Last week I was invited to travel to Cairns in Queensland Australia to take a look at something special from Wargaming, the makers of World Of Tanks and World Of Warships. Interestingly they had purchased a tank known as the AC1 Sentinel which is now a playable tank in the game. I was lucky enough to be invited to the unveiling event and see this tank in person as well as a variety of other tanks and weapons at the Australian Armour & Artillery Museum.
The Australian Cruiser Tank Mark 1 (AC1), also known as the “Sentinel”, was the only tank to be designed and produced by Australia during the second world war. There are only 7 of these tanks remaining in the world, making it a historical rarity amongst collectors. Wargaming purchased this tank from Jacques Littlefield, he is a well known tank enthusiast and also the founder of the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation.
During my time while at the event, I was also able to wander around and take a look at a variety of other tanks and military equipment at the Australian Armour & Artillery Museum. It’s quite interesting to see all these things up close and in person. Even though many of these tanks are over 50 years old now, they were at the time some of the most powerful things on Earth and are very dangerous and formidable weapons. If anyone reading this is planning to go to Cairns in the future, I would say the museum is a good place to visit, especially if you are a fan of modern history and love weapons, this place is quite impressive.
I managed to take quite a few pictures of the more interesting vehicles that I saw at the museum that day. I quite like the look of the Soviet vehicles, they looked very dangerous, but so did quite a lot of things as well.
If you are interested in visiting the Australian Armour & Artillery Museum you can find all the information you need on their site right here.
It’s great to see a video games company like Wargaming being active in preserving historical artifacts such as the AC1 Sentinel and it’s great to see that Australians can now enjoy their own homemade tank once again. With this piece of history now preserved at the museum.
Overall this was a great experience as I had not known much about Australia’s military production capabilities at all before I visited Cairns and I really did learn a lot from visiting this museum and from chatting to various Wargaming staff such as Nichoas Moran about the AC1 Sentinel and also other tanks in the game.
While there I also learnt that Wargaming actually has VR section on their website which can be used to explore tank battles and other historical related things using your Google Cardboard or other VR device. I tried it with the Google Cardboard and it was quite good, you can take a look at what they have right here.