Hello everyone,

yesterday, I made a post about the light variant of the T-54 based on info Slakrrr from US forums found. I proposed this vehicle to become a tier 8 light tank in the post and the same question was asked by someone else too. Actually, a developer replied that WG is aware of this vehicle and is considering it.

Immediately after the article, speculations arose whether this tank can become Soviet tier 8 premium (possibly replacing somehow the ill-fated T-44-85). Let’s compare it a bit with other tier 8 premiums.

Now, we will be working with following premises:

- Type 59 as a premium tank is overpowered
- T-34-3 as a premium tank is fine
- T-44 as a regular tier 8 tank is fine

First, let’s compare it with the Type 59, to make sure it wouldn’t be OP immediately.

Armor

Upper frontal plate of Type 59 is 100mm thick at 60 degrees, T-54 (49) has 80mm at 60 degrees
Lower frontal plate of Type 59 is 100mm thick at 55 degrees, T-54 (49) has 80mm at 55 degrees
Turret front of Type 59 is 200mm, T-54 (49) has 180mm

In practically all the armor aspects, T-54 (49) is inferior. So far so good. T-44 has 90mm hull armor (under the same angle, eg. better), but it has weaker turret – significantly. But then, that is not that big a problem, since the T-54-3 also has that typical Chinese/Soviet round hardened turret (with 190mm frontal turret armor no less). I’d say armor-wise it fits.

Continue reading →

Source: wot-news.com

Hello everyone,

two cinematic clips of the Hidden Village map (that cam in 8.10) appeared on wot-news. Most players have probably seen the map, but even so, these clips are very well made, so I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Continue reading →

Source: narod2.ru via Slakrrr (US forums)

Hello everyone,

what we have here is a quite interesting thing. Some of you (with very good memory) might remember one interview with SerB for the Goha.ru portal from more than two years ago (you can check it here), where – while discussing potential light tanks – he mentioned an ultra-lightweight variant of the T-54 tank a potential hightier candidate for World of Tanks. I’ve seen this interview before several times, but I honestly never found anything about this special T-54 variant, until it showed up on US forums today. It’s pretty interesting actually. Here’s what we know about it.

The article states that there was some testing of various types of tracks for T-54 tanks around 1949. At the same time, in May 1945, the design bureau of Plant No.183 (Kharkov) designed a light variant of the T-54 tank with improved terrain passability compared to the production T-54 model. This light variant could serve during special operations, where passability, speed and agility were needed more than superior armor protection. In order to achieve that, this light variant had wider tracks (580mm).

Continue reading →

Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/2923103.html

Hello everyone,

an interesting post appeared on RU forums – did you know that Ensk might have been partially modelled after Minsk? I sure didn’t. LJ user yozas_gubka makes a number of interesting comparisons between Ensk buildings and those really existing in the home city of Wargaming, Minsk. He admits that although the map developers might have drawn their inspiration from generic Soviet-type architecture, some buildings in Minsk come very close to what we can see in Ensk. Check this out:

This building exists in Ensk…

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

today, we are going to have a look at another tank, that is currently not available on the EU server, the A-32 – and we will attempt to answer the question: are we missing something, or it’s not worth thinking over?

A-32 is a medium tier 4 tank. According to World of Tanks wikipedia, it was a part of the light pre-order package, but even though I play the game practically ever since it came live, I don’t remember seeing a single such vehicle in battle. According to WoT Wiki, there are like 8000 of these vehicles on EU server in total, but few of them are played, you’d be very lucky to see one – and there’s a reason for that. It’s worth noting that for a while, A-32 was classified as a light tank, before moved to the medium class.

Continue reading →

The lack of air superiority became quite a problem for the German army in both World Wars.
Very often you will hear people spouting about “invincible Tigers only defeated by enemy airplanes”, which of course was only somewhat true until the Soviets started fielding 122 and 152mm self propelled guns, not to mention the IS series, while British and Americans also put 76mm high velocity cannons to good use on the other side.

The Germans of course were aware of the consequences of loosing air superiority and developed several solutions, of which we will cover only the ones based on tank hulls, ranging from sensible battlefield modifications to daring paper tanks that never reached the battlefield, using mainly “Gepard” by Spielberger and “Panzer Tracts 20-2” by Jentz & Doyle.

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

after Wargaming discovering a Japanese hobby kit company uses the Failowe model for their kits, they weren’t happy. However, this is not the only case. Check this out (this was submitted by Vladimir_Lemon). Mobile game Tank War 2013 for Android uses the following picture as its logo:

Looks familiar? Let me give you a hint:

It is clear that World of Tanks is a very popular concept and various copycats are trying to use this to their advantage. I am sure black helicopters were already dispatched Wargaming lawyers will not be happy. Or maybe they will – depends on whether they get paid by the case or by the hour.

Hello everyone,

so, here’s a thought. Yesterday, XZ linked me this War Thunder beta video. No, don’t worry, I won’t bash War Thunder (in fact I find the graphic very, very good and it will take World of Tanks a while to catch up) and yes, I do know this is just closed beta. Just watch it.

Well as you can see, War Thunder will have flippable tanks. Some time ago, Storm announced that World of Tanks will have this too, which got me thinking: do we REALLY need this one?

It’s obvious War Thunder influenced Wargaming plans more or less – even Storm admitted so. Some things it has good, some thing it has bad, but it does have influence. I am not sure that flippable tanks is something that was War Thunder inspired (I doubt that, since it was first mentioned a long time ago, when the War Thunder tanks were not even announced), but if it was, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Let’s look at both the advantages and disadvantages of tank flipping.

Continue reading →