Hello everyone,

the M36 Jackson tank destroyer served in the Balkan region for practically 60 years, which is not very usual for wartime tech (the T-54 medium tank for example does have a very long career as well, but that’s not a wartime vehicle, at least not in the way the Jackson was). The Jacksons participated in practically all the conflicts in the Balkan region from 1991 to 2001 and the last pieces were withdrawn from service in Serbia and Montenegro in 2005 – at that point, the vehicles had 60 years of service behind them.

The M36 GMC self-propelled guns were sold to Yugoslavia during the Yugoslav-Soviet crisis, when Yugoslavia was threatened by the Soviets and their eastern bloc allies. It all started in 1948, when Moscow heavily criticized the Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito for not bowing down to Stalin and for not following his directives. Along with the threats came embargos on various things, including military technologies and arms. Border clashes between the Yugoslav and the eastern bloc troops also happened and there was a general fear that Yugoslavia would be pulled forcibly into the Soviet bloc.

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Hello everyone,

as you know, we now have a new Clan Rating available. This post is based on the Russian post , explaining the formulae of the clan rating. I haven’t seen WG EU translate this to English, so… here goes.

The basic formula is this:

where:

CR – clan rating
SR – average personal rating of clan members, calculated like this:

SRi – the value of personal rating of a player i-th player at the moment of the calculation
m – number of players in clan at the moment of the calculation

TR – team rating (see below)
C – coefficient, regulating the influence of SR on CR (currently is 1)

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Thanks to LoooSeR78V for this one!

It’s an interesting insight into how armor works in current Afghanistan – basically the Afghani soldiers keep the old tanks left there by the Soviets alive by cannibalizing others for spare parts. It’s quite impressive actually, not only the fact they keep the tanks at least running in such conditions, but also that someone actually survives the dreadful heat and dust in such a tank.

Hello everyone,

here’s a tank you’ve probably never heard of before, well, unless you are into this sort of thing. When you consider the German tanks, they are rarely pretty, but they are always functional. But what happens when the French and the Germans start to cooperate? Well, something like this:

This is the DF 105 Combat Tank. It’s a prototype, built in the mid-80′s in cooperation between the French (the turret) and Germans (the hull) by Thyssen Henschel, intended for export. The hull is of the Marder 1 IFV, the turret is French-made FL-15 by Fives Cail Babcock company (this turret was used in the late production AMX-13 as well). First, the hull – the Marder IFV was developed in the 70′s, based on the needs of the West-German army, the Bundeswehr. It’s very lightly armored (protecting the crew and passengers from 20mm APDS shells only, later increased to 30mm protection due to the armament of the BMP-2), but it’s fast and well armed. Of course, it’s “just” an IFV and as such, there were plans by Thyssen-Henschel to build several vehicles on this chassis:

- tank destroyer (please note this does not imply a casemate design, merely a role)
- infantry support tank
- IFV (the Marder)
- self-propelled gun

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Hello everyone,

once again, a few videos from Rasta_knight from this year’s Saumur dynamic demonstration of vehicles. It’s impressive to see so many historical vehicles in running condition. Go Saumur! :)

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A bit old, but there’s never enough girls and tanks, right? Well, okay, technically there are no tanks, but ho cares…

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Gonna try streaming (one time only, since my computer can barely handle it) in cca 15 mins or so (IF I can manage to set everything right) for a while. Unique chance to see how terrible I am at WoT and to see me curse and swear online :)

http://www.twitch.tv/silentstalkerftr

Part 1: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/07/18/world-of-tanks-client-analysis/
Part 2: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/07/20/world-of-tanks-client-analysis-part-2/
Part 3: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/07/22/world-of-tanks-client-analysis-part-3/

Author: Thiemo Jung

Network and other community requests

This part will cover multiple topics, all from user requests of the WoT community.

Firstly I will cover the network traffic, I’ve recorded the network traffic with Wireshark. The network part is mostly reasoning about the frequency, the size, looking at undecoded content of the network packages and some guessing. The other user requests are, behavior if the process priority gets changes, behavior when minimized and rendering of the new maps (in this case Kharkiv).

Some people requested a analysis of the servers, unfortunately this is not possible, I have the same access to the servers as everyone else and can only use tools to view stuff from the client side and this allows only a very limited view of the server structure.

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Author: sp15 (US server)

Part I: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/03/07/swedish-tanks-part-i-strv-m21-29/
Part II: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/03/12/swedish-tanks-part-ii-strv-m31-strv-fm31/
Part III: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/03/15/swedish-tanks-part-iii-landsverk-l-100-and-l-120/
Part IV: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/03/21/swedish-tanks-part-iv-landsverk-l-60/
Part V: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/03/27/swedish-tanks-part-v-strv-m37-and-strv-m41/
Part VI: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/04/08/swedish-tanks-part-vi-sav-m43/
Part VII: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/04/18/swedish-tanks-part-vii-strv-m42/
Part VIII: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/05/08/swedish-tanks-part-viii-pvkv-m43/
Part IX: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/05/12/swedish-tanks-part-ix-tlp-46-and-strv-leo
Part X: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/05/15/swedish-tanks-part-x-strv-lansen/
Part XI: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/05/17/swedish-tanks-part-xi-ls-50/
Part XII: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/06/01/swedish-tanks-part-xii-emil-1951/
Part XIII: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/07/15/swedish-tanks-part-xii-emil-1952-1958/

The Centurion is one of those classic tanks that have seen service all around the world and – in some forms – still do these days. Today, I’m going to talk about the Centurion in Swedish service.

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Hello everyone,

it is sort of “fashionable” to bash the Polish players on EU servers as bad, but the truth is, there is absolutely no proof anywhere that Polish players are worse than other players. There however is a proof that there is a LOT of them. Recently, World of Tanks was mentioned on Polish TV Polsat news (from 1:55 on):

There, Polish WG employee Konrad Rawinski states that there is over one million registered Polish players on EU server. Well… that’s a lot of people. It’s a damn shame there are no Polish tanks in the game since it has such a large audience here, but you know what? I think there will be some. Hopefully next year.