ich folgende Info erhalten: Der RU 251 steht auch in Trier und wird demnächst restauriert. Aber auch für den RU 251 wird Minsk keine Genehmigung zur Untersuchung erhalten. Es gilt das gleiche Verbot wie für den Leopard Prototyp B. Tut mir Leid. Das deutsche Verteidigungsministerium will nichts mit Kriegsspielen zu tun haben. Ich kann da leider nichts dran ändern.
“Upon inquiry, I recieved the following info: RU251 currently also stands in Trier and will be restored soon. But Minsk will not recieve the permission to research it. It’s the same ban, like for the Leopard Prototype B. I am sorry. German Ministry of Defense wants to have nothing to do with war games. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about that.”
This info corresponds to other info I recieved from other sources. Even Yuri Pasholok noted that the attitude of Germans towards Russian researchers is less than warm currently as it is. Wargaming will either have to do with available photos (there are very few) or should start looking for another candidate…
ever since the entire 9.0 mess with FPS drops and other issues, I kinda dropped World of Tanks, but it got fixed (sort-of), so I decided to try historical battles once again. I mean, I have a 5 perk crew in the most ubiquitous vehicle of all, Panzer IV (and StuG), how hard can it be to get into battle with that? Time to get that 50 percent more credit income for playing Panzer IV in Ardennes!
Well… I play on EU2 server (65k players online at that moment about an hour ago) and…
Yea… literally nobody playing the Ardennes. After a few minutes of wait, there was not a single battle in any vehicle. Oh well, time to switch server. Switched to EU1.
players Rabiesdog and IRSanchez contacted me with a link to their big post made about their trip to military museum in Warsaw (Poland), dedicated to weapons Poland and Polish troops used. The post was excellent (very informative) and with Rabiesdog’s permission, I am going to repost it here (with a bit different formatting). The original post can be found here.
Enjoy!
From here on pics from the Museum and some explanatory text from the info plaquettes.
it’s been a while since the last part, but I hope you haven’t forgotten – it’s time for one of the most interesting parts of the EU tree concept: Sweden.
Hearing about Sweden in connection with computer games always makes me smile – the reason for that is my experience with Warcraft, specifically Frostwhisper server, which was predominantly Scandinavian and “SWE???” equalled to World of Tanks “Siemka kto PL” – it practically became a meme of the server at one point. Make no mistake though – there is nothing funny about Swedish tanks – in fact, using currently known rules for tree creation (“all classes have to end either with a merge, or a tier 10″), Sweden is the only nation in the prospective EU tree, that could actually build a tree of its own, having enough vehicles for each class.
I will be drawing heavily from the work of Renhaxue and sp15 – the first being well-known for digging through Swedish archives on his blog, the latter being the author of the Swedish series on this blog (in case you are interested, click the “History” button, scroll to the bottom of the page, find “Sweden”, the links are all there).
I was a bit reluctant to post about Sweden earlier for four reasons:
- I know only little about tanks
- sp15 is already doing it
- not to steal anyone’s research
- there is SO much stuff and the proposal is quite complex
So, I am going to give you an overview of what the proposed Swedish branch (or more like a tree) is about and will either link you to details, or sp15 will just get to them eventually in the Swedish series on FTR.
This is the draft of the Swedish tree, as proposed by sp15.
Yea, there’s a lot of stuff. Columns from left to right: heavies, meds, lights/meds, tank destroyers, tank destroyers, artillery. Let’s start with the easy stuff.
Thanks to Looser78V for posting this, I kinda missed it. At first I thought “that has to be the ugliest animation I’ve ever seen”, but it’s kinda funny. Guess who the bald guy is…
Interested in catching bots? Download the Bot Hunter mod (version for 9.0).
- the vision and spotting points on a turret are identical (SS: as in, the points that get checked for spotting and the points, that spot on turrets are located on identical places)
Otherwise nothing much today… ah well, it’s Sunday anyway.
Russian portal Kanobu.ru made an interesting survey. The post author, Sergei Kolokolnikov, compared, how friendly is the community of various online games towards newbies (not to mix that term up with noobs!) – and he also included World of Tanks in the survey. This survey is “tainted” a bit by the fact that as far as I know, some games have exclusive Russian servers (WoT), some games are almost exclusively Russian overall (Warface) and some games have mixed audience. Either way, here’s how the author considers the communities:
DOTA 2 – some swearing, as you progress, there are less and less “gentlemen”.
Friendliness score: 6/10
Slovak player Elnorka was kind enough to share some pictures from his trip to Piešťany military museum in Slovakia, which focuses on vehicles, used by the Czechoslovak army. I think some are pretty interesting.
Also, thank you all for sending me many, many photos – from Munster, Overloon, Latrun, Saumur and others. I will post them all eventually.
T-72 model – a military school item for teaching the soldiers about tank construction
