RobotMinisterofTrueKorea

So from what I'm gathering he's claiming he's former WGA? He's not. His description of Customer Service being only five people proves he never set foot in the building.
 
And that's only one of about a hundred things he gets wrong. This is like, hilarious levels of inaccurate.

Yep. This is a load of semi-public information veiled as insider information.
 
This can also be read as: "We made shit up.".
 
Apparently X is really scared about getting identified, but doesn't care about everyone knowing that Victor is an asshole? I think he's one of the few people that's actually claiming that.
Or, you know, it's made up. Like a lot of shit on that website.
 
The 'best' part is that apparently he somehow tried to plant child porn on the PC of a WoT player he had an axe to grind with. It's the same dude he tries to doxx on his website. Not only did he fail at planting child porn, he apparently got caught trying to do so and has been reported to the FBI. And that doxx isn't a doxx per se because it's not actually that WoT player's information.

So, WoT Asia server is adding actual anime tanks now....
 
RIP WoT, you have crossed the event horizon. This game is dead kill.
 
Remove animea, you are worst tank.

US supercarriers have modest point defense systems, but they are going to traveling as part of a strike group that contains at least one aegis cruiser.  Smaller navies which can only deploy smaller strike groups have thicker defenses mounted on the carriers themselves.  INS Vikrant has short and long range SAMs, 76mm autocannons and 30mm CWIS, for example.
 
The tradeoff is that the Nimitz/Gerald R. Ford class carriers utterly dwarf all other carriers in sortie generation rate.  The Nimitz class can surge to 230 sorties per day for four days and sustain 120 sorties per day for extended periods.  The Navy was initially optimistic that the Gerald R Ford class could manage a 33% increase in sortie generation rate, but some newer sources are saying that it will only manage a 25% increase, at least initially.
 
The surge rates for the Queen Elizabeth class and the Charles de Gaulle are something like 120/day and 100/day respectively.  So even going all out, the next biggest non-US carriers can't even match a Nimitz's sustained sortie generation rate, much less a Gerald R Ford's.  Kuznetsov and her kin are lower still.  Not sure about the new Vikrant.
 
There appears to be an economy of scale that heavily favors really big carriers.  The US supercarriers appear to roughly match the best of their smaller peers in terms of maximum sorties per day per tonne of displacement, and appear to pull far ahead in terms of sustainable sorties per day per tonne of displacement (the figures for the CDG's latest cruise in Syria are not flattering, 12/day or something).  On top of that, the US supercarriers are a few knots faster than all the other carriers.
 
In short, giant, nuclear-driven American firepower for the win.
 

Nord 1500 Griffon
 

I see the JASDF has wisely heeded the warnings of Pierre Sprey and adopted a new true lightweight fighter.

Latest post. 
 
