Hello everyone,

just like most of players who visit forums (or aren’t completely oblivious to the game), I heard of bots before. In case someone completely oblivious to the issue is reading this: a “bot” (shortcut of “robot”) is a program, that controls the player character so the player doesn’t have to. Bots appear in many games and there are many types, but in online gaming they are almost universally illegal.

In World of Tanks terms, bots are programs, that play instead of the human being – not to reach any stellar results of course, but to “grind” – in other words, to play and earn credits/XP, so the player doesn’t have to. Just like everywhere else, their use is strictly punished and uncovered botters will have their accounts wiped, or they get permabanned outright.

At least, such is the theory.

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Hello everyone,

a very long time ago, I wrote a post about the TNH-57/900 light tank. I recently added some new info I found, so let’s have a look at it. This vehicle could appear in the Czechoslovak light branch around tier 5.

After the war, the newly-reformed Czechoslovak army was not interested too much in new light tanks, even though the LT-38 and Hetzer suspensions were used for the development of other vehicles, such as some self-propelled guns. Several designs were given to consideration in 1948-1949, including the Škoda T-17, but the army really showed no interest. However, Škoda developed the new line of automatic drum-fed cannons – the 37mm A23, the 47mm A24 and the 57mm A25 (the latter two intended also for the T-16 prototype). ČKD thought it would be a great idea to make a new light tank design too – they knew the Czechoslovak army wasn’t really interested and so the design was concieved for export in 1949 and it was designated (in the ČKD light tank tradition) as TNH 57/900, as it was based on the TNH chassis conception and designed so that it could share many parts with the LT-38 and Hetzer. It was to be armed with the 57mm A25 cannon and it was generally a very good design. A technology demonstrator was created and passed the tests (it was made from the last TNH n.A. hull and a wooden mock-up turret), but in 1949, Czechoslovakia was banned from selling any weapons to countries outside of the Soviet sphere of influence (and as the countries within the sphere of Soviet influence were serviced exclusively by Soviets and their tech, it was a de-facto export ban). Losing its primary goal (the export), the project was cancelled in 1950. Oddly enough, the prototype wasn’t scrapped and it was used for towing artillery even around 1957. Without the turret of course. Unfortunately, no photo of the turretted demonstrator survived.

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Source: http://overlord-wot.blogspot.cz/2014/02/wot360-moar-tanks.html

Hello everyone,

yes, this is a bit of late info, but Xbox WoT went live recently – not worldwide yet. Here are the details. Personally, I really am not attracted to this kind of stuff, but if it makes Wargaming profit…

Source: http://serb-2.livejournal.com/201589.html

Hello everyone,

so, SerB has a personal blog. It’s not updated regularily and the posts there are generally short and personal, so there was no real reason to translate anything from there, but recently (or rather, today), SerB posted an interesting characteristic of general Russian (not only WoT) audience – as a sort-of advice for those, who want to work with the Russian market. Thanks to Brenwen from LJ community for re-posting the link.

What he wrote (I will try to translate it as correctly as I can):

Russian mass audience – mass as in both the main audience group and the fact there are many of them – is very patriotic. Anti-patriotic groups (in our case, “Germanlovers”) are visible and very loud, so a casual observer might get wrong idea about their numbers and financial importance. The main audience group, providing most of the financial income, is patriotic in following sense:

1. Mass audience is not ashamed and does not want to be ashamed of Russian past and present. All the while a large part of this audience takes highly philosophical approach towards Russian failures and dark parts of history: “We got punched in 1941 in the teeth – oh well, happens, we shrugged it off and ended up in Berlin.” Smaller part of the audience directly argues (makes excuses for) even real failures (“Americans were never on the moon”).

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Author: Károly “Karika” Németh

Hello everyone,

some of you might remember the Tas – the ultimate Hungarian wartime project of a medium/heavy tank, inspired by the Panther. I wrote about the Tas here, in case you are interested. Either way, sometimes, some “information” appears that Tas was supposed to be equipped with German 88mm gun, like the Tiger. This is not true and Károly “Karika” Németh will explain it in detail.

Regarding the picture above, that was claimed to be the 88mm Tas – that’s not the model of the Tas with 88mm gun, there’s NO chance that the Tas could have been mounted with an 88mm, historically.

At first I have to make some things clear: the original plans, blueprints and documantations for the Tas medium tank are mostly missing (lost during the occupation of Hungary by the Germans, and then the Soviets), and the historians have to work with the limited written sources and many (less reliable) personal memoirs/flashbacks. Therefore, a lot of misunderstandings and delusions circulating around on the internet, and even in published books.

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Hello everyone,

this is some info for those of you, who like to follow Rita on stream (that “Stream” button on the upper bar). Rita now has (unlike before) regular schedule she will try to keep according to her own words. The schedule is here:

Enjoy!

PS: there is an interesting competition upcoming on the stream for nice prizes I think, I helped design it so you might want to refresh your knowledge of tanks… :)

Hello everyone,

as promised, here is the overview of this week’s FTR contributors. I value all your help equally, no matter how small, so I just want to thank you all once again.

Contributors

S.R. (Poland) – DONKEY LIVES
L.H. (Germany)
Godsmacked (Poland) – large contribution, thanks mate!
F.K. (Germany)

Please note that if you want your full real name or nickname listed, you have to write me your nickname (or your consent for full name publication) :)

You can also leave a message you want published.

S.R. wanted to leave a short message for you guys. It says: “DONKEY LIVES”

Hello everyone,

you might have noticed the new poll on the main FTR page, regarding the premium vehicles (if you haven’t voted yet, cast your vote, please). This poll is there for a reason actually. Last night I had an interesting chat, was also reading some articles, looking through some books and realized, how tough it is actually to come up with a decent premium tank. There are some pretty strict categories and conditions to follow, when you make such a proposal. This can be very clearly seen on the case of the American premium tank destroyer.

Not that Wargaming drops historical requirements the lower you go by tiers, but first and foremost, I think it’s obvious that tier 8 premium tanks are the most “watched” tanks in World of Tanks. For example, recently (on 8.11 test), the shape of Type 59 armor was changed. It was changed in a completly insignificant way (the angle changed by half a degree or so, resulting in a few milimeters of shift), but there have already been voices saying “Oh, you changed Type 59, will there be a compensation?”

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Hello everyone,

not everything that appears as a leak is one. Today, I posted the following picture:

It’s supposed to be a “supertest tree”, including three new premium TD’s. I am sad (happy?) to report that it is a fake. The reason I fell for it is quite simple: last year (in May), both the GAZ-75 and IT-45 descriptions were leaked and icons existed too (as far as I know, even models do). I thought Wargaming simply decided to implement them with delay, but it is not so (yea, I had it confirmed by a real supertester).

By the way, those of you, who said it was a photoshop – nope, it wasn’t. It is actually possible to edit local client XML files to create your own “version” of the tree, that’s probably how they did it. Another leaked thing later today were “statistics” of these vehicles. These are also fake.

I am sorry for the confusion.

All credits go to Vollketten as usual.

This invention, submitted in 1944, seems to resemble a wartime version of the Soviet Mi-24 Hind…

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