Two weeks ago I ran a little competition with the prizes supplied by the Wargaming EU office. Now its my first time doing something like that, and I made a few mistakes. So for the answers and to find out if you're a winner, to see some of the odd answers, or to see where I dropped a clanger read on!
World of Warships closed Alpha test access.The question I asked you to answer was:
"Name the only capital ship that has directly sunk a Submarine."
I got a mind blowing 171 entries, and most of you said HMS Dreadnought, which was of course the answer I was after.
However a few of you said other ships which I went and had a look at, and in a couple of cases they had rammed and sunk friendly submarines. Obviously it was my fault as I had missed out the word "Enemy" from the question; the only fair way around the problem was to count the alternative answers as correct.
The two alternative answers where the French battleship Saint Louis, which had an unfortunate habit of bumping into allied ships and on June 8th 1912 she rammed the submarine Vendémiaire. That one was submitted by farmpunk from the NA server.
The second alternative answer was the USS New York, which hit something, judged to be a submarine, however it wasn't actually confirmed. But I was willing to give it possible credit. However I didn't need to, as when I randomly rolled up which number entry was the winner both had said HMS Dreadnought.
Congratulations to Nabusco, (NA) and Ghanschje, (EU). You were both selected by random drawing to get the prize from the list of people who answered the question.
But lesson learned, I will make sure I write the wording in the questions more carefully in future!
Quite a number of you misread the question and listed ships that had been sunk by submarines. Of which the most common were the Japanese ship Kongo, HMS Royal Oak and HMS Barham. A few answered HMS Warspite (which was my answer when I first heard the question), but she didn't sink the Submarine, it was one of her aircraft.
A couple of you named craft that sunk a submarine, such as PC-566. But that's a patrol craft, not a capital ship. Equally one person named a Q-ship (HMS Farnborough). Again even with the best will in the world a Q-ship isn't a capital unit.
Quiz
We had 44 entries for this, of which three of you got all five questions right, and eleven got four questions right.
I) Name the World War Two German armoured fighting vehicle that had the knocked out the most enemy tanks
Answer is of course, the humble Stug III.
II) Name the most produced armoured vehicle in history.
A lot of you answered T54 series, which is most produced tank, but is still about 10-25 thousand (depending on which source you use) units behind the correct answer, which is the Universal Carrier, racking up an impressive 113000 units produced.
III) By the end of World War Two almost every country in the world that had a tank arm had used a single model of tank, or a derivative. Name that tank.
This one got your brains going! It was also the one most people got wrong. There's some very good guesses, such as the Vickers 6 ton. Sherman's, Stuarts and T-34's were all also suggested.
The correct answer was the FT-17, or a derivative of it, such as the Ford 6 ton or the Fiat 3000. If you look into almost every army in the world it's likely their first tank was the FT-17. Even Germany used FT17's that they'd captured during WWII.
IV) during April 1943 a British officer's body was washed up on the coast of Spain. On his body were top secret documents about the upcoming invasion of Greece. What was the bodies real name.
I asked for the bodies name, not the officers name. The answer is of course (To quote one of you who got it right) "The unpronounceable Glyndwr Michael."
V) Name the highest scoring British Empire ace from World War One.
This one caught me out as well. When I first thought it up I went and checked scores. An old book I had listed the person as Major Edward "Mick" Mannock. However recent research shows that it wasn't Maj Mannock but William "Billy" Bishop who was the top scoring Empire ace.
I got the dates on question VI wrong. The question originally read:
"From the End of World War Two until the start of Operation Desert Storm how many tank on tank engagements had American forces fought in?"
And I utterly forgot about the Korean War. Whoops. It should have had "World War Two" replaced with "Korean War", and the answer was two.
So T-127's to the following people:
GrumpyStranger (EU), perdi (EU), Invictus97 (NA), ZdeSpi (EU), Dominatus (NA), Iceclouds (EU), Rossignal (NA), jerze75 (EU), nekojima (NA) and The_MythMaker (EU).
Write an Article
Again forty entries, ranging in subject from chocolate to gun stabilization. It was harder than I expected to pick four winners. However you'll be seeing the results of that over the next few weeks.
I am sorry to say that four people tried to plagiarize, and win with entries copied from other peoples work. All were caught out, and had their entries for all the other competitions removed. One particularly bad cheater failed on three points. First he ripped off someone else's work. Second he only copied 300 odd words and finally he picked a subject that very little is known about. Unfortunately for him I was a consultant on that subject for another company a few years ago so I know rather a lot about it...
Over all however thanks for the entertaining answers, the great articles, and for giving me a bit more experience in this kind of thing. Hopefully next years will run smoother.
