Have you ever looked back at work you did when younger or looked back at your social media posts from your teen years and thought "What the hell was I thinking?". Well that is me today, and it is time to touch upon a subject we've covered at least three times on here, and this I hope will be the final time. This is also an apology as a young historian I made a mistake.
We are all aware of the "Super Conqueror" that is spreading like wildfire around the internet. Well after seeing it appear, as a model kit after its WOT release, I began to feel a bit like Dr Frankenstein, whose just applied the electrodes, seen his monster lurch to life, stagger down to the local village and now all you can hear is screams and see the glow of a massive fire. At this point I have no idea how to stop it.
The WOT Super Conqueror is made up of three parts. The hull of a normal Conqueror, a new turret based upon a sketch I found, and a set of spaced armour plates that were employed upon a range target.
In WOT high tier heavy tank was needed. However, on the 4th of July 1946 Britain had officially stopped developing infantry and cruiser tanks and moved all armour development to the Universal Tank. It is also at this date they switched from the old pre-war General Staff numbers (Eg: A.22), to the FV number system. This left WOT with a serious problem and is the reason why they used the FV215 (HT) that they made up for a number of years.
Then I show up with a document that says the hull armour on the Conqueror range target was actually manufactured and would have been fitted for combat.
To get around the issues WOT had, they mashed all the components together and came up with something that could work, they just needed a name. This approach works fine for WOT. Even the model kit that has been produced is fine, as it's meant to be the range target (although the base model is the wrong marque of Conqueror). The recent addition of the range target to other "100% historically accurate" games is a bit more confusing though.
Where did I go wrong then? Well last week, for the first time in four to five years, I was reviewing the documents on the spaced armour with some colleagues over at
tanks-encyclopedia.com. It was pointed out that my evidence was a bit suspect. Even at the first glance I could see this was the case. The original claim for the hull plates was in a proposed requirement, not an actual specification. The document on the range target trials did use the same name for the armour plates, which I had latched onto and used it as proof. If I had been a bit more thorough I would have read the entire document and seen the wording at the back.
Simply put there is no evidence that the hull plates were manufactured or built. The text in the trials report implies that the hull plates were built for the trials only. Granted it is only implied, and you could read it to say the hull plates were actually for service. However, I feel that the phrasing indicates this was not the case. Now it maybe that someone will find a document listing the hull plates as produced, but at this time it is looking unlikely they were. I would also be careful about claims otherwise as these hull plates are unlikely to have left much, if any records, even in a fully complete archive, which the UK archives are nowhere near.
These were some of my earliest discoveries. Luckily, these days, I have become more thorough and over the years and learnt better methods of note taking, documenting and cross checking.
Therefore, I can only apologize for the mistake I made when I was younger and impetuous.
