title: Russian nationalism

text: The Russian conquest of Muslim Kazan is considered the first event which transformed Russia from a nearly homogenous nation into a multi-ethnic society. Over the years and from the territorial base which it gained in Kazan, Russia managed to conquer Siberia and Manchuria and it also expanded into the Caucasus. At one point, Russia managed to annex a large territory of Eastern Europe, Finland, Central Asia, Mongolia and, on other occasions, it encroached into Turkish, Chinese, Afghan and Iranian territories. Various ethnic minorities have become increasingly viral and integrated into mainstream Russian society, and as a result, they have created a mixing picture of racial relationships in the modern Russian nationalist mindset. The work of understanding different ethnic minorities in relation to the Russian state can be traced back to the work of Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, a Swedish prisoner of war who settled in Tsarist Russia and became a geographer.


title: Russian nationalism

text: The concept is strongly understood by various minorities in Russia. The Volga Tatars and the Bashkirs, the two main Muslim peoples in Russia, have long been lauded as model minorities in Russia, and historically, they have been viewed more positively by the Russian nationalist movement. Furthermore, Tatar and Bashkir imams have worked to spread the Russian nationalist ideology in a way which is in accordance with their Islamic faith.


title: Russian nationalism

text: In the Caucasus, Russia gained a significant amount of support from the Ossetians, one of the few Christian-based peoples which live in the mountainous region. There was also a strong amount of support for Russia among Armenians and Greeks, a sentiment which was largely due to the fact that the Armenians, the Greeks and the Orthodox government of Russia all adhered to similar religions.


title: Russian nationalism

text: The Koryo-saram (Koreans) have also been regarded as a model minority in Russia, and as a result, they have been encouraged to colonize sparsely-populated parts of Russia, this policy was first implemented during the Tsarist era and it continues to be implemented today, because Koreans were not hostile to Russian nationalism. Although the Korean diaspora in the Russian Far East was loyal to the Soviet Union and also underwent cultural Russification, Koreans were deported to Central Asia by the Soviet government (1937–1938), based on the erroneous charge that they were aligned with the Japanese. When Khrushchev allowed deported nationalities to return to their homelands, the Koreans remained restricted and they were not rehabilitated. On 26April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law "On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples" with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and genocide".


title: Russian nationalism

text: Ukrainians in Russia have been largely integrated and the majority of them pledged loyalty over Russia, while some Ukrainians managed to occupy significant positions in Russian history. Bohdan Khmelnytsky is one of Russia's most celebrated figures who brought Ukraine to the Tsardom of Russia throughout the Pereyaslav Council. Ukrainian Prince Alexander Bezborodko was responsible for manifesting the modern diplomacies of Russia under the reign of Catherine the Great. Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev also had some ancestral connections to Ukraine. In addition, Russia's biggest opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, is also of paternally of Ukrainian origin as well as being a potential Russian nationalist.


title: Russian nationalism

text: Akhmad Kadyrov and his son Ramzan defected to Russia during the Second Chechen War, pledging loyalty to Russia following the fear of Wahhabi takeover in Chechnya. Vladislav Surkov, who is of Chechen origin, was the chief figure who initiated the idea of Russian managed democracy, in which nationalism is a part of the ideology.


title: Russian nationalism

text: Georgians in Russia do not have a positive view of Russian nationalism, and as a result, some of them maintain a neutral or negative opinion. However, Russian expansion into the Caucasus mountains has been driven by Georgian figures such as Pavel Tsitsianov, who initiated the conquest of the Caucasus. Pyotr Bagration was another Georgian who went on to become one of Russia's most celebrated heroes. Soviet Union's transformation into a superpower was the work of yet another Russified Georgian, Joseph Stalin, who had a complex relationship with Russian nationalism.


title: Russian nationalism

text: Some of Dagestan's revered figures have long been respected by Russian nationalists, such as Rasul Gamzatov, who is one of Russia's most respected poets despite his Avar origin. Khabib Nurmagomedov's rise to popularity and fame has earned a divisive opinion among Russians and Dagestanis. Many Dagestanis supported Russia against Chechnya, during the previous Caucasian War when the Dagestanis found Chechens incapable to obey and follow order, and during the Second Chechen War, owning by Chechen expansionist attempt to conquer Dagestan in 1999.


