Hello everyone,

as you probably know, when it comes to the Lend-Lease help to the Soviets, Britain became one of the largest exporters of armor to the Soviet Union. Three major types of armor were exported from Britain – the Matilda II infantry tank, the Valentine and later on, the Churchill (another mass-exported thing were the Universal Carriers, but that doesn’t really concern this article). Today, we are going to have a look at the first one.

The following video (posted on Yuri Pasholok’s blog) shows Matildas being loaded on their way to Soviet Union.

The first Matilda II tanks arrived in Soviet Union in late 1941 – including these ones, Yuri Pasholok found out – based on their numbers – that these particular tanks arrived on 18.12.1941 and all three were assigned to 172nd Tank Batallion. Between 1941 and 1943, 1084 Matildas (more than one third of the entire production of 2987 vehicles) were shipped to the Soviet Union (of which, only 918 were recieved by the Red Army, the rest got apparently lost along the way, sunk in the destroyed convoys and such).

The Soviet Matildas saw their first use during the battle of Moscow – at that point, 145 Matilda tanks were delivered to the Soviets and only a part of them was used. The first units to recieve Matildas were the 170th and 171st Tank Batallions of the South-Western and Kalininsk fronts – the 170th had 13 Matildas for example. However, the role Matildas played in the defense of Moscow was very minor – of all the tanks participating in this operation, lend-lease armor (and that includes Valentine III tanks) made for only 2 percent.

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Source: http://www.novinky.cz/

Hello everyone,

this article is not about the Soviet LTP design, but about a Czechoslovak pre-war tank of the same name. LTP (also known as Tanque 39) was an export tank by Praga from the 30′s, designed for the army of Peru. It was modified to operate in high altitudes of the Andes and in its role, it was very successful – you can read about this design in an older article on FTR. These tanks actually served until 1988 or so, being one of the longest-serving Czechoslovak-made vehicles in history. After that, they were phased out and converted into monuments.

In September 2012, one was transported from Peru back to Prague and exhibited for a time in front of the military museum in Prague.

This is the shape it was in in December 2012 – as you can see, it’s quite bad. The vehicle was extremely worn out and rusty all over.

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Hello everyone,

everyone knows the 88mm L/100 variant of the E-50, right? The gun itself was actually a historical proposal (it sounds silly, but then the Germans did consider the L/130 as well as PaK – eg. AT gun no less). In real life it would encounter massive issues with manufacture process (creating a barrel of that length is not easy) as well as wear and tear (such a long barrel would have to be reinforced somehow, heat would twist it) and accuracy (long barrels tend to oscillate when fired, reducing the accuracy significantly). This is how it looks in the game.

For E-50, for which it was not planned – in fact, noone knows for sure what the E-50 and E-75 projects would be armed with, but considering both were an evolution of the Königstiger – or rather its streamlining for production, 88mm L/71 would be the most likely candidate (128mm gun would not fit the turret at all). The 88mm L/100 itself is not really a “real gun” either, just a demand from Hitler for a gun to mount on the Porsche Tiger  from January 1942. Nothing ever came from it.

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Hello everyone,

this might not come as a surprise for e-sports fans who follow this stuff, but the developers were in the past testing various e-sports formats as alternatives to the popular 7/42 (which works in team battles as well). The testing was mostly closed, but currently, Wargaming US decided to organize an event in new format, which is 6/48.

The fact that this format appears in the “open” does invite speculations, whether this will be the future of e-sports (in the past, it was discussed to actually use a 7/56 format). The WGL administrator wrote:

Over the next several weeks, a series of tournaments will be introduced to test different formats for the WGL. All players that participate are requested to provide feedback on the proposed format, to help judge the utility of this format for future WGL seasons.

