Monday 7 September 2015

More Kolohousenka pictures

The blue color is a placeholder (obviously) :)







Supertest - Czechoslovak Tier 1 Kolohousenka

Hello warriors,

Czechoslovak tier 1 appeared on supertest - the Kolohousenka. Want to read more about it? Check out Silentstalker's article about how it came to be. After the article came out, the vehicle was changed - now it has only one of each module, but two guns. The fun part is - it's a hybrid, it has KH-50 hull and KH-70 turret (that's because WG devs didn't bother to model the top gun for both turrets).




Description:


One of the first Czechoslovak attempts to build an indigenous vehicle was this light wheel-cum-track tank. It was built using the Hanomag WD-50 suspension designed by Joseph Vollmer in late 20s. It was never accepted in service since by the time the development was completed, it was already obsolete. Several prototypes were built in three variants and three vehicles were sold to Italy and Soviet Union. One vehicle of this type served until 1935 as a training vehicle.

Tier: 1 LT
Hitpoints: 110
Engine: 50 hp (WD-50PS)
Weight: 7,925 tons
Power-to-weight: 6,31 hp/t
Maximum speed: 25/8 km/h (buffed from historical 15 km/h)
Hull traverse: 40 deg/s
Turret traverse: 28 deg/s
Terrain resistance: 0,767/0,959/1,438
Viewrange: 280
Radio range: 90 (signal flags)

07.09.2015 Stream (Ended)

Hello Warriors,

Will be livestreaming WoT for the next couple hours, cant promise a long stream as this one been burning in fever for the past 2 days.

Got a new tier 10 and been grinding the Soviet TD line as most recently.

As usual, 197 tanks, EU/NA:  http://www.twitch.tv/ritagamer2

Steady as she goes!

07.09.2015 Q&A

Storm is collecting info from RU players about the performance in 9.10 - apparently many players reported FPS drops in 9.10.

- there is a lot of outrage on RU forums regarding the Type 59/Patton hybrid because it is underpowered and overpriced, players are expecting it to appear as a marathon prize soon anyway
- in new motion physics, artillery and TD's won't be able to make a quick U-turn ("handbrake police turn"), this is intentional for fast TD's not to do that quickly
- apparently there is a bug in 9.10 - camouflage doesn't display properly on HD models, it will be investigated
- Storm states that the bug where in some cases the silhouettes do not appear properly could not be reproduced by Wargaming
- Storm states that the current level of WoT is "satisfactory" - there will be serious optimizations in the future however
- current WoT performance is better than it was before 9.0
- for now there is no hotfix patch ready yet for 9.10

X3 Weekly

Hello Warriors,

From Tuesday 8 September at 07:10 until Saturday 12 September at 07:00 CEST (UTC +2) EU server will have X3 XP for the first victory of each day.


Enjoy!

"It's a Fake!" - Chinese Fake Edition

Hello warriors,

you know what really grinds my gears? World of Tanks double standards. Take the Chieftain. As you know, it'll be arriving soon (9.11?) and Wargaming went to great lengths to make sure it's completely historical. They contacted Bovington where the Mk.2 Chieftain was supposed to be and much to the "amusement" of some of the developers, it turned out that Bovvies mislabeled their Chieftain and it's actually a Mk.6 - with so much effort invested, Wargaming decided to rename the ingame Chieftain to Mk.6 - and that's it.

Of course, the reason why the Chieftain was implemented in the first place was that its predecessor - FV215b is a Wargaming fake (there was no such project with a 120mm gun anyway). Storm announced some time ago that WoT would eventually get rid of all the fake vehicles (well, except for the E50M because there's apparently no replacement for that - plus, it's not a total 100 percent fake).

Hue hue hue, as it happens, that promise didn't last very long.

Enter Type 59/Patton hybrid, a fake. Or, is it a fake?






Yea, it's a fake. Not a Wargaming one though. Basically, WG got "info" from its Chinese partner (Kongzhong) that such a vehicle existed. What a coincidence! A model that re-uses existing model parts for cheaper production (like the T95/Chieftain hybrid - that's not a fake though, that was actually considered). Naturally, this tank did not come with any historical references, only a short notice that it was considered.

After inquiries with WG developers and Chinese armor experts (everyone's answer being *shrugs* and silence), we can safely assume Kongzhong made this shit up. Alright, fair enough - Chinese market doesn't care. But why on earth would anyone introduce Chinese fakes to the western market? It's not like there aren't better candidates for hightier premiums (*cough* US TD *cough*).

Long story short, it's a fake. It's not a bad tank (based on the testing performed), just made up. Really, Wargaming...why not leave Chinese fakes for the Chinese market?

Czechoslovak Tanks alread in Game

Not quite, but still, this is something really interesting.

A bunch of Czechoslovak players (carramba66, madman_24 and menechip) got creative and - using some of the decals and other elements implemented for Czechoslovakia in 9.10 as well as some custom skins - re-created some of the situations the Czechoslovak tanks appeared in troughout history. The original in Czech can be found here. Some of those are really nice screenshots

This is by the way one of the reasons why the Czechs and Slovaks got their own tree - do you see other communities (Italian, Swedish) doing something like this?

ČSLA (Czechoslovak People's Army) - Šumava 1984, Štít 84 excercise, T-55A advancing