Source: narod2.ru via Slakrrr (US forums)

Hello everyone,

what we have here is a quite interesting thing. Some of you (with very good memory) might remember one interview with SerB for the Goha.ru portal from more than two years ago (you can check it here), where – while discussing potential light tanks – he mentioned an ultra-lightweight variant of the T-54 tank a potential hightier candidate for World of Tanks. I’ve seen this interview before several times, but I honestly never found anything about this special T-54 variant, until it showed up on US forums today. It’s pretty interesting actually. Here’s what we know about it.

The article states that there was some testing of various types of tracks for T-54 tanks around 1949. At the same time, in May 1945, the design bureau of Plant No.183 (Kharkov) designed a light variant of the T-54 tank with improved terrain passability compared to the production T-54 model. This light variant could serve during special operations, where passability, speed and agility were needed more than superior armor protection. In order to achieve that, this light variant had wider tracks (580mm).

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Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/2923103.html

Hello everyone,

an interesting post appeared on RU forums – did you know that Ensk might have been partially modelled after Minsk? I sure didn’t. LJ user yozas_gubka makes a number of interesting comparisons between Ensk buildings and those really existing in the home city of Wargaming, Minsk. He admits that although the map developers might have drawn their inspiration from generic Soviet-type architecture, some buildings in Minsk come very close to what we can see in Ensk. Check this out:

This building exists in Ensk…

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Hello everyone,

today, we are going to have a look at another tank, that is currently not available on the EU server, the A-32 – and we will attempt to answer the question: are we missing something, or it’s not worth thinking over?

A-32 is a medium tier 4 tank. According to World of Tanks wikipedia, it was a part of the light pre-order package, but even though I play the game practically ever since it came live, I don’t remember seeing a single such vehicle in battle. According to WoT Wiki, there are like 8000 of these vehicles on EU server in total, but few of them are played, you’d be very lucky to see one – and there’s a reason for that. It’s worth noting that for a while, A-32 was classified as a light tank, before moved to the medium class.

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The lack of air superiority became quite a problem for the German army in both World Wars.
Very often you will hear people spouting about “invincible Tigers only defeated by enemy airplanes”, which of course was only somewhat true until the Soviets started fielding 122 and 152mm self propelled guns, not to mention the IS series, while British and Americans also put 76mm high velocity cannons to good use on the other side.

The Germans of course were aware of the consequences of loosing air superiority and developed several solutions, of which we will cover only the ones based on tank hulls, ranging from sensible battlefield modifications to daring paper tanks that never reached the battlefield, using mainly “Gepard” by Spielberger and “Panzer Tracts 20-2” by Jentz & Doyle.

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Hello everyone,

after Wargaming discovering a Japanese hobby kit company uses the Failowe model for their kits, they weren’t happy. However, this is not the only case. Check this out (this was submitted by Vladimir_Lemon). Mobile game Tank War 2013 for Android uses the following picture as its logo:

Looks familiar? Let me give you a hint:

It is clear that World of Tanks is a very popular concept and various copycats are trying to use this to their advantage. I am sure black helicopters were already dispatched Wargaming lawyers will not be happy. Or maybe they will – depends on whether they get paid by the case or by the hour.

Hello everyone,

so, here’s a thought. Yesterday, XZ linked me this War Thunder beta video. No, don’t worry, I won’t bash War Thunder (in fact I find the graphic very, very good and it will take World of Tanks a while to catch up) and yes, I do know this is just closed beta. Just watch it.

Well as you can see, War Thunder will have flippable tanks. Some time ago, Storm announced that World of Tanks will have this too, which got me thinking: do we REALLY need this one?

It’s obvious War Thunder influenced Wargaming plans more or less – even Storm admitted so. Some things it has good, some thing it has bad, but it does have influence. I am not sure that flippable tanks is something that was War Thunder inspired (I doubt that, since it was first mentioned a long time ago, when the War Thunder tanks were not even announced), but if it was, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Let’s look at both the advantages and disadvantages of tank flipping.

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Thanks to EnsignExpendable for posting this.

Yesterday, we talked about ads, so let’s have a look at how to do a good one for a change :) This is a Russian ad for World of Tanks.

After the grandpa opens the window, the gangster says: “Grandpa, how many battles have you played?” and on the bench, the granpa said “I’m telling you, it didn’t penetrate!” and the gangster replies “No! Didn’t penetrate how?”.

I actually laughed (and I rarely do that with ads) :)

Partial source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/269679.html, Zarax’ posts and articles

Hello everyone,

this is something that kinda… bothers me. Today, on developer blog, Yuri Pasholok posted about the VK7201K (Failowe) – according to him, it was a real project with a 150mm (149mm) gun KwK L/38 and a rear turret. There was some development, the Lowe project got cancelled and the attention of Hitler and his merry band turned towards the Maus. This is how the model looked, according to Yuri Pasholok:

The picture above is a model (mock-up) of a rear-turret Lowe variant, mistakenly named “leichter Lowe” (“light Lowe”) by the site called Achtungpanzer (responsible for numerous myths about German tanks). Yuri Pasholok claims this vehicle is historical, but in a serie of articles (the Lowe history is actually pretty complicatged), it was argued by Zarax (and me (see the Tiger Maus section)) that that’s just crap. There was never such a rear turret project of such a weight, the ingame Failowe is a Wargaming fake (the picture above belongs to a proposal for a light vehicle of 70 tons).

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Hello everyone,

for those who are interested in streamers, Rita is streaming right now with Jingles and will be for a while, so you might want to check it out. If you don’t know how, just press the “STREAM” button on the FTR bar below the logo.

- SS

Hello everyone,

since the “Legion” series I posted here around Christmas was apparently successful, I will be continuing the story. I hope you find it to your liking. The previous Legion series part one can be found here, part two here and part three here – if you haven’t read them, I suggest you do that before you read this post.

Summer, 1918 – the city of Samara on river Volga

After the crushing Czechoslovak victory near Lipyagy on 4.6.1918 against the bolshevik forces, another obstacle to overcome on their journey east was the city of Samara. It was a fortified city, it housed the headquarters of an entire Volga district and it was home to both local military command, but also to a strong garrison under its commander of ruthless reputation, Soviet Comissar Dolgushin.

The area looked like this (the broken line from Lipyagy over Kryazh to Samara is the railroad and there is a railway bridge marked over river Samarka too):

When they heard about the fate of the bolshevik troops at Lipyagy, the Soviet staff members tried to secretly negotiate with the Czechoslovaks, because they realized in full that the bulk of the elite Soviet forces in the entire region was destroyed there, but it was also clear to the Czechoslovak Legion that with the elite of the bolshevik army gone, Samara was practically defenseless against the Legion. In a move previously unheard of, the Soviet (ruling committee) of Samara even offered the Czechoslovaks the right of free passage through Samara, despite the fact that only days earlier they called for Czechoslovak destruction and would never even consider this option. Lieutenant Čeček (the commander of the Legion force) refused this offer – for one, he had nothing to gain, since Samara was ripe for taking, on the other hand, he didn’t believe the sincery of the Soviets, fearing treachery.

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