with a bit of delay, I am reporting this sad news that Mikhail Nikolaevich Svirin passed away on 24.5.2014 after long illness. For those, who don’t know the name – he was the foremost Soviet tank researcher, one of the first ones to start writing about the Soviet tanks in detail and he was as important for Soviet tank history publication as Hilary Doyle is for the German tank history – he did a tremendous amount of work in the field and in his last years, he created a military history club near Moscow, where he worked with “troubled” youth.
According to Sergei “SerB” Burkatovsky, Svirin’s work was instrumental in creating the early World of Tanks Soviet tank line, M.Svirin also helped SerB with writing his historical science fiction book “Main Date”.
history shows us a lot of examples of countries, that didn’t have the resources to support their own indigenous tank research, which started instead modifying the western (or Russian) designs. This was very typical not only for smaller European nations, but it was especially pronounced in Africa and South America. South-American engineering made often do with designs, that were considered obsolete for decades in the countries of their origin – in other cases (Nahuel), South American countries (Argentina) were even possible to construct their own tanks literally from nothing. Back to the upgrades however – one such design was the Brazilian X1 (heavily modified Stuart tank), another such case, which we are going to discuss today, was the Crusader Argentino SPG.
Argentina undisputedly belongs to the most powerful countries of the continent (when it comes to military), along with Brazil and Chile. In Argentina’s case, this is even confirmed by the history – due to the Allied embargo on Argentinian military industry during WW2, Argentina was basically forced to create their own medium tank and – surprisingly enough – they actually succeeded, creating something that actually resembled the Sherman in a lot of aspects. In the end, it was quite a bite to chew for the undeveloped industry of Argentina, but nevertheless, 16 tanks of the indigenous type called “Nahuel” were made.
US player Meirzin recently visited the 45th Infantry Division Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and decided to share some of the pics. Some of the pictures are quite interesting here they are. If I mislabeled any of the tanks, let me know.
Russia’s flagging tank maker UralVagonZavod, or UVZ, is boosting its cyber-image by partnering with online video game makers, Russian media reported Monday.
UVZ, based in the Urals city of Nizhny Tagil, became the byword for blue-collar conservatism in Russia after a company worker pledged on live television in 2011 to lead his colleagues in a crackdown on anti-Kremlin protests spearheaded by young computer-savvy urbanites.
we have another guest article today, this time by Listy, well-known poster and article author, his work got featured even on official WoT portal. Enjoy!
Author: David “Listy” Lister
For the last few months, the history battles mode has been in game. Its fair to say that so far the mode has been one giant flop, much to mine and several other person’s annoyance. When it first came out, I was a good little player and I brought a Panzer IVH solely for HB and queued up each day. But I only ever got two games in. After the first couple of days, every time I queued the counter would hit five minutes and boot me back to the garage, because the Matchmaker couldn’t find a game.
This got me thinking and the results of those musings are contained here along with a couple of possible fixes.
The problems with HB are sort of everyone’s fault. While yes some of it is Wargaming’s fault, other faults lie with you, the players – in part. My take on why HB have been a flop is simple: Everyone is queueing in the most overpowered of the tanks available to the battle. How many teams did you see in the Ardennes that were mostly made up of Hellcats for example?
in 9.1, a new feature is coming to World of Tanks, the “kill marks” on tank barrels. They come in different forms – some, like the German kill rings are well documented. But what about others – the Chinese for example?
Check the new article by Listy about US Marines serving in China
- Storm on quoting Discovery Channel (Great Tank Battles show) as a historical source: “Discovery is even more laughable than Wikipedia. My source are our historical consultants.” (SS: the question was, whether there were Tigers in Ardennes – there were a few, they didn’t fight though)
- for now, developers aren’t considering removing the rule where both sides have to have the same amount of arty (and scouts) (SS: this rule is not absolute, I think there is +/-1 tolerance)
- Storm states that when it comes to historicity of guns in World of Tanks – made up tanks (WT E-100) can have any gun that fits, historical tanks can only have guns they had in real life
- Storm regarding the assault mode: “What is there to comment? It’s a normal mode. I play it from the beginning without switching it off.”
- Storm, explaining why assault and encounter modes don’t have their own specialized maps and responding to a player who claims they are bland:
“Because we don’t consider it rational to make maps for those mods only. You personally decide the level of blandness of a mode? Are there any normal criteria that determine “blandness”? Assault and Encounter mode are finished and polished. Historical battles are in the state of finding the correct solution.”
- Storm reacting on the “28 bots in one game” video: “You’d have to find out what is shown in there in general and how it happened. Personally, I don’t have time to do this on Sunday. Sorry.”
- according to Storm, the TD share in battles has long since stopped growing and now is within normal frame. WG checks every month.
- too many TD’s in battles? “Statistics do not confirm that” and “We do not observe the dominance of TD’s”
- long map loading? “We are investigate this issue”
- Storm states that the IS-7 buff planned was a hoax started by Jove (Russian streamer), there will be no buff (SS: to my eternal shame, I jumped on this too – basically, he – or someone else – photoshopped a fake screenshot of “Storm’s post”)
This is how the fake looked (quite convincing)
- Storm doesn’t know whether the A45/FV201 will be a tier 7 or 8 and when will it come
- situations where you get the same map several times in a row are apparently okay
Codes are for 1000 gold and 7 days of premium and are valid for EU and US only. These are invite codes fornew players only, you can’t use it on existing accounts – if you don’t need it, don’t waste it.
