So, following a short absence I realised that I need to put a few more Patent vehicle out there. The usual batch of the silly, dangerous, badly thought-out and impractical along with some decent ideas mixed together. So yes; some absurd, some not so much. You choose.

Deciding that after the war, France really needed an 80cm high armoured coffin in January 1955, Victor Bouffort, along with hundreds before and since, thought of the individual armoured machine involving lying prone, protected by flimsy armour. At least for once, the hapless driver gets company in a two man machine, as well as a very funky helmet. So; could be worse I suppose.

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Hello everyone,

9.6 test round 3 started. A list of changes:

- fixed the visual and collision models of HD E-100 and T95
- fixed a large number of issues with combat equipment (SS: stronghold consumables)
- improved the game performance when triggering combat equipment
- fixed the bug where the game froze when you tried to change camouflage or inscriptions on a tank, that didn’t have full crew
- fixed the descriptions of some IM’s
- fixed some issues with IM UI
- fixed some ingame and UI issues of Stronghold mode
- fixed some issues during the crew role change
- fixed some interface issues of the client, when using social networks

Hello everyone,

the contributor review is back after I skipped one. These days are a very chaotic time for me, there’s a lot of stuff to do and little time for pretty much everything – so, sorry :) And yes, it’s connected with FTR as well.

This time, I’d like to thank the following people for donating:

Lee D. (Germany) – a message from him: “WUB WUB in space” :)
Lars R.T. (Denmark) – thank you for the generous contribution :) Much appretiated.
Michael R. (Germany) – glad you liked the article, mate :)
Andrew B. (California, US)
Mark P. (United Kingdom)
Mario N. (Slovakia)
KTZV_D86 of the LAS clan (Germany)
Michael H. (United Kingdom) – yes mate, I know about that petition, already linked it before
Shaun H. (United Kingdom)
Andrew N. (Australia)
Tomáš L. (?)
David S. (Washington, USA)

Some of you guys already contributed repeatedly, thank you – I really appreciated. Of course, I appreciate the Patreon donations as well – next week, there will be a “contributor special”, dedicated to the Patreon guys. You all have given me a lot of support – simply thank you.

Otherwise, apart from being really busy, not much is going on, everything’s as usual (well, maybe more typos than usual, but that’s been constant for last months I am afraid).

Hello everyone,

as you probably already know, one of the main features of patch 9.6 will be the retraining of crew members from a different role to another (for example from radioman to gunner). This change is as far as I know available ONLY for gold and on test 1, the price was 600 gold, but it was decided to reduce it to 500 gold.

As you can imagine, the price was not met with much approval from the community and many complained that it’s too high. Here’s Storm’s answer (from the non-public section of RU forum):

“The most common case during the tanker role retraining: unlocking a new tank, retraining the crew to it from the old one and it turns out that one more tanker is needed (or, opposite, you have one tanker too many). And so, you take a free tanker and you try to put it in this tank (or in the opposite case, you take the free tanker and you retrain it to another tank).

As such:
- you retrain the tanker to another tank
- there’s a skill/perk reset (since you have a different role now)
- the role itself gets changed

At first, we charged 200 gold for each of these operations (as we did earlier), in total we got 600 gold. Then we reduced it to 500. A bulk discount :)”

Hello everyone,

the Insider returns to tell us what the developers are considering for the people, who rig the individual missions.

The developers are well aware of the issue of rigged battles and are concerned with it. The people, who rig battles, will not only have their rewards removed, but already do recieve a seven day ban. No defense is admissible to the verdict, as they – to quote one of the developers:

“talk out of their ass justifying any form of match rigging by the terms of handicapping enemy or allies or purposedly changing in any way, mentioned or unmentioned by normal map battle dynamics”

Furthermore, developers consider “rewarding” the riggers with a lifetime ban from any individual missions (they will not be eligible for any rewards). According to developers, there is plenty of time to complete the missions legally and the riggers often are greedy kids, who just want “it all right now”.

But of course, that’s WG RU… WG EU – a different story completely. Did you know that you can’t write a ticket about game rigging on EU server?

Well, now you do.

Hello everyone,

I was sent this rather interesting video, showing something that’s probably not very commonly accessible, the Italeri model plant inside. Thinking of buying your World of Tanks-themed Italeri kit? Here’s how it’s made.

Thanks to Vollketten for this one :)

Hello everyone,

need a good laugh? Well, here’s some stronk French armor history. In the TnT magazine, January/February 2009, the French actually proved that the Panther is superior to IS-3! :)

Let’s start with something mild. The armor.

Well, for starters, that’s a Panther with 88mm L/71 and Schmalturm. Because, you know, that totally existed. The numbers are off too – but whatever. The magazine is calling that Panther Ausf.F. Newsflash: Panther Ausf.F did NOT have the 88mm L/71, that was a separate project! But no worries, it gets better – mobility:

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Hello everyone,

after a night’s sleep and a coffee, I decided to write a bit about my meeting with Yuri Pasholok and his colleagues (they are not publicly active, so I think giving out their names and positions would do them disservice) yesterday afternoon in Prague. Along with me were two of our historians, Jiří Tintěra and Vladimír Francev – both are well known in the Czech community, but V.Francev is a living legend, one of the few “old guard” historians left like H.Doyle for example.

The meeting was cordial and I had actually a lot of fun and learned some interesting things of how Wargaming operates – and of tanks, of course (like the WT E-100 replacement, but who knows when that’s going to happen). Despite our reputations, we did put aside our differences with Yuri Pasholok (who is actually a pretty okay guy in real life) to work on the Czechoslovak tree, specifically to start proper cooperation between the two gentlemen and Wargaming.

Now, before I jump to the Czechoslovak tree stuff (very interesting by itself), a little bit of Wargaming first. You see, I learned some things how Wargaming operates – and no, that’s not some stuff I want to publish, I have no reason to as the guys from WG were very honest and open. Some of the things made me laugh, some made me facepalm or shake my head in disbelief. But the biggest surprise was… Richard “Challenger” Cutland, or rather his activities. If half of what the WG RU guys said was true… that’s not even incompetence. That’s borderline sabotage. I really thought better of you, Richard. Oh well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. But – as fun as it is to throw dirt on WG EU, at this point, I won’t do it. It’s pointless, because knowing what’s going to happen with (to) WG EU… yes, very very amusing (well, to me, not to WG EU I am sure).

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Since it was published elsewhere…

Yea. This is the GW E-100 replacement, still called Grille IIRC. And yes, it’s this weapon – we (Czechoslovaks) wanted to put it on Panther chassis after the war, but the mortar was developed earlier, during the war, for – amongst other things – the Tiger chassis, aka Grille.

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