Source: world-of-kwg livejournal
Huge thanks to Vlad for translating.
As you already may probably know, Yuri is Wargaming’s main tank historian. I will quote his post:
„In case somebody missed it, we had some drama over here. […] (Seb: link to another blog, but it is basically the same stuff as here: SP15’s Original Rant)
The essence of what’s happening is the following: SP15, one of the two Swedish historians who made the Swedish tree possible, exploded. WG totally screwed up the tree, the models are wrong, it does not correlate with historical data etc.
I, of course, understand the anger of SP15, the tree really is not quite like it was planned. But let’s look at how things happened the way they did. I personally learned about this drama from the internet and was quite surprised.
Let’s start by sorting out who SP15 was talking to. With us, the historians, he was talking exactly ONCE. In Stockholm, in January 2015. I didn’t hear anything from him after that. This poses a question: who was he talking to, and who broke the tree?
The answer is simple: he was talking to a person who is known on the EU and NA server as Cannoneer. In contrast to myself, who isn’t an official Wargaming employee (and never was), he is working there oficially. But there’s a nuance. He is working in the balancing department. There are no historians in this department, and if there is someone who thinks of himself as a historian, that’s his personal problem.
There is also another interesting fact. We historians have contacts regarding the Swedish branch, namely Renhanxue. We’re working with him exactly as we have worked together with Silentstalker. We’re thankful to both of them, the archive material provided by them formed the basis of drawings which became game models later on. We also are doing archive work, so we contributed to these as well.
Now, let’s talk about wrong models and wrong specifications.
You know, after we recieved stuff regarding the Swedish vehicles and started to verify it, we had some quarrels. Swedish schematics. The fact that they oftentimes do not correlate with each other is only half of the problem. It all becomes even merrier when you start comparing numbers.
If we’ve already mentioned the EMIL 1951, i’ll just leave this here.
http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/yuripasholok/765139/3641506/3641506_original.jpg
In other words, with the given elevation angle, the rear turret niche enters the engine compartment, and with the depression angle, the gun enters the hull. These are just frontal elevation and depression, not taking left-right movement into account.
Regarding inaccuracies: some changing of the proportions of this same EMIL 1951 is a result of trying to press broken schematics into broken specifications.
Regarding broken schematics:
http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/yuripasholok/765139/3651271/3651271_original.jpg
To stay on point: may I ask who decided to plug a 105mm gun into the EMIL 1951 which it did not have? And put a 120mm gun, which is actually a bit weaker than the D-25, in the top configuration? Wasn’t this SP15?
And this stuff continues on and on. In the schematics on the Strv 74 with a wheeled base the error was twenty (20!) centimeters. We then manually calculated each wheel and the distance between them, since we couldn’t believe it at first.
Now, regarding the LAGO. This may be breaking news for SP15, but the LAGO existed in three configurations – 1938, 1940 and 1941. Let’s look at the 1940 LAGO:
May I ask what’s wrong here?
I can say that our draftsmen broke their brains over the Swedish schematics. One of them “broke” entirely, we almost lost him. He was working with the EMIL 1951, by the way. Instead of 1,5 months he was working 4, he’s still trying to come to his senses. And before that, he worked for 3 months on Strv m/38, since the factory schematics really didn’t correlate with the real vehicle. We’ve came to a point where the most correct material were schematics of the Toldi I, which were made by the testing department in Kubinka. Thank god they are based on the same vehicle.
All in all, we historians are somewhat confused. It’s weird to expect good results if you have tooth pain and go to the proctologist instead of the dentist to heal it. Both are medics, both work on parts of the body, but there’s a nuance…
By the way, SP15 is not the first one. Mizutayio, who works on the Swiss tree, also made the same mistake at first. And before that, the guys who work on the British vehicles did the same.
Afterwards, I can only recommend SP15 to calm down a bit and take up a constructive position. For example, seek contact with us, after 1,5 years you might want to do that. Neither I nor my colleagues do like any of the things that happened, it’s sad that the story took such a turn but to say that WG is to blame about everything is not quite correct. It’s weird to talk about historical accuracy when you talked with historians once, in a cafe.
P.S.: Neither the historians nor the balancing department do take final decisions on matters of trees and branches. This is done by different people entirely. And we have a game about tanks, not an encyclopedia. Thus, changes in branches are usually unavoidable.”
