this video was posted by Yuri Pasholok on his blog. Basically, what happens in it: during the November 2013 airsoft session in Alabino (Moscow), there were military tanks present on the range for some reason. One of the tanks managed to get stuck in a pit full of mud and water – it had to be towed out by another tank. The video actually shows really nicely how rugged the vehicle is and how the engine struggles to get the 40 ton beast from the watery trap. I wouldn’t want to be the guy cleaning it afterwards…
today, we are going to talk about the upcoming (allegedly in 8.11) Soviet tier 7 medium premium tank. But – you might ask: how can we talk about the vehicle noone has ever seen in combat? We have no idea, what it will do in random battle! Well… now we do:
one of the things I find most annoying are the obnoxious animated flash ads with “games”. We probably all know this crap from World of Warplanes, but War Thunder has this “very special” ad, beating anything Wargaming produced. And when I say special, I mean not a “special occasion”, but “my mum said I’m special”. Or “special kind of hell, reserved for child molesters and people, who speak in theater”.
check this out, Wargaming has given us some amazing offers!
Oh look! 3000000 gold!
Or not.
Seriously, does really noone proofread this stuff? I can only imagine how retarded the WG magazine will be in English, since noone even bothers to doublecheck portal news.
an interesting thing appeared on Yuri Pasholok’s blog. On the example of the IS-4, Yuri Pasholok demonstrates, how much can various projections differ from reality. He states that if someone claims some vehicle to be modelled after “factory drawings”, you don’t have to take that claim too seriously, because – if I understood what he wrote correctly, there is not only a significant difference between various book drawings and the final product, there is also a difference between the general factory drawings and the final product.
Basically, production plans consist of series of detailed partial drawings, by which the vehicle parts are created. General drawings however (as in, general overview, even though created by the same factory) tend to be much less accurate (this is apparently the reason why for example Wargaming preferred the partial IS-3 turret plans to the general model in the recent IS-3 turret changes).
Here is a comparison, made by Yuri Pasholok:
The photograph above is of the serial IS-4 vehicle. Red lines belong to the drawing published by well-known Russian author Michael Svirin, blue lines represent the general drawing of the IS-4M (Drawing 701 – Sb.3 from April 1952). As you can see, both the general factory projection and Svirin’s projection (from the book) are different from reality.
To compare, here is a comparison of a partial turret drawing from IS-4M (701-157-Sb.3) with the real life tank:
As you can see, it fits much better than the general drawing, demonstrating the superior accuracy of partial drawings.
this info comes obviously from the WG EU newsletter, but some of you might have missed like (like me, WG newsletter ends up in spam folder regularily). So, check this out (picture by cNNk):
Disregard the language (Czech): Wargaming is going to publish a magazine about WoT and WoWp. This promo picture includes the announcement about “latest news”, interviews, war stories, archive documents and such. Could be interesting. It will be issued both in Russian and in English – which means it will be translated from Russian, which means less space for WG EU fails. That is good. Allegedly, this magazine will be published at first in English and Russian only, but from No.2 it will appear in other languages, like Czech and Polish.
I am a bit afraid here that if the same people who translate the portal translate this too, we might get much stronk translashuns (could be hilarious, but not exactly something I’d want).
An interesting thing: carramba66 posted a video in the Czechoslovak forum section, showing recent appendix (as in, a mini-magazine within) from one Czech magazine (Score, January edition). It might give us a little insight on how the magazine might look design-wise…
today, we will have a look at another mythical creature few have seen in battle, the Panzer IV Hydro.
It’s really difficult to find something to write about, because this vehicle is simply a form of the Panzer IV tank. Historically, one prototype of this vehicle existed: by the end of the war, there was a project to equip Panzer IV with hydrostatic control systems (hence the “hydro”). Historical info from wot-wiki states:
In late 1943, Zahnradfabrik Augsburg equipped normal (turretless) Panzerkampfwagen IV Ausf G/H with newly developed hydraulic steering system. Thoma (non-liquid) oil drive transmission was installed and drive sprocket was replaced with the new one. The power train consisted of twin oil pumps driven by Maybach HL 120 TRM engine. In order to accommodate all the changes, entire engine deck and rear was modified. In mid 1944, this prototype was fitted with modified hydraulically operated turret. Tests were carried on but were never concluded and for testing purposes the only prototype was send to Russia and served with the Waffen SS unit. At the end of the war, this vehicle was captured by the US Army and was sent to United States for further examination. Tests were never concluded and this vehicle is still at Aberdeen U.S Army Proving Grounds in Maryland.
Other sources state that the vehicle this tank was build upon was Panzer IV Ausf.H specifically and that it has never seen combat, because it was breaking down constantly.
All I need now are some explosives and a German terrorist played by an English actor. Okay, seriously now. Thanks to some very nice people, I did get an access to a press account. What is a press account? It’s a special type of account, that (like the test client) has a lot of gold and credits on it, but (unlike the test client) it also has ALL the tanks in the game in the garage and each has a crew with ALL the perks (inteded for journalists to write reviews with). Pretty cool stuff.
So, here I was wondering, which tank to take for a spin first and obviously, the first choice had to be nothing other than the mythical tier 3 light tank, the MTLS-1G14.
So, a bit of history. About a year ago, maybe more, three lowtier premium tanks were introduced into the game. One was the Panzer II Ausf.J, the other was the BT-SV and the third was this little beauty. The first two vehicles became a part of the Gift packages: basically, you buy a box with WoT, some books and this beauty for like 100-150 USD and you get either the Panzer IIJ (German edition) or the BT-SV (Soviet edition). These Gift packages are very rare and they are available only in some e-shops from Belarus and Russia. Panzer II Ausf.J codes were given out at Gamescom events, making it the least rare of the three on EU server. BT-SV is very rare (I have seen only one ever), the only way to get is is to order that package from Belarus and there are like a dozen on the EU server altogether I think.
remember the “new method” of evaluating, whether tanks are OP or not? You know, graphs like this?
Well, Edrard programmed an application on wot-news, that does the same evaluation automatically. The data gathered counts into account samples of at least 50 thousand battles with each tank (that’s why it took a bit longer to gather the data, along with reworking wot-news statistics for new API)
The application can be found here:
http://wot-news.com/main/test/
(the first selection window is obviously the tank, the second is whether you want to display winrate, or ER)
