Hello everyone,

check this out – this is one REALLY detailed Lego model of a Tiger tank. Damn… that’s a lot of work right there. And it actually drives around! Seriously impressive.

Thanks to Vahakhn for this one.

Hello everyone,

recently, an article (or more like a commentary) came out on Cyprus Mail news site. Its topic is the general position of Cyprus in the current EU politics (especially regarding the Greece crisis), but it also mentions Wargaming’s involvement in Cyprus’ economy.

For one, Wargaming owns a large share in the Hellenic Bank of Cyprus. Recently, HB CEO announced plans to become the largest bank in Cyprus (currently, it’s third largest). This is very much related to Wargaming, as a shareholder of the said bank, but not limited to. Currently, according to the article, Wargaming is the largest taxpayer in Cyprus. No wonder Big Boss Kislyi is on first name basis with Cypriot minister of finance (as he confirmed in an earlier interview).

Currently, Wargaming is interested (apart from finishing their spectacular new HQ building in Nicosia) in buying as much free Cypriot property as possible as an investment for times when the games won’t be earning Wargaming money. In other words, Wargaming is now a completely Cypriot company and is there to stay.

Funnily enough, this was used against Wargaming not so long ago, when a representative from another company (Mail.Ru, the producer of Armored Warfare) accused Wargaming in Russia (during an official meeting of some parliament committee or so) of being an unpatriotic, “offshore company”. Cause quite a bit of stir, that one. Oh well :)

Source: http://yuripasholok.livejournal.com/4236614.html

Hello everyone,

as a part of the “Saint Infantry Tank Mk.III day”, Yuri Pasholok posted an interesting document about the performance of Valentine IX tanks in USSR. Valentine IX was a Valentine variant with a 57mm (6pdr, late model) gun. First vehicles of this type arrived in the USSR in early 1943. Design-wise, they were further developed from the Valentine III/V model by switching the original 2pdr for the larger 6pdr gun and removing the coaxial MG due to the large size of the new gun.

One Valentine IX was tested in March 1943 in Kubinka.

One of the things they tested was the visibility from the tank. Here’s how that ended for the driver:

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

World of Tanks: Generals (an online browser “card game”, announced very long time ago) finally reached the closed beta stage of development. Check out this trailer (Russian, with subtitles):

It is currently not clear, whether the CBT is open only for Russian players, or EU/US will be able to participate as well (the site is currently down), but knowing Wargaming… oh well, maybe we will be pleasantly surprised.

Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/pc-browser/12/love_strong_as_armor/

Hello everyone,

once again, we survived the Valentine’s Day (hopefully) unscathed, but when it comes to the topic of love, there’s one thing that I’d like to return to and it is the article on Russian WoT portal by Yuri Bakhurin, called “Love, strong as armor”, about the life story of Zhosef Kotin (the famous Soviet tank designer) and Anastasiya Polkonnova, who both got to live in the difficult times of WW2. This is their story.

Long before the war, in the early 30′s, when the Soviet army armored forces were being still re-armed, a girl student enlisted the F.E.Dzerzhinsky Military-Technical Academy. At first, Anastasiya “Nastya” Polkonnova was attending the Faculty of Chemistry, but after half a year, she achieved her goal of transferring to the Faculty of Mechanization and Motorization. It was not simple to keep up with other students, but she tried hard and she became very successful in mastering various armored vehicles, as confirmed by a number of “For exemplary tank driving” honor badges on her school dress. She did not only want to keep up, she wanted to be one of the best.

Continue reading →

Source: VK Express

Hello everyone,

just a couple of interesting numbers, as posted by the VK community, based on the data from SimilarWeb site. This data concerns the main worldoftanks.ru site, which is apparently the 74th most visited site in Russia and 28th most visited game site in the world.

- In January 2015, the number of visits on the portal is apparently 30,1 million people.
- average time spent on the site is 4 minutes 1 second
- one user views 3,37 pages on average
- bounce rate is 44,02

Out of those 30,1 million: 79,31 percent viewed only portal and news, 19,16 percent viewed also the forums and 0,23 percent viewed WoT Generals pages.

54,85 percent of the traffic for last 3 months on the site was direct, 23,34 percent from referrals, 17,13 percent from searches and only 2,08 percent from social networks. Of the searches, almost equally the same number came from google search and Yandex search. Of the social networks, most traffic (75 percent) came from Vkontakte, 18,6 percent from Youtube and only 2 percent from Facebook (followed by 1 percent from Twitter and Odnoklasniki).

Regarding the traffic, 2,35 percent of traffic came from advertising – the largest source are Google ads (Ukraine), followed by Youtube and Google ads (Russia).

Regarding the countries of the users:

67,65 percent of users is from Russia
18,67 percent from Ukraine
5,61 percent from Belarus
2,04 percent from Kazakzhstan
0,54 percent from Germany

Hello everyone,

as was written earlier, Wargaming is currently testing new physics system on supertest, that includes tipping tanks over on their roof – and…. well, I’ll just leave this here.

Yes, this is going to end well. To be quite honest, I am very skeptical of this. Last thing the game needs are outrageous flips, WT style. I talked to one of the supertesters and allegedly, it’s actually possible to make a tank do a 360 degrees (vertical) flip in the air. We’ll just have to wait for the open physics test, which should come relatively soon.

Hello everyone,

I think many of you noticed my recent distaste (an understatement) for Richard Cutland, originating in what I was told in person by WG RU people during our meeting in Prague – and trust me, there’s a very good reason for it, several in fact and I am sure they will come to light eventually, either on FTR or somewhere else. I’ll give you even a hint though: the story of why there are no more post-war French medium tanks aside from the upcoming AMX-30 Prototype and AMX-30 in the game (and there likely won’t be any more) is an interesting one and very relevant. If you knew what I know, you’d.. “dislike” him too, but there are reasons why I cannot talk. For now.

Nevertheless, the following content might be interesting to people and that restoration part is quite fascinating.

As usual, Richard Cutland is reading stuff (presumably from a teleprompter) and as usual, there are mistakes. The biggest one I noticed is that he connects the concept of an autoloader mechanism to the oscillating turret. There is absolutely no reason to, those two are completely unrelated, an autoloading mechanism could be added even to a normal turret.

Regarding the depression – “10 degrees is the usual rule” is a complete nonsense. There is no general gun depression rule, the Soviet tanks for example usually had much worse gun depression due to the tactics they were to be using.

Regarding the oscillating turret, Richard Cutland (or whoever wrote the script) failed to mention the biggest disadvantage by far. An oscillating turret, given its nature, is impossible to overpressurize and thus, a tank with oscillating turret is practically impossible to secure against NBC’s. This was considered a major disadvantage and it still is even to this day.

The statement that the 75mm is the Panther gun is problematic. It was certainly an inspiration of sorts, but it is hardly an identical gun. The late (!) gun is shorter than the Panther’s, but only by a bit (L/62 compared to L/70), it has roughly the same amount of performance as the Panther gun (yes, it’s underrepresented in the game for balance purposes). Also it is worth saying WHICH gun, because the original AMX-13 gun had lower muzzle velocity  and it was worse than the Panther KwK 42.

Oh, and Richard Cutlend mentions “hollow charge” ammunition for the 75mm gun: “hollow charge” is a term for HEAT – there was no such thing for 75mm (or at least definitely not a commonly used one), the upgraded ammunition was APCR (or even APFSDS).