Thanks to Sander B. for this info (guys, leave nicknames when you write me :) )

Source: official Munster web pages (in German)

Hello everyone,

today I wrote an article about the RU251 and the negative attitude of Munster (and other German institutions) towards World of Tanks. What I didn’t know was – there is even an official Panzermuseum Munster statement (link above) regarding World of Tanks. I will translate it from German then (not literally, but to keep the meaning). Some parts I ommitted, as they basically repeat the same – if any German would be so kind to translate it better (did my best), I will be glad to fix my own translation. Also, keep in mind this was written some time ago, apparently after the great accuracy buff last year, in April/May.

Tank Museum and World of Tanks – a complicated relationship

In May, the tank history in the museum will be experienced in a different way: there will be cheer, laugh, hundreds of tanks will be destroyed for the general happiness and fun. In the May weekend, company Wargaming will build a promotion stand here. In this stand, their game (and the mainstay of the entire company) “World of Tanks” (furthermore only WOT) will be advertised and available for playing on like a dozen computers.

………. (explanation of what WoT is)

In principle, World of Tanks brings only such content, that goes directly against the values (SS: literally statements) the tank museum tries to convey:

- clinically clean battlefield: you cannot see any people, be it soldiers or civillians. Pain and suffering, death and mutilation, that’s no problem. The war is only a “tag, you’re it!” game and when your tank gets destroyed, you hear them say stuff like “This vehicle had it, let’s get out”. Only occasional statements, such as “they killed our driver” indicate that there’s a war going on after all.

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Edit: comments disabled after some very nasty outbursts. Gonna go through the filth later to see if there is anything ban-worthy. I am very disappointed in some commenters.

Hello everyone,

a very, very long time ago (like mid 2012 or so), there was a discussion about the possible Israeli medium branch in World of Tanks. One of the ideas kicked around was to actually have a Merkava on tier 10. Now, I know what you thinking – that’s a ridiculous idea. Merkava would never fit, right? Well… yes and no.

Above, we can see the Merkava Mk.1 from the Latrun tank museum. It’s the first model of this famous Israeli vehicle, entering service in late 70′s. According to wikipedia, Merkava was developed from 1973, making it too new for World of Tanks (even if it could fit characteristic-wise). Or is it?

According to the book “Merkava – a History of Israel’s Main Battle Tank” by Marsh Gelbart, the development actually started in 1970, with the first prototype coming in 1974. This is a mock-up turret variant, dated 1970:

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Hello everyone,

it is finally here. After months of organizing and work, the Veteran charity event (to which some of you contributed) is finally, concluded, all the money collected was used for buying the things the veterans need, contracts were closed, things were distributed and now it is done. It actually took five long months due to various complications, including health issues of some of the veterans and other matters we had to attend to.

Well… I say “we”, but most of the work was done by Clearevil and carramba66, especially Clearevil was the “ground trooper”, who went with the Veteran association (ČSLO) members to visit the veterans themselves and oversaw the entire thing. Here’s a “closure” video, made by carramba66… I hope you like it.

Translation of the Video (spoken by carramba66)

Five months ago, we asked you, World of Tanks community members, to contribute to the charity we organized in order to help Czechoslovak tankers, WW2 veterans. When we organized the charity, we assumed that we would collect 400-600 Euro, which we will use to buy for example medical accessories for one of the veterans. The amount of money collected however exceeded original estimates several times and so, thanks to you, we could help not one, but fifteen members of Czechoslovak tank units from both the western and eastern front.

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Hello everyone,

once again it’s the time to thank the contributors, it’s you who keep FTR running after all! This time, following people donated via Paypal:

Sean C. (United States) – thank you for considerable donation – much appreaciated :)
Lars R.T. (Denmark) – thank you for a large contribution, mate!

The best way to help me and FTR is via the Patreon service

http://www.patreon.com/silentstalker

This is the Patreon account of For the Record. In case you read this for the first time and feel like contributing, here is an explanation what it is, how it works and how to contribute. You can find a list of all those, who pledged and help to keep FTR running here.

Thank you all!

Hello everyone,

as you all well know, the RU251 tank was announced a very long time ago (January 2013!) as the upcoming German tier 8 light tank. It’s been a year and the vehicle is still not there, leaving the German light tanks end with the less-than-popular Aufklärungspanzer Panther.

