The appearance of the Me 262 in the skies drew intense attention from military aircraft designers. The first mass-produced jet fighter proved unmistakably that the piston era was ending. Still, the Germans did not catch the Allies completely off guard: Britain and the United States were already working on their own jets. The Soviet Union tried to join the race as well, but found itself trailing. Domestic turbojets were not ready, and Soviet fighter projects existed largely on paper.
Almost all piston aircraft start a match by climbing because whoever looks down on the enemy gets to set the terms. But there are fighters and interceptors that climb so aggressively that we might jokingly call them “helicopters”. And today we’re taking the controls of exactly that kind of machine: the Japanese Ki-44 II Hei.
For a long time, carrier-based VTOL aviation remained just a dream of Soviet aircraft designers and a distant hope for the Soviet Navy. The USSR’s first production VTOL aircraft, the Yak-38 attack jet, turned out to be an overly complex and accident-prone subsonic aircraft without a full-fledged radar. But in the 1970s, naval commanders envisioned the future fleet in formations approaching the capabilities of U.S. carrier strike groups, and the Yak-38 clearly didn’t fit that vision. The Navy needed an aircraft that could secure air superiority, strike ground targets, and support amphibious landings. All of that — in a single impressive package.
The idea of a universal platform, one that can be adapted to a wide range of missions, has long captivated armored-vehicle designers. Vehicles like the M113 APC and the Marder and Warrior IFVs were conceived from the outset as the foundations for entire families of fighting machines. Their upgrade potential was baked in at the drawing-board stage.
The British Fairey Swordfish bomber, remembered by history under its ironic nickname “Stringbag,” became one of the most striking paradoxes of World War 2. By 1939, this fabric-covered biplane with an open cockpit and fixed landing gear looked hopelessly obsolete. Yet it was precisely this slow, ungainly machine that went on to write some of the brightest chapters in naval warfare history.
The vast majority of piston aircraft use a pulling propeller layout. Pushers are far less common. But the most exotic configuration of all is the so-called “push-pull” design, with propellers mounted both in the nose and at the tail. Today’s subject is exactly such a machine: the unique Dutch fighter Fokker D.XXIII. Only a single prototype was ever built.
We continue looking at the newcomers of the December update. Today it’s time for one of the most modern armored vehicles in the game, an American fire support vehicle sometimes referred to as a light tank: the M10 Booker. Its real-world career turned out to be short-lived: deliveries began in 2024, and by 2025, the program was canceled due to numerous issues. Let’s see what the Booker can do in War Thunder.
Constraints and compromise often push naval engineers toward original answers to seemingly simple problems. For the Royal Navy after the First World War, constraints were paramount. In 1922, Britain signed the Washington Naval Treaty: an agreement among five powers to rein in the arms race at sea. The treaty forced the abandonment of promising new capital-ship projects — already growing ever more complex and costly. Yet Britain had no intention of surrendering its great-power navy, so the Admiralty challenged designers to produce a powerful new battleship that outclassed prewar types like the Queen Elizabeth while remaining within treaty limits.
If you’re asked which combat aircraft shows up on camera more often than any other, what’s the first one that comes to mind? For many, it’s the legendary American carrier-based fighter, the F/A-18. Today, we’re taking to the skies in this very aircraft — specifically in its most advanced variant, better known as the Super Hornet.