Hello everyone,

here’s a little preview of a potential premium tier 7-8 tank I’ve put together – you guessed it, it’s Czechoslovak. I am calling it “TVP Model 1946″ (it really has no official designation).

Actually, a quick stop here. Hightier premium medium tanks are in fact a problem for the European branch. This is one of the very few candidates, available for such a position. One might think that this issue will be mitigated by the presence of Swedish tanks in the EU tree, but – no. The Swedish – for all their interesting designs – have problems with hightier medium tanks, some candidates are pretty speculative (or without drawings whatsoever) and the medium branch is generally very strained (what the Swedish do not lack are hightier heavies and TD’s, but mediums are a bit of a problem). Italians are even worse, pretty much only clones or fantasies (Panther II) on high tiers. Hungarians and Polish have no hightier mediums at all and Yugoslavia has some candidates, but it was never really considered to be one of the “primary” EU tree nations (lack of lowtiers). They will probably come, eventually. Switzerland is promising by the way.

Anyway, back to Czechoslovakia. This is the first proposal for TVP by VTU from 1946. Its history is complicated and not really important at this point, if you are interested, check the earlier TVP articles on FTR. Today, we are going to focus on game characteristics and how to turn it into a premium tank.

Short description:

Initial proposal by Military Technical Institute (VTU) for a “medium tank of general use”, designated “TVP”. It was further developed by Škoda and Praga until the 50′s, when the program was cancelled in favour of licensed T-34/85 production.

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Hello everyone,

I haven’t seen this on the EU portal, so just to make sure it gets to you:

Hello everyone,

when I say “LTP”, many of you will think of the Soviet premium light tank in World of Tanks – some of you however, who read this blog for a long time might remember, that that was the designation of the light tank for Peru as well – a tank, produced by ČKD (Praga).

If you are interested, you can read about the tank’s history here. Now, why am I writing this. Generally, it was believe that the tank was offered just to Peru, but as it turns out, other countries were interested in it as well – countries such as Argentina. I’d like to thank player COLDOWN for the information, that follows.

The commercial and military ties with Czechoslovakia were nothing around the beginning of the Second World War. In 1932, Škoda sold Argentine an undisclosed number of AA guns (possibly the 76,5mm L/50 export variant). Ever since, Czechoslovak arms had a good name in Argentine and it was no wonder that when Argentine saw Peru purchasing the Praga light tanks in 1938, they wanted some of their own as well, as they were fast, nimble, had sufficient firepower and were quite capable of dealing with the low-tech armies in the region.

Between 1937 and 1938, Argentine sent a letter of intent (to Škoda and PRaga), expressing its desire to purchase as many as 160 light tanks of the LTP type (between 7-9 tons, modern design, anti-tank capabilities). There was some unspecified communication, but the deal was cancelled when Czechoslovakia was occupied by Germany. The intent, however, did not die.

Three years later, in July 1942, Domingo Martínez, head of the federal police, contacted the German charge d’affaires, Erich Meynen, about purchasing the same tanks over Spain. The Germans however refused this time as well. This decision was one of the key moments for the birth of Argentine’s very own tank program, resulting in the Nahuel tank.

Here, Peruvian LTP’s can be seen in this 1941 Peru-Ecuador war propaganda video at several moments.

Sources:

www.valka.cz
Militariarg – Vehicles
Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales
Navarro. “Tanque Vickers.Colección Museo de Armas de la Nación”.
Sigal Fogliani. “Blindados Argentinos. De Uruguay y Paraguay”.

Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/pc-browser/remember-everything/keep_history_together/

Hello everyone,

as a part of the “Remember everything” initiative (Wargaming supporting various historical events in Russia and Belarus), Wargaming decided to start a fundraiser to save/restore certain museum pieces and asks Russian players to donate money to the cause. The first project of this initiative will be the restoration of Lenin-Snegiri military museum museum collection.

The museum is located at the spot of one of the firecest battles, where the German SS division Das Reich fought the Soviet 78th Rifle Division (commanded by Afanasy Beloborodov) during their approach to Moscow in the winter of 1941. For its bravery, the 78th Rifle Division was renamed to 9th Guard Division on 26.11.1941. You can see the presentation here (there are English subtitles):

The museum contains some pretty unique pieces, including a German Tiger. The initial stage of restoration has already begun in October 2014 with the installation of MS-1 tankette, an M-30 howitzer and some mortars. The rest however needs more money, hence the fundraiser.

The initial installation:

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Hello everyone,

this is not THAT important, just a bit funny. Do you know the site Vkontakte? It’s basically a Russian Facebook – the most important Russian social network (in fact, it’s more important than Facebook in Russia, from what I could gather).

In any case, World of Tanks: Blitz VK page was suspended “due to suspicious competitions or actions.”

I really wonder what kind of competitions were they running there…

Hello everyone,

WoT Blitz (and the entire mobile gaming) is not something I am very interested in, but occasionally, an interesting piece of information pops up.

Recently, I’ve read several threads about the fear of players, that the new Android Blitz will work on Android emulators, allowing the players to use keyboard and mouse for total pwneage. One unnamed player (better that way, since he was attempting something not exactly kosher) tested this theory with the popular Bluestacks emulator.

It is not working. According to the player, it crashes and freezes on launch. It’s actually possible to make the game run, but the textures are missing (pink and white checkers) and it suffers from impossible lags. So, no keyboard + mouse pwnage for you!

Unless you find out how to fix it.

In which case I would be very interested.

Hello everyone,

by now, you already probably know about the screwed model of the M53/M55. Thanks to Russian player Torsys_sd, you can see how it looks in praxis. Notice how the shells are flying through the model and how they actually hit, when you aim ABOVE the artillery, because the turret is shifted upwards.

Oh and that song is amazing, I’ll have to translate that (it’s a modified Soviet air force march with WoT-related text) :)

Many thanks to Applesaucebandit for this one (and for the other people, who did let me know)

There’s a funny bug in the XP conversion screen – basically, when you run your mouse over the list of tanks, the names will start…. shrinking. It happens to a client even without mods, tested it myself. Nothing gamebreaking of course, just another of the many little bugs in 9.4.

Source: FTA VK community

Just a couple more pics of the FV4005 Stage II model.

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Hello everyone,

when we say World War 2, most people, including probably most of us, imagine the classic stuff: the horrors of war, tanks rolling in, planes flying overhead, concentration camps and all the other awful stuff that happened. Few people are however interested in another part of the war – economics. Wartime economics are a complicated topic, that would fill several book volumes (it does in fact), so today, I’d like to write about one certain aspect of the war – the price of the Czechoslovak resistance in gold.

After the Munich betrayal, many politicians (including president Beneš) foresaw the need to assemble sufficient resources to finance the exile movement in case Czechoslovakia was ever occupied (despite the “guarantees” of the British and the French, only very few people trusted their word – after all, once a betrayer, always a betrayer). Surely enough, the worst happened and Czechoslovakia got occupied by nazi armies in March 1939, forcing many officers and representatives to leave Czechoslovakia to seek exile in other countries. Thus, as predicted, the need to finance the entire exile movement arose.

In the first phase, the exile (not yet an official army) was supported by the finances of the Czechoslovak offices (embassies) abroad, that did not accept the destruction of Czechoslovakia and represented its unbroken continuity until the war was over. Especially the ambassador in Britain (J.Masaryk, son of the legendary president T.G.Masaryk) and in France (Š.Osuský) recieved during 1938 large sums of money for “special purposes”. The president in exile, E.Beneš, also donated his professor’s salary and the money he recieved for giving lectures. Third large source early on was the money, collected by Czechoslovaks living in the USA.

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