Now, I made some inquiries regarding the fate of this tank, because this is not the first time this has happened. Basically, Wargaming has been trying to get any info on that vehicle for ages, but it was rebuked several times by German government. This did not only happen with the RU251 by the way – the same thing happened with the Leopard Prototype B, that’s why we don’t have it in the game and that’s why it’s very unlikely this vehicle will become German hightier premium.

As I said, I asked the EU player Madestcat, who made some inquiries.. Don’t ask for details, but he asked here and there and the answer he sent me was this:

Auf Nachfrage habe ich folgende Info erhalten: Der RU 251 steht auch in Trier und wird demnächst restauriert. Aber auch für den RU 251 wird Minsk keine Genehmigung zur Untersuchung erhalten. Es gilt das gleiche Verbot wie für den Leopard Prototyp B. Tut mir Leid. Das deutsche Verteidigungsministerium will nichts mit Kriegsspielen zu tun haben. Ich kann da leider nichts dran ändern.

“Upon inquiry, I recieved the following info: RU251 currently also stands in Trier and will be restored soon. But Minsk will not recieve the permission to research it. It’s the same ban, like for the Leopard Prototype B. I am sorry. German Ministry of Defense wants to have nothing to do with war games. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about that.”

This info corresponds to other info I recieved from other sources. Even Yuri Pasholok noted that the attitude of Germans towards Russian researchers is less than warm currently as it is. Wargaming will either have to do with available photos (there are very few) or should start looking for another candidate…

Hello everyone,

ever since the entire 9.0 mess with FPS drops and other issues, I kinda dropped World of Tanks, but it got fixed (sort-of), so I decided to try historical battles once again. I mean, I have a 5 perk crew in the most ubiquitous vehicle of all, Panzer IV (and StuG), how hard can it be to get into battle with that? Time to get that 50 percent more credit income for playing Panzer IV in Ardennes!

Well… I play on EU2 server (65k players online at that moment about an hour ago) and…

Yea… literally nobody playing the Ardennes. After a few minutes of wait, there was not a single battle in any vehicle. Oh well, time to switch server. Switched to EU1.

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Hello everyone,

players Rabiesdog and IRSanchez contacted me with a link to their big post made about their trip to military museum in Warsaw (Poland), dedicated to weapons Poland and Polish troops used. The post was excellent (very informative) and with Rabiesdog’s permission, I am going to repost it here (with a bit different formatting). The original post can be found here.

Enjoy!

From here on pics from the Museum and some explanatory text from the info plaquettes.

TS-8 *Bies* Training aircraft

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Part I – Introduction
Part II – Italy, Czechoslovakia
Part III – Hungary

Hello everyone,

it’s been a while since the last part, but I hope you haven’t forgotten – it’s time for one of the most interesting parts of the EU tree concept: Sweden.

Hearing about Sweden in connection with computer games always makes me smile – the reason for that is my experience with Warcraft, specifically Frostwhisper server, which was predominantly Scandinavian and “SWE???” equalled to World of Tanks “Siemka kto PL” – it practically became a meme of the server at one point. Make no mistake though – there is nothing funny about Swedish tanks – in fact, using currently known rules for tree creation (“all classes have to end either with a merge, or a tier 10″), Sweden is the only nation in the prospective EU tree, that could actually build a tree of its own, having enough vehicles for each class.

I will be drawing heavily from the work of Renhaxue and sp15 – the first being well-known for digging through Swedish archives on his blog, the latter being the author of the Swedish series on this blog (in case you are interested, click the “History” button, scroll to the bottom of the page, find “Sweden”, the links are all there).

I was a bit reluctant to post about Sweden earlier for four reasons:

- I know only little about tanks
- sp15 is already doing it
- not to steal anyone’s research
- there is SO much stuff and the proposal is quite complex

So, I am going to give you an overview of what the proposed Swedish branch (or more like a tree) is about and will either link you to details, or sp15 will just get to them eventually in the Swedish series on FTR.

This is the draft of the Swedish tree, as proposed by sp15.

Yea, there’s a lot of stuff. Columns from left to right: heavies, meds, lights/meds, tank destroyers, tank destroyers, artillery. Let’s start with the easy stuff.

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