Military secrets are supposed to remain, you know, secrets. This has apparently eluded fans of the War Thunder tank simulator, as they continue to post real-life military schemes on the game’s forums to win flame wars. And no, that’s not a euphemism for something else.
As reported by Kotaku, this most recent disagreement comes from a user who pressured developers to change the statistics of a Chinese tank housing. According to a ResetEra thread, when the user saw that the statistics for a given shell were the same as an earlier version of the game, when in fact they were placeholder values, he apparently filtered out the actual shell schemas in order to to “fix” developers
Although the developer of War Thunder Gaijin banned the user and its publication, the image of the schemes has been circulating online since the apparent leak. We won’t post it here for obvious reasons, but let’s say you can find it with a quick Google search.
This is at least the third time a user has posted classified military documents in War Thunder forums. The confrontation became so intense in the latter case that a user directly published the manual of a French Leclerc tank, which probably went very well with his superiors.
According to this thread, however, the funniest version of this phenomenon involved the British Challenger 2 tank. This user also published the tank manual, but this was after distorting the vital statistics of the machine (such as speed turret rotation and machine gun length) in an apparent attempt to improve it.
Given that this user was presumably a real-life tank commander, this is the equivalent of Shinji’s groundbreaking character to pressure Hideaki Anno to improve the EVA-01. Or, if this reference doesn’t make sense to you, it’s like that time your friend tried to convince your D&D DM that a katana hurts more than a big sword. Steel sharpens steel, but it’s probably not worth going to Chinese military prison for the sake of the goal.