Hello everyone,

this one’s on me actually – I made a pretty stupid mistake in the “Wargaming fake tanks” article and I would like to rectify it. I wrote in that article that the Jagdtiger with 128mm L/61 is a fake, because the gun was fitted in an enlarged superstructure and wouldn’t fit the regular casemate. That is not the truth – I made a mistake by confusing the 128mm L/61 and L/66. Here’s the deal.

This is the regular Jagdtiger with its original 128mm L/55 gun (not counting the 88m L/71 variant):

Sometimes however, you hear about “Porsche Jagdtiger” – this was not some different proposal by Ferdinand Porsche however, it simply was a regular Jagdtiger with experimentally mounted Porsche suspension. This is how it looked (source: Spielberger):

The Porsche suspension for the Jagdtiger was an effort to reduce the man-hours, needed to actually build a Jagdtiger. According to Spielberger, ten vehicles were fitted with this suspension and successfully tested. The goal of reducing the price and man-hours was reached: the classic Henschel suspension costed 866.000,- RM and it took 360 man-hours to prepare the hull for it. The Porsche system costed 462.000,- RM, it took only 140 man-hours to complete and it was lighter too. The results of this project were satisfactory and it’s possible that in the future, more Jagdtigers would be fitted with the Porsche system, but the end of the war prevented that. Other than the suspension however, there was no difference between “Henschel Jagdtiger” and “Porsche Jagdtiger”

Either way, the 128mm L/61 gun was never intended for the Jagdtiger, so that setup in game is fictional (I was right). I was wrong however with the casemate part, because I thought it was intended for the L/61. There was a project to arm the Jagdtiger with a 128mm L/66 gun that looked like this:

This was proposed by Krupp in November 1944, the project was refused in January 1945 as unrealistic. Basically, the gun would use the same mount as the L/55 variant, only it could not be mounted as such – it would have to be retracted before moving the vehicle, because it was too long and the Jagdtiger wouldn’t be able to move with it sticking out like that. Therefore, before moving the vehicle, it would have to be moved backwards and – vice versa – it would take time to prepare the vehicle for firing, because it would have to stop and then the crew would have to shift the gun forwards, negating Jagdtiger’s advantage as a tank destroyer – Wa Prüf 6 in fact reclassified such a vehicle as heavy artillery. It’s worth noting that even this long gun kept decent traverse (10 degrees to each side).

So, in short:

- Porsche Jagdtiger – only suspension is different
- 128mm L/61 Jagdtiger is fake
- 128mm L/66 Jagdtiger existed (see above)

Hello everyone,

what, you thought Wargaming EU would get better with the amount of fails in 2014? Oh come on, you, you should know better :) Our batch of fail for today comes from the German community.

The Teleportation contest (which is common for all the language sections as far as I remember) had incorrect rules in German: instead of making pictures with one tank OR an airplane, the German contest said “AND”, so basically until today morning, all the German submissions were invalid. No rewards for you, Germans!

Here’s their staffmember saying “It was a translation mistake, I am sorry” (I am sure he is. right until tomorrow when they do it again).

Another German competition was a huge fail too. The players were asked to submit their replays or something – only, the submitting did not work and the competition got cancelled as a result yesterday. Apparently the competition prize pool was “saved”, so players will have a chance to win a double prize next time.

How terrible…

Hello everyone,

some time ago, I opened up a poll with the question, whether you want skill MM in random battles or not. To explain, the thing generally referred to as “skill MM” is a principle where battles are put together not only with players with suitable tanks, but also with players of the same skill level. The result was as follows:

42 percent of people do not want this at all, 58 percent do. Of the 58 percent, 41 percent of players wants to have this based on your personal rating and only 17 percent wants it based on winrate.

So much for the poll (7954 votes cast). Well… it was a bit pointless poll, because the cold hard truth is that it is almost certain skill MM will not appear in random battles (and by almost certain I mean 99,9 percent chance). Both Storm and SerB were clear about this matter and as far as we know, their position has not changed even a little. Personally, I was always against skill MM and I there are numerous reasons for that (for example, mixing noobs with noobs does not make anyone learn anything), but the thing that occured to me a day ago when I was watching my own stats is: how exactly do you define a good player?