title: Russian nationalism

text: Germans in Russia have long been treated with privileges under the Tsarist government and many Germans became prominent in Russian politics, education and economy, including the Tsarist House of Romanov, which also included many German-based figures, most notably Catherine the Great. Many Germans fought in the Russian Civil War and regarded themselves as Russian nationalists. The Baltic German nobility were significantly loyal to the Russian empire, but were resistant to nationalism until the Russian Revolution, identifying mainly as members of the Russian nobility.


title: Mansoor Ali Khan (actor)

text: Mansoor Ali Khan is an Indian actor, music composer, writer and producer. who has predominantly appeared in Tamil films, mostly in antagonistic and supporting roles.


title: Mansoor Ali Khan (actor)

text: He got a breakthrough role as an antagonist in "Captain Prabhakaran" (1991). After the success of this film, he got a lot of acting opportunities. He has acted in over 250 films in all languages and has produced and directed numerous films. He has also acted in a few Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada films


title: Mansoor Ali Khan (actor)

text: Mansoor Ali Khan was born in Dindigal, Tamil Nadu. His parents are Meesaikaara Abdul Salam Rowther and Sagorammal.


title: Mansoor Ali Khan (actor)

text: Khan has often played in antagonist roles and a few lead roles. He got a breakthrough role as an antagonist in Tamil cinema industry by the R.K. Selvamani directorial "Captain Prabhakaran" (1991) which became a blockbuster, hence fetching him a lot of acting opportunities. He did his acting course in Anupam Kher's acting school in Mumbai.


title: Mansoor Ali Khan (actor)

text: In his early career, Mansoor Ali Khan tried his hand at politics by supporting the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK). At the 1999 Indian general election in Tamil Nadu, he contested from Periyakulam as a candidate of the Puthiya Tamilagam (PT), he secured about one lakh votes and finished at the third position. At the 2009 Indian general election in Tamil Nadu, he stood as an independent candidate and the opposition pressed criminal charges against him for moving around in a vehicle with a propaganda banner breaching the moral conduct code. At the 2019 Indian general election in Tamil Nadu, he contested from Dindigul as a candidate of the Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK). He quit the party later and formed his own political party 'Tamil Desiya Puligal'.


title: Mansoor Ali Khan (actor)

text: Khan was arrested in July 1998 for causing a roadblock and obstructing traffic while protesting against the pirate showings of his film "Vettu Onnu Thundu Rendu" (1998) on cable television. His activity led to film distributor Chinthamani Murugesan releasing a press statement condemning the television's actions and prompted a shut down of cinema halls across Pondicherry for one day.


title: Mansoor Ali Khan (actor)

text: Khan was convicted on the charge of rape and awarded him seven years of imprisonment on 27 March 2001 by session court. Later, in 2012, the Madras High court found the women had made false accusations against him and ordered the woman to pay Rs 50 lakh as damages to the actor for malicious prosecution and defamation.


title: Mansoor Ali Khan (actor)

text: Khan was arrested in January 2012 on land grabbing charges after it was alleged that he had illegally constructed a 16-storeyed property in Arumbakkam.


title: Mansoor Ali Khan (actor)

text: Khan was arrested on 17 June 2018, along with environmentalist Piyush Manush, while protesting the proposed 270-kilometre superhighway connecting Salem and Chennai.


title: Mansoor Ali Khan (actor)