Other formats will be tested as well in the future, as the quote says, so maybe we will see 7/56 still. The real question is, if the WGL format changes for all, will the team battles format change as well? Since team battles are considered to be an e-sports preparation, it’s completely possible…

Hello everyone,

the review today is not “weekly” per se, as the last one was delayed and posted this Wednesday, but I am trying to keep schedules as much as I can wherever possible.

Either way, no Paypal donations in this period, but I recieved some encouraging e-mails, thank you all for any support you give me, sometimes it’s really nice to read some of the positive things from you, saves my mood every now and then :)

One thing that is worth adressing is the fact that during the recent Patreon monthly “cycle”, the amount of contributions dropped by cca 30 percent. It wasn’t long before I recieved a couple of gleeful e-mails (anonymous of course), mocking me and FTR for losing reader support.

The truth is however quite different. During the recent Patreon monthly “cycle”, for whatever reason, roughly one fourth of contributions did not “count”, they got into the “pending” status (which meant delayed to the next cycle – won’t count twice next time of course, one month was simply skipped) – here I would like to thank Patreon support staff for the superfriendly way they handle things on their end, it really is actually a pleasure writing with them (not exactly common these days). Count in some personal issues I had to deal with (still have to, hence the reduced weekend content) and it wasn’t exactly the best week ever for me. In the end, some of the “pending” charges got through, the issue is still ongoing. Will keep you posted.

So, once again, thank you all who keep supporting me! :)

PS: Some positive FTR changes for the future – we will be getting something called “CDN” – I have no idea what exactly it is and how it works, but Edrard said it will speed up FTR across the world access by (if I understood it correctly) storing data on some localized servers or something like that. Sounds useful and it’s not that expensive a service. Oh yes and some improved image thingie that will optimize too large images for web use. What is planned is also a better message system (I am getting TONS of spam from FTR mail system). So, stay tuned :)

Thanks to Mydragonsfly for this one :)

There have been a lot of things that used World of Tanks art – cups, t-shirts, mouse pads… but fireworks, that’s new :) Something tells me that this is was not done with WG permission… (made in China, lol). Hmm. I wonder how safe this is…

Source: VK Wotleaks community

Hello everyone,

as you’ve read before on FTR, 9.2 will bring various new medals for team battles and one for clanwars. Two of them will be multiple stage medals, although the exact conditions of getting them are still unknown. Here are the pictures of multiple stages of them.

Rotmistrov’s medal for certain amount of Clanwars battles. It’s named after the commander of all Soviet armored forces in WW, Chief Marshal Pavel Alexeevich Rotmistrov. A strange choice indeed, because Rotmistrov’s combat command was not exactly successful, he got removed from active command allegedly because the unit he commanded suffered very high losses during the battle of Minsk in 1943. He was “kicked up” to strategic level and became the supreme armor commander in February 1944.

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Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/3378731.html

Hello everyone,

the fact that the rear turret VK4502 was scheduled to be buffed at some point was no secret. However, interesting info appeared on Russian forums. The supertest client contains a VK4502 Ausf.B armor buff as such:

As you can see, the frontal “machinegun” weakspot disappeared and the frontal hull armor was buffed to 200mm or so, it’s really hard to tell from one gif, as the colors are close to each other. The armor is completely unhistorical of course, so they might as well buff it this way (it was unhistorical even before, historically this vehicle’s armor was 80mm thick or so), but I think the best course of action would be to replace this vehicle completely with something else.

Either way, please keep in mind that this buff was not mentioned even in 9.2 supertest notes, so it’s completely possible that it will NOT appear in the 9.2 live version. It’s good that the devs are thinking of buffing this tank though.

Hello everyone,

thanks to Jusuchin for this one. Some of you know the excellent Youtube video channel and portal Forgotten Weapons (if you don’t, it’s definitely worth checking out, although the guy who runs it specializes on infantry weapons, mixing it occasionally with some heavier stuff). He recently took a short footage of the M18 Hellcat fire (unfortunately, he wasn’t able to make a full video), but damn, the firepower is impressive…