so, as you can imagine, normally I don’t do this, but I am going to make an exception. The last year’s been hard on us all, but some folks took it exceptionally bad. One of those people is a well-known World of Tanks NA community member Mesotronik. He’s a friend and a good person overall.
Sadly, life has the nasty habit of stabbing you in the bag when you’re not looking. Long story short… he got into some serious trouble both family-wise and health-wise and one of his friends from another project opened a donation drive for him:
It is with immense sadness that I must inform you of something truly tragic. As the Military Experience Museum Facebook page reported, this week, the American Department of Defense, specifically the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM), demilitarization program under the command of one Jeff Garrett, decided it would be a good idea to scrap a dozen invaluable historical artifacts, including a rare MBT-70 prototype and an XM803 prototype.
This already happened. The tanks are gone. All that remains from the MBT-70 prototype is its turret.
The tanks belonged to a now defunct Military Museum in Danburry, Connecticutt and the DoD did not even allow a private military museums (including the abovementioned Military Experience Museum) to buy these old venerable tanks off their hands.
Say what you will about Russians, but at least they value and preserve their history. The question remains, who is responsible for this atrocity? The abovementioned gentleman is, according to comments under the original post, a good start, but if you know who’s responsible directly, do send me an e-mail to fortherecordwot@gmail.com, please.
Let’s make sure the limp-dick shithead gets the attention he deserves.
For more details about the story, please visit the Military Experience Museum Facebook page.
If you are following World of Tanks news, you probably know already that Wargaming is introducing a new premium French tank called AMR-35. In the Wargaming tradition, it’ll probably be a free gift of some sort.
The version they are introducing is called ZT2. The main difference from a “standard” mass-produced one was the APX5 turret with a 25mm autocannon. It’s pretty exotic actually because only about ten of these was ordered between 1935 and 1936. The rest of its story you know already – France lost the war and all of its military stuff (including tanks) went to the Germans, who then mostly used it for training or counter-insurgency because some of the junk was super obsolete.
But, did you know that these little tankettes found themselves in 1945 in Prague of all places? On both sides in fact.
Here’s a little overview:
ZT1 was the basic model with a 7.5mm Chatellerault MG or 13.2mm Hotchkiss MG (167 made between 1936 and 1938)
ZT2 was the abovementioned upgunned version (10 probably made)
ZT3 was a light tank destroyer using the same chassis
ZT4 was a “colonial” version with a slightly different hull, improved ventilation and several different weapons (including old Renault FT turrets), built for service overseas (about 55 made)
It seems that a second-line peacekeeping German unit, the 539th Special Purpose Division (Division z.b.V. 539) had a whole bunch of the “colonial” ZT4 model AMR-35s and used them during the Prague Uprising in the May of 1945. Some of them got subsequently captured by the Czechoslovak rebels and used against the Germans. Others remained in German hands and would, between May 8 and May 9, travel to Pilsen, where they’d end on a military scrap yard. Here, you can see a broken down AMR-35 near Prague during the last days of the war:
The captured AMX-35 tankettes actually ended (for a short while) in the Czechoslovak military inventory after being (presumably) scrapped, despite their historical value. Metal was at a premium during the days after the war and a lot of German stuff ended up being melted.
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:
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.
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! ;)
If you watch Yeong or Jim Sterling, you probably already know about this but if you don’t and still play any free to play game, check this out:
A lot of people has this weird notion in their heads that the games industry is a nice place where people get together to create fun products for their customers and so on. Well, this is the reality that’s valid for many F2P games, if not all.
Ladies and gentlemen, our fake tank parade continues with another great example. This time, Wargaming calls it Kampfpanzer 50t.
According to Wargaming’s description, it’s supposed to be “One of the medium tank projects that were developed in Germany in the 1960s…”
Naturally, not being an expert in everything, I went and asked someone who really IS an expert on anything German and was involved, amongst other things, in the original introduction of RU251 to WoT.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
That’s right. This vehicle was never developed. It was taken from this page, specifically this image:
Basically, what you’re looking at is a drawing from a book from 1958 that depict the idea of its author, Ferdinand Maria von Senger und Etterlin, regarding how a “future combat tank” could look like.
The author was certainly an interesting person and had plenty of experience from the war (he was a tank unit commander), but he was not a tank designer or involved in tank design (at least not directly and until the Leopard 1 era). As such, the drawings weren’t based on developed tank designs – they were, for the lack of better term, musings of a veteran soldier regarding what he’d like on tanks.
Okay, if I am to be honest, this is slightly better than the totally fake T 27, but not enough to make a difference. So, let’s ask our resident expert – what’s the verdict:
Armored Warfare for consoles has a small but dedicated group of members who create pretty nice content sometimes :) But let’s face it, what caught my eye was definitely the music. And a few scenes (mostly caused by bugs so probably not good for promoting on official channels).
In all seriousness, I’m really happy to see relatively funny stuff like this, especially on consoles that make it much harder to capture videos and all that stuff. This was taken on Xbox if I am not mistaken.
Yeah, I totally stole this off Rita’s blog but what the hell. If you’re following various military blogs and such, you might have noticed a case from not so long ago when a rare, partially restored Nashorn – as you know, that’s a WW2 German tank destroyer – burned down. It’s a damn shame, they even made the chassis run.
That was then. This is now:
Long story short, its owners are now collecting money for fixing the poor thing. They estimate the damage at 200k EUR, which is, a lot. Kudos to them, I might have given up after seeing so much work go up in flames. But they didn’t.
If you feel so inclined and have some cash to burn, you can support the project here:
