Proably wants to be moved to the Fantasy section.
link scroll to the bottom to se the sorry tale and a piture. Text is below.
I personally find it disgussting thet folk try to fake history for commercial gain. Unfortunately charlatons have beed with us almost since the begginings of history.
VK72.01(K) (120 ton)Edit
In mid-2013 WarGaming's World of Tanks video game debuted this vehicle as a special end-game reward, touting it as "A rear-turreted, 100 ton Löwe design." Immediately suspicions arose about the historical accuracy of such a design. WarGaming defended it as having coming from Walter J. Spielberger, a historian specializing in German World War II vehicles whose word often is regarded as law on the topic. This snippet from his book "Special Panzer Variants" was circulated to back up WarGaming's claim.
Spezial-Panzer-Fahrzeuge des deutschen Heeres
The excerpt from Special Panzer Variants.
Unfortunately, WarGaming's representation of the tank is where it all falls apart. In their game the vehicle weighs 120 tons and has 240mm thick frontal armor. As one can see by even briefly looking at the "source", the real VK72.01, which was one of many different Löwe designs, would have weighed 72 tons, as the name would suggest.
WarGaming's idea that the vehicle was over 100 tons comes from just a bit earlier in that same sentence, "[Krupp] received instructions that a 100-ton test vehicle, instead of the 72-ton VK72.01(K)… [was to be built]". The key word being "instead", which was ignored.
The 100 ton vehicle in question is the VK100.01, the vehicle which would later become the Maus. Much like the Löwe, the Maus project inflated massively in weight and armor over time. The VK72.01 was the last of the Löwe designs before the project was terminated and the Maus lineage was pursued instead.
The caption at the bottom of the picture, "The development of a 100-ton tank by the Krupp firm led first of all to the building of a wooden mockup of the VK72.01." was used as further grounds for the idea that the VK72.01 weighed 100 tons or more. What this caption is saying is that first of all in the development of the VK100.01, was the Löwe project, which ended with the wooden mockup for the VK72.01.
WarGaming "creatively" interpreted this unfortunately worded section of Spielberger's book in order to created a Löwe that is on par with the Maus. They used the wooden mockup as a basis for their model and assigned it arbitrary armor statistics in order to make it competitive for their game. At this point the story of this fake should end; unfortunately there is more.
I (the author) try to keep personal opinions out of articles on Panzerpedia and only present the facts, however for this vehicle I feel compelled to make an exception. If you the reader are only interested in the origins of this fake you can stop reading here; but for those of you who would like to see deeper into WarGaming's inner workings and the mindset of the people who are responsible for these fakes, this last paragraph is included.
The Fake Tanks page was one of the first pages on Panzerpedia, and still remains the most popular to this day. Orginally, instead of in depth histories of the origins of these fake vehicles, there were only single sentences to summarize each entry. Under VK72.01 I attributed its origin to the Russian historian Yuri Pasholok. There are two reasons for this, firstly Pasholok is WarGaming's in-house historical consultant, and second, he was very vocal in discussions of the VK72.01 and rejective of the notion it is fake. When this lowly website was brought to his attention he made several posts on his blog which reiterated the above misinterpretation as well as showed several original documents using the name VK72.01 as 'proof' that it was a real vehicle. I had never claimed the VK72.01 was not a real vehicle, but had asserted that the 120 ton tank that bears its name in World of Tanks is. Nevertheless, ignorance is common on the internet and if that was all it would not be worth including here. However in the three blog posts he made regarding the VK72.01 and several other fakes he had a hand in creating, he felt it was necessary to call me a "Polish fool" (for the record I am an American) and insinuate that I am stupid and illiterate. Now I am not saying this here because I have hurt feelings, I have been called much worse and frankly don't care what people call me; I am including this here so people may know that this is how WarGaming employees and Yuri Pasholok himself operate. I would advise anyone who is offered the opportunity to work with Pasholok to think heavily about if they really wanted to work with such an unprofessional man who has on numerous occasions displayed anti-Polish sentiment.