Post # 68 The Chieftain's Hatch does the M4A1, we review it: A great Hatch!
The video comes in two parts
The subject of the video is  Black Magic, small hatch, late production M4A1 if the turret came on it, though the turret or gun mount could be from other tanks. When it comes to restored tanks, I think being concerned about matching numbers is not a thing that seems to be worried about. This sherman started life as a canadian Grizzly, basically totally the same as an M4A1 with an extra small hatch in the hull floor.
This tank has almost all the quick fix upgrades, the extra armor over the hull ammo boxes but lacks the cheek armor on the turret, and the turret may, I can't tell for sure, have the cast in cheek armor, meaning it almost for sure didn't come on the hull.  It also lacks the armor plates added in front of the driver and co drivers positions, that the Chieftain calls "sheet metal".  It also has some late Sherman stuff, either added by the restorers, or by a depot rebuild later in the tanks life. The spot light, and 'gun crutch', or travel lock as normal people use were not on most small hatch shermans. Also the all around vision cupola would not be found on these tanks during WWII.
The Tom Jentz tangent. 
The Idea that, that the Sherman was no more reliable than any other tank, well, I don't buy it. I like Mr Jentz's work, and to some degree, his books helped inspire this site, since there was so little really detailing info on the Sherman out there, but I don't think he really knows much about the Sherman if he thinks tanks like Panther and Tiger just needed more spare parts to be reliable seems to show he may need to bone up on America's Sherman tank.  The lack of .50 machine gun storage mounts on the back of the turret is interesting, with all the other updates it should have those too.
First: The Chieftain himself has done Hatch posts on reports from the British, about how much more reliable, the M4A4 Sherman was than the Cromwell, even when both had full crews working to keep them running. both tanks were run thousands of miles, something late war German tanks could not do.
Second: In one of his own Hatches talks about the French experience with the mighty panther showed they averaged 150 kilometers per final drive set! Much less if the crew was hard on them.  There was no major automotive component including the oil, that had to be changed every 150 kilometers on any model of Sherman.
Third: This will focus on the Panther, since it was a major part of Germany's late war armored force, and how terrible it was. This tank didn't have just one flaw that should have disqualified it for production it had at least five. It was generally poorly reliable across all it's automotive components, along with the final drive, 2500 kilometers for the motor and 1500 for the trannty were hugely optimistic and most of these tanks broke down and or were destroyed before they had to refuel. You had to take the whole drivers and co drivers compartment apart and the top of the hull off to change a transmission! Don't get me started on the weak turret drive system that Rube Goldberg would have loved.  The  'wonderful' dual torsion bar suspension and interleaved road wheels would cause any maintenance nazi to find the nearest US Line and surrender instead of working on it!
. . .
Another thing to note, you can see the wholes drilled vertically in the suspension bogies, these are the tops of the holes the bolts that hold the suspension caps on go into. They were covered up with body filler by the factory, but on most restored and old Shermans the filler is gone, and they don't fill the holes.
Note: the odd grove in the center of the Hull casting, this wasn't done on all M4A1 tanks, and may have been unique to General Steel casting.
On the problems with the R975, I have not heard of complaints about the engine being easy to blow, and would be very surprised if the throttle wasn't governed to prevent it.  One have to crank the engine before starting, I have it on good authority, that the crew could just start the tank and run it for a few minutes every 45 minutes to an hour to avoid having to hand crank the motor.
Many of units removed the sand shields in ETO to prevent problems with mud.
The Commanders vane site is an early version bolted to a late pad vane site pad. The tank has the early style gunner's periscope.  The gunners periscope is missing the linkage going down to the gun.  The radio looks like a 528.  Note the Armored doors on all the ammo boxes and ready rack. The tank is missing a lot of interior storage, it may have been removed in preparation on shipping the tank out.
I'm not expert, but I think the Chieftain confused a .30 cal ammo bin for the 75mm ammo bin right next to his shoulder for the location of an SCR-506, I just can't see a WWII radio fitting in the tiny box! You can see how sparsely filled the interior is, as issued the tank would be stuffed full of item to help fight it, live with it, or keep it running.  The Chieftain shows just how easy even a small hatch Sherman was to get out of,  the the Loader was still going to have some issues.  I wish he would have tried the belly hatch out, but maybe it's welded shut or something.
He covers the small floor hatch on the Grizzly tanks, and you get a nice shot of the early escape hatch.  They also show the generator mounted on the rear of the transmission in one of the shots, briefly.  You can also see the full turret basket's mesh screening that separated the turret crew from the hull crew. Part of the quick fix was to cut this all out.  I suspect most of the inconsistencies in the tanks details are due to the restoration crew using the Sherman parts they could get their hands on.  Very few people would  even notice or know it had the wrong commanders hatch, or even whole turret.
A note on the tank, it belonged to a the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation, a fancy name for the collection of a man named Jacques Littlefield. He had a passion for armored vehicles of all types but really like tanks. He restored many to full functionality, including working main guns and machine guns on some tanks.  Owning a working tank cannon is easier than you would think, and far easier than getting the paperwork approved to own machine guns in California, and Jacques Littlefield did both.  He employed a restoration crew with world class skills and did some amazing restorations, including a Panther A that was impossibly damaged, but still brought back to life.  That Panther was his crowing achievement, and he was a real mover an shaker in the international military vehicle restoration scene, seeing that tank run was one of the last things he achieved, because cancer claimed him shortly after.
The MVTF was supposed to make sure the collection of vehicles, that were a labor of love his whole life, life on when he passed. Unfortunately the location of the MVTF, Portola California, on a large chunk of very private property, with very limited parking really presented some problem.  The collection was used often while it was there by TV productions like Myth Busters, and was a staple for the Wargaming Staff for their productions.  There were other difficulties with the location, and ultimately the collection was donated to the Collings Foundation.  They reportedly decided to keep keep 40 of the most significant vehicles and auction the rest off.  The money from the auction was going to be used to build a facility in Stowe Massachusetts, but due to zoning issues, the permits were not provided, leaving the vehicles they did keep in limbo.
I'm sure the Collings Foundation, a really amazing Charity the keeps many rare WWII aircraft, and cars, including race cars running, has a plan for the rest of the tanks. Their website only lists the Panther in their collection, I hope that doesn't mean they sold the rest when the museum fell through.  That's not a criticism of the CF, they I'm sure know their business far better than I do, and they really are a top notch group of people. Just browse that site to see the airplanes they gotten flying.  The only real B-24 liberator and a working F-4 Phantom are just two of the notable planes!!  If you know anything about aviation, you know just how complicated and expensive keeping an aircraft like a Phantom flying, especially if you don't have the resources of the U.S. Navy or Air Force.
I have to say, this is one of the best Chieftain's hatches they have done. Granted, I'm a tad biased, since it was on the Sherman, well a Grizzly made into a later model small hatch Sherman anyway, and the Chieftain really has gotten pretty good with the Sherman and its sub variants, and even has a book on US WWII TDs on the way.
 
 
 
 
 
Plus these c

This is pretty magical:

Nice.