text: He was arrested in April 2021 for spreading rumours about Covid vaccination and ordered to pay 2 lakhs to the health secretary.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Supermaneuverability is the capability of fighter aircraft to execute tactical maneuvers that are not possible with purely aerodynamic techniques. Such maneuvers can involve controlled side-slipping or angles of attack beyond maximum lift.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: This capability was researched beginning in 1975 at the Langley Research Center in the United States, and eventually resulted in the development of the McDonnell Douglas F-15 STOL/MTD as a proof of concept aircraft. The Saab 35 Draken was another early aircraft with limited supermaneuverable capabilities.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: In 1983, the MiG-29 and in 1986, the Sukhoi Su-27 were deployed with this capability, which has since become standard in all of Russia's fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft. There has been some speculation, but the mechanism behind the supermaneuverability of the Russian-built aircraft has not been publicly disclosed. However, post-stall analyses have been increasingly used in recent years to advance maneuverability via the use of thrust vectoring engine nozzles.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Russian emphasis on close-range slow-speed supermaneuverability runs counter to Western energy–maneuverability theory, which favors retaining kinetic energy to gain an increasingly better array of maneuvering options the longer an engagement endures. The USAF abandoned the concept as counter-productive to BVR engagements as the Cobra maneuver leaves the aircraft in a state of near-zero energy, having bled off most of its speed without gaining any compensating altitude in the process. Except in one-on-one engagements, this leaves the aircraft very vulnerable to both missile and gun attack by a wingman or other hostile, even if the initial threat overshoots the supermaneuvered aircraft.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Traditional aircraft maneuvering is accomplished by altering the flow of air passing over the control surfaces of the aircraft—the ailerons, elevators, flaps, air brakes and rudder. Some of these control surfaces can be combined—such as in the "ruddervators" of a V-tail configuration—but the basic properties are unaffected. When a control surface is moved to present an angle to the oncoming airflow, it alters the airflow around the surface, changing its pressure distribution, and thus applying a pitching, rolling, or yawing moment to the aircraft.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: The angle of control surface deflection and resulting directional force on the aircraft are controlled both by the pilot and the aircraft's inbuilt control systems to maintain the desired attitude, such as pitch, roll and heading, and also to perform aerobatic maneuvers that rapidly change the aircraft's attitude. For traditional maneuvering control to be maintained, the aircraft must maintain sufficient forward velocity and a sufficiently low angle of attack to provide airflow over the wings (maintaining lift) and also over its control surfaces.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: As airflow decreases so does effectiveness of the control surfaces and thus the maneuverability. If the angle of attack exceeds its critical value, the airplane will stall. Pilots are trained to avoid stalls during aerobatic maneuvering and especially in combat, as a stall can permit an opponent to gain an advantageous position while the stalled aircraft's pilot attempts to recover.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: The speed at which an aircraft is capable of its maximum aerodynamic maneuverability is known as the corner airspeed; at any greater speed the control surfaces cannot operate at maximum effect due to either airframe stresses or induced instability from turbulent airflow over the control surface. At lower speeds the redirection of air over control surfaces, and thus the force applied to maneuver the aircraft, is reduced below the airframe's maximum capacity and thus the aircraft will not turn at its maximum rate. It is therefore desirable in aerobatic maneuvering to maintain corner velocity.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: In a supermaneuverable aircraft, the pilot can maintain a high degree of maneuverability below corner velocity, and at least limited altitude control without altitude loss below stall speed. Such an aircraft is capable of maneuvers that are impossible with a purely aerodynamic design. More recently, increased use of jet-powered, instrumented unmanned vehicles ("research drones") has increased the potential flyable angle of attack beyond 90 degrees and well into the post-stall safe flight domains, and has also replaced some of the traditional uses of wind tunnels.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: There is no strict set of guidelines an aircraft must meet or features it must have in order to be classified as supermaneuverable. However, as supermaneuverability itself is defined, the ability of an aircraft to perform high alpha maneuvers that are impossible for most aircraft is evidence of the aircraft's supermaneuverability. Such maneuvers include Pugachev's Cobra and the Herbst maneuver (also known as the "J-turn").


