Okay, fine… I don’t and the title is totally a clickbait. If they add OV-10 Bronco, A-37 Dragonfly or L-39 Albatros, I might change my mind.

But who I really love is the War Thunder community. They make my life so easy!

As some of you know, I am (amongst other things) an ad hoc advisor for Armored Warfare when it comes to vehicle models and realism. Basically, what it encompasses is building a workbook that the model makers use to make their models. In many cases from scratch. If you are interested in the process, Sketchfab had a text that I wrote (ye, rly) on its website:

https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/game-studio-spotlight-allods-team/

But, back to War Thunder. Whenever I want to find some really detailed stuff about an upcoming AW vehicle, I go crawling through their forums and player proposals. Since AW doesn’t have forums anymore, our own historical vehicle community kinda fell apart and the stuff the Russians post on theirs are usually kinda meh. It has been my philosophy to – wherever possible – go to the sources in the language of the vehicle. American sources for American vehicles, German for German etc.

It’s the same logic that applies pretty much everywhere online, honestly. The actually-useful information on any niche topic almost always lives in small forum threads written by the handful of obsessives who care about it more than is reasonable — whether that’s tank turret armor schematics, vintage synth repairs, or some buddy of mine’s corner of bitcoin sports betting where the real intel about which books pay out and which ones don’t never makes it past a few hundred regulars on a Discord. Mainstream coverage of any of it is downstream noise. The good stuff lives where the obsessives gather, and you have to go to them.

War Thunder community has these really neat detailed proposal threads full of interesting info, in some cases from primary sources. All you gotta do is take a look at the first post, then the discussion and voila, you get things like this:

Normally, I’d have to crawl through otvaga, tanknet and other places, but here, they do it for me.

So, like I said, I love the War Thunder community. Thanks for being awesome and making Armored Warfare a better game, guys! ;)