unsurprisingly to many, Russia won the 2014 Tank Biathlon.
Yesterday, on 16.8.2014, Russia was declared the winner at the Alabino grounds near Moscow with the top 4 teams consisting of Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and China. Other teams in the competition (that consisted of a course where the crews had to traverse the distance of cca 20km while shooting at targets in lowest time possible) consisted of Serbia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, India, Mongolia and Kuwait.
This is actually funny :) You probably know about the story how the separatists stole the IS-3 from a monument in Lugansk and pained “Onwards to Kiev” on it.
Well, the tank got to Kiev indeed… just not the way the terrorists and their Russian patrons expected. It was captured by Ukraine forces and brought to Kiev to resume the role it was meant to fulfill: a piece of history on a monument.
just a short post about something, that was kinda haunting me for a while. Some time ago, I was going through the British section of one Czech portal and ran into something called “Tropical Tank 8-20-10″. I had absolutely no idea what it was as there were no details provided, but its name intrigued me and so, after some unsuccessful searching, I asked David “Listy” Lister, since he has extensive knowledge of British vehicles. And, of course, he came through.
The Tropical Tank 8-20-10 is mentioned in the “Mechanized Force” book by David Fletcher and was created in 1922 by Philip Johnson for service in India. Four versions were proposed: a tank, artillery transporter, supply carrier and an amphibious version. It was one of the very early British tank designs. It had a 45 horsepower engine, Rackham steering and a 4 speed gearbox. Its armor was probably paper thin (protecting against small arms only) and it was equipped with two machineguns in twin turrets.
A single prototype was tested in June 1922 – after running 238 miles, the tank broke down and its development was discontinued. The prototype was likely scrapped later on. It has of course no place in World of Tanks, since it was equipped with machineguns only, but nevertheless, if you are looking for this obscure piece of hardware from the beginnings of British tank design, here it is.
WoWs portal posted this video, in Russian unfortunately. Some answers were also given. Still worth watching!
From what was said in the video:
- models in the alpha are already created in high quality and historicity
- the models are based on a large archive of military documents
- turrets will change with configuration
- there are optional hulls (such as Minekaze early (1922) and late)
- Essex is the tier 9 US aircraft carrier
- carrier planes can also be upgraded as a module (there are several classes of aircraft with different roles, such as dive bombers, torpedo bombers, fighters)
- British and Soviet ships will appear in the game, after release
It started with QB advertising and then some random guy started talking how he started playing WoT… my god – who cares, how some random guys started playing WoT? Three hours of stream to cover the entire Gamescom day, several games and this is what you waste it on? Incredible.
And of course, some mandatory “WoT is the besterest”… I mean, it’s a good game, but “unparalleled experience”? Please.
As a bonus, the chat was completely compromised by people spamming that retarded reference Alienware shit. Well, at least there was that hot Turkish chick again. What was less funny was that the competition thread on FB was immediately infested by spammers as well, so that didn’t work too well. The rest, in points:
- Some random WG employee: “we had the really nice big booth” – but you’re not going to see it, because we will show you a bunch of random guys instead (same goes for Gamescom atmosphere, dancers, WoWs…) Absolutely retarded.
- Eikarrramba (German community contributor) appeared to explain what a community contributor does (reading FTR and translating it :P Nah, I know you do your own stuff as well and you do it nicely, keep at it!)
along with Gaijin and Wargaming, there is a third company with their own tank game attending Gamescom – Mail.ru and their very own Armored Warfare. Now, they released this trailer…
And it looks good. But wait… it seems the developers left their FTP server open, hihi :) So what have we here… some screenshots, but also a very interesting presentation!