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Some aircraft are capable of performing Pugachev's Cobra without the aid of features that normally provide post-stall maneuvering such as thrust vectoring. Advanced fourth generation fighters such as the Su-27, MiG-29 along with their variants have been documented as capable of performing this maneuver using normal, non-thrust vectoring engines. The ability of these aircraft to perform this maneuver is based in inherent instability like that of the F-16; the MiG-29 and Su-27 families of jets are designed for desirable post-stall behavior. Thus, when performing a maneuver like Pugachev's Cobra the aircraft will stall as the nose pitches up and the airflow over the wing becomes separated, but naturally nose down even from a partially inverted position, allowing the pilot to recover complete control.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: The Cobra, as performed by non-thrust vectoring aircraft, still depends on the aircraft moving through air; however, it does not involve the aircraft's aerodynamic surfaces and normal laminar airflow, but rather the whole airframe as a solid shape traveling through air, and its center of gravity in relation to the thrust vector. Being performed under conditions far beyond normal aerodynamic control and well into a stall without thrust vectoring, this is a form of passive supermaneuverability, possible because of aircraft design rather than thrust vectoring, which provides a way to actively control the aircraft well outside of the normal flight envelope.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: The Herbst Maneuver, however, is believed to be impossible without thrust vectoring as the "J-turn" requires a half-roll in addition to pitching while the aircraft is stalled, which is impossible using conventional control surfaces. Pugachev's Cobra can be performed with less change in altitude if vectored thrust is used, as the aircraft can be made to pitch far more rapidly, both inducing the stall before the aircraft significantly gains altitude and recovering level attitude before altitude is lost.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Although as aforementioned no fixed set of features defines a supermaneuverable aircraft explicitly, virtually all aircraft considered supermaneuverable have a majority of common characteristics that aid in maneuverability and stall control.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: The key difference between a pure aerodynamic fighter and a supermaneuverable one is generally found in its post-stall characteristics. A stall, as aforementioned, happens when the flow of air over the top of the wing becomes separated due to a high angle of attack (this can be caused by low speed, but its direct cause is based on the direction of the airflow contacting the wing); the airfoil then loses its main source of lift and will not support the aircraft until normal airflow is restored over the top of the wing.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: The behavior of the aircraft in a stall is where the main difference can be observed between aerodynamic maneuverability and supermaneuverability. In a stall, traditional control surfaces, especially the ailerons, have little or no ability to change the aircraft's attitude. Most aircraft are designed to be stable and easily recoverable in such a situation; the aircraft will pitch nose-down so that the angle of attack of the wings is reduced to match the aircraft's current direction (known technically as the velocity vector), restoring normal airflow over the wings and control surfaces and enabling controlled flight.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: However, some aircraft will deep stall. The aircraft's design will inhibit or prevent a reduction in angle of attack to restore airflow. The F-16 has this flaw, due in part to its fly-by-wire controls, which under certain circumstances limit the ability of the pilot to point the nose of the aircraft downward to reduce angle of attack and recover. Neither an extreme pitch-down nor a deep stall is desirable in a supermaneuverable aircraft.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: A supermaneuverable aircraft allows the pilot to maintain at least some control when the aircraft stalls, and to regain full control quickly. This is achieved largely by designing an aircraft that is highly maneuverable, but will not deep stall (thus allowing quick recovery by the pilot) and will recover predictably and favorably (ideally to level flight; more realistically to as shallow a nose-down attitude as possible). To that design, features are then added that allow the pilot to actively control the aircraft while in the stall, and retain or regain forward level flight in an extremely shallow band of altitude that surpasses the capabilities of pure aerodynamic maneuvering.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: A key feature of supermaneuvering fighters is a high thrust-to-weight ratio; that is, the comparison of the force produced by the engines to the aircraft's weight, which is the force of gravity on the aircraft. It is generally desirable in any aerobatic aircraft, as a high-thrust-to-weight ratio allows the aircraft to recover velocity quickly after a high-G maneuver. In particular, a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than 1:1 is a critical threshold, as it allows the aircraft to maintain and even gain velocity in a nose-up attitude; such a climb is based on sheer engine power, without any lift provided by the wings to counter gravity, and has become crucial to aerobatic maneuvers in the vertical (which are in turn essential to air combat).