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Hello everyone,

today, we are going to have a look at the fake vehicles in World of Tanks. Please note that by a “fake vehicle”, I don’t necesserily mean various unhistorical configurations (there are TONS of those), but I will mention them too briefly.

The problem with World of Tanks is that it is the victim of its own success in a way. There can be no doubt that it was World of Tanks, that revived the interest in armor in general audience, not just the usual armchair generals, historians, tank enthusiasts etc. Suddenly, tanks are mainstream and with that comes the fact that given how World of Tanks was advertised as a “historical” and “realistic” game (just look at the flashback trailer from this year, you know, the one with unhistorical FV215b), players take the game also as an “encyclopedia” of sorts and take the vehicles in it as real.

In this sense, Wargaming sends a mixed message – some vehicles are practically ultra-historical, down to the precise armor angles and thicknesses (IS-3 is very historical), others are complete fakes, but since WG advertised the game as “realistic”, a lot of people believe these vehicles were real and that is possibly the thing I find I find most annoying about Wargaming: promoting fakes.

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Hello everyone,

just quick heads-up for you:

This Friday (10.1.2014) at 20:00 CET, I’ll be a guest at Rita’s stream (she’s featured now on FTR as the resident streamer, you can check her stream out by clicking the STREAM button in the right part of the FTR bar below the logo).

I will be answering questions about the game and tanks overall to my best knowledge (and that which I cannot answer I will attempt to find out). You will be able to ask the questions in the stream chat, Rita will read the chat, pick your questions and read them to me. It will not be a short show, so I am sure there will be plent of time to ask everything you’d like to know.

Please note that since I am not a WG staff member, the answers for you will not be “official” per se, but I will be using official WG sources, such as Storm’s posts and others to find the answers for you. I hope to hear from you on her stream then :)

PS: The comments to this post are locked, as this is simply an announcement

Hello everyone,

usually posting about WG fails is not very entertaining, but this time, I had a pretty good laugh :) So, there is this competition, where you were supposed to fill the crossword with aircraft words. Pretty neat, huh?

Only they posted the crossword file already filled with solution and all. Brilliant. As a result, the competition was cancelled immediately.

Great job, guys! :)

Hello everyone,

those of you, who like to read about tank history probably know how much bullshit info and fake tanks are there around. This is something that actually bothers me, because there are some myths, that get repeated over and over (some of the most annoying myths being referring to the Jagdpanzer 38t as “Hetzer”, the crap about Shermans burning all over the place and other bullshit by Belton Cooper and many others).

A special category of tank myths however belongs to fake tanks, that were never built or even projected. In this category belongs the myth that Löwe or Bär had working prototypes (they didn’t) and all sorts of German-related bullshit, made up by Wehraboos, modellers or simply ignorant or confused people (Krokodil, FlakMaus and others). There is one special subcategory of the previous group however: fakes, created intentionally with some purpose in mind. This is the category of Wargaming fake tanks like the 120 ton VK7201, WT E-100, T28 and T28 Prototype and other crap, that makes its way to history sites, because World of Tanks is supposed to be historical. We’ll take about that in next part.

Today however, we are going to have a look at a fake that – if unchecked – could spread and – in worst case – appear historical, the T-60P.

“T-60P” is supposed to be a (possible high-tier) Polish tank. It appeared first in this topic on European forums in the Polish section. Basically, the author (nickname Antonowicz) produced a story, where he claims that his grandfather was working in Polish plant in the 60′s (!) and that he mentioned (!!!) such a project being created as an upgrade to the T-54 by mounting a T-10M turret (!!!) on a T-54 hull. It was supposed to look like this.

Continue reading →

Part 1: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/01/03/the-legion-at-samara/

Ride accross the river, deep and wide…

They almost made it.

Immediately after the arrival of both flanking batallion to Samarskaya Slobodka, the units took all the barges and rafts they had and started their trek accross the river. Night fell upon the land and all that could be heard were silent whispers of the men, organizing the transport – and soft water splashes, as first makeshift boats touched the murky waters of Samarka river. Across the river, the enemy was waiting, hidden in the evening mists.

A part of the 12th Company, led by 2ndLt.Tajbr would go first. They had no paddles, so they used their trench shovels instead. The men were grim and silent, paddling, or clutching their rifles nervously. There was constant danger that the enemy would see them and start firing on the defenseless barges and rafts.

Continue reading →