The US State Department and other US government organs believed their own propaganda.  Remember this?



The US government is filled with aging Baby Boomers who feel considerable nostalgia about the social uprisings that defined their generation.  They also feel guilt about not having participated in them more vigorously, and wish to vicariously participate in such uprisings elsewhere.  They became convinced that the entire Arab world was filled with hip, Western-educated young people who aspired to live in shiny, Western-style democracies instead of shabby, corrupt dictatorships.  With a little help from their friends in Washington DC, they could make their dreams a reality!  Yes we can!
 
Also, once the revolution was complete there were going to be some shady oil deals and whatnot to sweeten the deal for some of the people involved.  The first batch of diplomatic cable leaks have alluded to some of these.  But this isn't to say that the US government started all this chaos to get their hands on oil.  They're simply not that rational.  The horrifying thing about US foreign policy is that the US is so overwhelmingly powerful, and so completely insulated from the consequences of its actions, that the primary goal of US foreign policy is to posture and to gain advantage in US domestic politics.  If you live outside the US, you are just a puppet on a string, dancing to a solipsistic and insane tune played by the blind idiot god of America.  Unless you live in Russia or China and to a lesser extent India.  They have nukes and they're not afraid to tell the US government to shove it.  Everywhere else?


 
So, the Democratic Party and their extended network of allies in the State Department and elsewhere decided to prove their purity and support for Democracy by assisting in the overthrow of secular dictatorships throughout the Middle East.  This was, in retrospect, and also a the time, obviously a bad idea.  While these countries did have large numbers of hip, westernized youth who were tired of the corruption and economic stagnation of their homelands, these countries had even larger numbers of Islamists who were older, better-funded, better-organized, and far better at playing the game.  The results were entirely predictable; the young, cool, hip protesters who basically wanted to turn the entire southern coast of the Mediterranean into LA were quickly displaced and cowed into silence by barbarians who want to dynamite the pyramids and conquer all of their neighbors so they can have them as rape-slaves.  Also, I want to point out that that last sentence sounds like a breezy, poetic exaggeration but it's actually literally true.
 
This happened pretty quickly; it was obvious that Islamist elements were wearing the pants only a few months into the Arab Spring movement.  But the US government does not let mere facts stop it.  Instead of quickly pulling support and walking away while pretending nothing happened at all, the US government decided that if Islamists had taken over pro-Democracy protests, Islamists must be the true face of Democracy in the Middle East.  Seriously; that's how come you get retarded buzzfeed articles like this one lamenting the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood.
 
Very quickly, a number of governments that managed not to implode decided that if Uncle Sam was going to act all retarded and shit, they might as well do their best to make sure that it was directed at their enemies.  These countries, chiefly Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel, formed a surprisingly effective alliance of strange bedfellows that aimed at exporting their domestic political problems and at sticking it to the Persians.  Saudi Arabia has a long history of religious radicalism, and an almost equally long history of exporting those radicals so they can get killed by airstrikes from civilized countries.  Qatar is a Salafist country that is looking very nervously at their own 20% Shia minority and what's going on in Yemen and Iraq.  Turkey is run by a knuckle-dragger who stays on top because his opponents are completely retarded, and who needs displays of foreign military might to keep his base satisfied with his lack of internal success.  Israel's Likud government has a precarious hold on power and opposes an Iranian ally and long-standing rival.
 
So, by making sure that a bit of money got into the right pockets, this coalition has kept the mostly Islamist opposition in Syria fed and armed.  Propaganda in the US, funded by the Saudis and powered by boomer egos, has mainly kept the public from realizing that this is exactly the sort of anthill that the US does not need to stick its dick into, although they have remained opposed to large-scale deployment of ground forces.
 
The biggest losers are, of course, the mainly secular, hip, westernized youth for whose benefit this idiotic operation was started.  And yes, I'm sure they would grit their teeth and side with Assad if any of them haven't been killed.

Some Photos of Gripen E production
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

North Korean tractor driving simulator:
 

 
From here.

CA ANG F-106 launching a Genie at Berkeley (I wish).

CA ANG F-106 launching a Genie at Berkeley (I wish).

If the Germans had somehow captured an M48A3, it would soon be sporting a pagoda greenhouse that would rival Japanese battleships.

The answer to this is "whatever junk Britain writes off next" or "whatever American lobbyists convince your government to buy".

No, no.  You see, that is a toy Abrams.  It was selectively bred to be smaller.

De Havilland Sea Vixen

Playing WT is a strange departure from WoT. In some ways, it is much more in depth and involved, and there are many aspects that I like. However, it is even more random than WoT. You could be repeatedly shelling and penetrating an enemy tank with APHE, sending fragments into every conceivable internal module and crew member, and they can just drive away as if nothing happened. Then, a couple minutes later, a single 20mm autocanon round finds it's way through your armor, and either instantly kills you outright, or stuns your entire crew, and knocks out your engine and transmission leaving you immobilized and unable to fight back.