Imperial War Museum Duxford Photos

Hello everyone,

Listy recently visited the Imperial War Museum in Duxford and decided to share some pictures with us. Enjoy :)

PS: I seem to be having some issues with some pictures not appearing, if you see white boxes instead of pictures, just refresh the page, should help. I have no idea what causes this, we’re investigating the issue.

Dingo and Daimler armored cars

FffkteI - Imgur

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Umbra 3 Middleware for World of Tanks

Hello everyone,

so, we all know noone really reads the legal stuff that appears with each patch, right? Well, maybe we should, sometimes an interesting info (well, for those who know what this is) appears. It is known that for quite some time, World of Tanks uses the Umbra middleware. I think I heard the name mentioned very long time ago, like two years back? Either, Umbra logo was noticed in the 9.2 legal stuff by player Taifuuni:

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Bonusweb WG Interview: WoT 2.0 Considered

Thanks to Jalt for this one

Hello everyone,

in recent Czech Bonusweb portal article, there was interview with Chris Keeling, American World of Tanks product manager. The interview took place during the recent E3 fair in the USA.

keeling

The interview starts with the usual PR garbage (bla bla we’re successful bla bla free to win bla), he goes on how they see War Thunder as a competition and how it is good to actually have a competition and how people saying “this patch destroyed a game” are mostly just trolls, but then it takes an unexpected turn.

Apparently, according to the interview, Wargaming is considering “World of Tanks 2.0″, in two options – either a completely reworked World of Tanks game on new engine with improved graphics (then the player data/accounts etc. would be transferred, this is the case if the game was another game with the same WW2 theme), or a completely new tank game from scratch (in which case nothing would be transferred).

The rest of the interview is garbage again – “we have historical battles and the gameplay is balanced and fun” (yea, right, that’s why it us getting removed in 9.2) and “we have people who expertly measure each tank so it’s completely historical bla bla” (right, that’s why for example Churchill was resized in HD instead of being done correctly the first time) etc.

Either way, the mention about the new engine is interesting. You might have recently read about the Wargaming interest in Crytek. It was actually not true (Crytek later denied any financial issues), but – who knows?

T-54 Model 1945 will be Soviet Premium MT8

Hello everyone,

Storm confirmed today – Soviet T-54 Obr.1945 (Model 1945) first T-54 prototype tank will be the Soviet premium tier 8 medium tank instead of the LT-54 (which will become a tier 8 light tank).

T54

So, what IS this “Model 1945″ then?

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Let’s have a look at some Russian sources on this. The history of the T-54 tank started in the Fall of 1944, when the Nizhny Tagil designers created as a “side project” a proposal for very strong modification of the T-44 medium tank, designed to further improve the protection and firepower of the T-44 while keeping the adequate level of mobility and terrain passability. The first documents and drawings were shown to the Tank Industry Comissariat in the last days of October 1944 and on 1st of November 1944, the comissar, V.A.Malyshev signed an order for the Plant No.183 to create a prototype.

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William Foster’s Italian Tank

by Vollketten

So, for those who don’t know, the firm of William Fosters and Co. Ltd. was based in Lincoln, England and was the home of the first British tanks – and, later on in the next war the great and glorious TOG vehicles. For some time, I have been trying to track down a rumour of a tank designed for the Kingdom of Italy sometimes in the 1930′s and after much searching, I feel it’s finally possibly to say with some certainly what that tank was and what it looked like.

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9.2 – Official Model Changes

Hello everyone,

if you’ve seen the 9.2 test server patch notes, you know that several tanks’ models are listed as “improved” – until there is an unofficial full list of changes, this is the list we know about. The English patchnotes say the following:

- Visual models of the following tank models improved: ISU-152, SU-122?, M18 Hellcat, M3 Lee, M4A3E2 Sherman Jumbo, Tortoise, Black Prince, Conqueror Gun Carriage, Pz.Kpfw. IV Ausf. D, Sturmpanzer I Bison, Pz.Kpfw. B2 740 (f) and Type 4 Chi-To.

If you are wondering what “SU-122?” is, it’s SU-122A – the reason the question mark is there is that they copied the text from Russian forums and probably filtered it through some editor, that doesn’t display cyrillic letters properly and turns azbuka into questionmarks.

I went through the models displayed and here’s what I found – a part of the models listed above (specifically, ISU-152, SU-122A, M3 Lee, Sturmpanzer I Bison, B2 740(f) and Chi-To) have had no changes whatsoever – or rather, it’s possible a pixel was changed here or there, but I haven’t been able to find them.

M18 Hellcat was lowered a tiny bit and the texture now displays more “wear and tear”, so it doesn’t look that much plastic.

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“How Wargaming Works” Video

Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/pc-browser/1/wargaming_in_working/

An interesting video appared on Russian portal, explaining “how Wargaming works” (there are English subtitles). I mean, I guess it’s okay… I just wonder whether the artist who made this took some LSD before he started working…