War Thunder, developed and published by Gaijin Entertainment, prides itself on its attention to detail and realism. The vehicular combat game has a vast array of planes, tanks, and ships, and the premise is simple: What if all these vehicles duked it out on virtual battlefields?
Each vehicle in the game is modeled in stunning detail, based on historically available data and references. The gameplay leans heavily into these details, where an aircraft’s flight model, a tank’s armor layout, or a ship’s armament determines its performance in-game.
This drive for authenticity, while admirable, has led to a complicated relationship with military secrecy. This is a relationship that has spilled over into the real world in surprising (and sometimes concerning) ways.
How War Thunder Develops Its Vehicles: The Sources
A huge aspect of how War Thunder is apart from other military games is the active involvement of its passionate community. Discussions on the game’s forums about the accuracy of a turret’s rotation speed or whether a tank’s armor can really withstand a particular shell are core to the game’s identity.
click to enlarge
+ 5Sometimes, these heated debates go further than strategy banter, as players dig into technical manuals and historical documents to argue a vehicle’s real-world performance.
This is because technical manuals and information that players provide are factored into Gaijin’s modeling of vehicles, making many players go out of their way to source them. The right manual, brochure, or technical document can either buff or nerf the vehicle you love playing or the vehicle you hate playing against, making it all a personal affair.
click to enlarge + 5When Enthusiasm Crosses a Line
To avoid trouble with militaries and governments worldwide, Gaijin makes it a point to use publicly released and/or open-source data. Generally, this is not an issue for modeling older military vehicles, as their obsolescence tends to come with the declassification of their specifications and designs.
To quote Gaijin’s community guidelines:
"You are prohibited from publishing any Classified information, Export-restricted military-technical data, or other defense-related information as specified in Section 2.3 below."
The leaking of classified data seems to be a problem unique to the War Thunder community. When technical data for vehicles is unavailable, educated guesses and inferences are made, which tends to irk the players on the forums, subsequently pushing them to source as much data as they can.
Classified or “Classified”?
Most of the “leaks” that show up in War Thunder are not earth-shaking spy capers. A file can sit in a public library, a Google cache, or an Eastern European archive and still be illegal to spread worldwide.
When a government erases the “Secret” stamp from a manual, it only means the material is no longer protected for national-security reasons; other chains can still be on it. The U.S. military, for example, marks many unclassified manuals as “DoD personnel and their contractors only.”
click to enlarge + 5American export-control laws add another layer, banning the transfer of detailed weapons data to foreigners without a license. Britain and NATO use similar “unclassified but restricted” labels. In short, declassified doesn’t automatically equal free to post.
Things get even murkier across borders. A Soviet manual that former Warsaw Pact countries have officially declassified may still count as secret in today’s Russia.
Faced with this patchwork of rules, Gaijin’s moderators take the safest path: unless a document is clearly stamped “public release,” they delete it. So while War Thunder threads do see genuine leaks, the real problem is less top-secret espionage and more a gray zone of papers that are available online yet still fenced off by export rules and copyright.
Peering Through the Iron Curtain: The Case of the MiG-29
A good example of the gray area that is attached to declassification came with the introduction of the Mikoyan MiG-29 to the game. In December 2022, the Apex Predators update introduced 4th-generation aircraft to War Thunder, and the manuals of the MiG-29 were posted on the forums as a way to fix perceived issues with the aircraft’s radar systems implementation.
click to enlarge + 5The post was deleted from the forums as it violated Gaijin’s policies on the use of classified information, but its public reception as a “leak” is, in my opinion, blown out of proportion. The MiG-29 manuals are declassified and publicly available and have been so since the 1990s, after the dissolution of East Germany. Following reunification, the former Soviet jet’s manuals were made public. The manuals have also been made available by both Poland and Hungary in the post-Soviet era.
This was not a matter of national security, though it is worth noting that the documents are still seemingly classified in Russia, hence the deletion.
Genuine Leaks: A Tale of Two MBTs
In July 2021, a British tanker, annoyed that War Thunder didn’t model his ride quite right, snapped photos of the Challenger 2’s Army Equipment Support Publication and posted them in a thread. The pages wore the “RESTRICTED” stamp: technically unclassified, but still shielded by the Official Secrets Act and not for public eyes.
The Ministry of Defence asked for immediate takedown, Gaijin complied within hours, and the soldier lost both his forum access and, likely, his career too.
About a year later, another forum user tried to bolster China’s ZTZ99 tank by posting a photo of a DTC10-125 tungsten dart perched on a sheet listing its muzzle velocity, penetration, and propellant data.
Those figures sit firmly inside China’s state-secrets fence and would trip international arms-export rules anywhere else. The image was wiped almost instantly, but screenshots had already escaped, possibly leaving the leaker facing real-life consequences that make game balance look trivial.
click to enlarge + 5War Thunder’s quest for authenticity walks a razor’s edge. These three leaks are but a few of many, and this issue may persist as the game adds more modern vehicles. A manual can sit on Google or in a Polish archive and still be export-controlled or “secret” somewhere else. Gaijin, therefore, sets one bright line: unless a source is unmistakably cleared for public release, keep it off the forum.
Or, as the thoroughly exasperated Gaijin moderator Jagdente snapped after deleting yet another thread:
"Guys its not funnny [sic] to leak classified Documents of modern equipment—you put the lives of many at stake!"
Stick with us here at Gfinityesports.com: the best site for War Thunder coverage and gaming news in general.
For more articles like this, take a look at our War Thunder and Features page.