title: Supermaneuverability

text: High thrust-to-weight is essential to supermaneuvering fighters because it not only avoids many situations in which an aircraft can stall (such as during vertical climbing maneuvers), but when the aircraft does stall, the high thrust-to-weight ratio allows the pilot to sharply increase forward speed even as the aircraft pitches nose-down; this reduces the angle the nose must pitch down in order to meet the velocity vector, thus recovering more quickly from the stall. This allows stalls to be controlled; the pilot will intentionally stall the aircraft with a hard maneuver, then recover quickly with the high engine power.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Beginning in the late fourth generation and through Generation 4.5 of aircraft development, advances in engine efficiency and power enabled many fighters to approach and exceed thrust-to-weight ratios of 1:1. Most current and planned fifth-generation fighters will exceed this threshold.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Even though true supermaneuverability lies outside the realm of what is possible with pure aerodynamic control, the technologies that push aircraft into supermaneuvering capability are based on what is otherwise a conventional aerodynamically controlled design. Thus, a design that is highly maneuverable by traditional aerodynamics is a necessary base for a supermaneuverable fighter.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Features such as large control surfaces which provide more force with less angular change from neutral which minimizes separation of airflow, lifting body design including the use of strakes, which allow the fuselage of the aircraft to create lift in addition to that of its wings, and low-drag design, particularly reducing drag at the leading edges of the aircraft such as its nose cone, wings and engine intake ducts, are all essential to creating a highly maneuverable aircraft.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Some designs, like the F-16 (which in current production form is regarded as highly maneuverable, but only the F-16 VISTA tech demonstrator is considered supermaneuverable) are designed to be inherently unstable; that is, the aircraft, if completely uncontrolled, will not tend to return to level, stable flight after a disturbance as an inherently stable design will. Such designs require the use of a "fly-by-wire" system where a computer corrects for minor instabilities while also interpreting the pilot's input and manipulating the control surfaces to produce the desired behavior without inducing a loss of control. Thus corrected for, the instability of the design creates an aircraft that is highly maneuverable; free from the self-limiting resistance that a stable design provides to desired maneuvers, an intentionally unstable design is capable of far higher rates of turn than would otherwise be possible.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: A canard is an elevator control surface placed forward of the wings. Sometimes, as with the B-1B, they are simply used to stabilize flexible portions of the fuselage or provide very minute attitude changes, but they are used often as a supplement to or full replacement of tail-mounted stabilators.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: The theory behind canards as the sole elevator surface is that no elevator configuration aft of the wings is truly satisfactory for maneuvering purposes; the airflow over the wings creates turbulence, however small, and thus affects elevators placed directly behind the wings. Placement below the wings (common on many fighters) exposes the elevators to even greater turbulence from under-wing ordnance.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: The original solution to such problems, the T-tail, has been largely discredited as being prone to dangerous "deep stalls". Other solutions like the V-tail place the combination rudder-elevator surfaces out of the wings' airflow, but reduce the effectiveness of the control surface in the pure pitch and yaw axes.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: As a supplement to traditional elevators, canards vastly increase control surface area, and often increase the critical angle of attack of the wings as the canard directs air more directly toward the leading edge of the wing. They can also be designed to operate independently (i.e., counter-rotate), thus also acting as ailerons.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Canards are not a requirement, and can have disadvantages including reduced pilot visibility, increased mechanical complexity and fragility, and increased radar signature, although radar cross-section can be reduced by controlling canard deflection through flight control software, as is done on the Eurofighter. F-22, for example, does not incorporate canards, mostly for stealth reasons. The production Su-35 also omits canards. Many technology demonstrators and maneuverability testbeds such as the F-15 S/MTD incorporated canards, even when the production aircraft they were based on did not. Production fighters like the Eurofighter Typhoon, Dassault Rafale and Saab Gripen all use a delta-wing configuration with canard surfaces, while some variants of the Su-27 including the Su-30, Su-30MKI, Su-33 and Su-37 use canards to supplement traditional tail-mounted elevators.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Though a high thrust-to-weight ratio and high aerodynamic maneuverability are found on both aerodynamic and supermaneuvering aircraft, the technology most directly linked to supermaneuverability is thrust vectoring, in which the geometry of the exhaust nozzle of a traditional jet engine can be modified to angle the engine's thrust in a direction other than directly to the rear (i.e., upwards or downwards).


title: Supermaneuverability

text: This applies force to the rear of the aircraft in the opposite direction similar to a conventional control surface, but unlike a control surface the force from the vectored thrust is dependent on current engine thrust, not airspeed. Thus thrust vectoring not only augments control surfaces (generally that of the elevators) at speed, but allows the aircraft to retain maximum maneuverability below corner speed and some attitude control below stall speed while in maneuvers.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Technology demonstrators such as the X-31, F-16 VISTA and F-15 S/MTD were built to showcase the capabilities of an aircraft using this technology; it has since been incorporated into pre-production and production fighters such as the F-22 Raptor. Eastern Bloc design companies have also introduced this technology into variants of fourth-generation aircraft such as the MiG-29 and Su-27 to produce the MiG-29OVT tech demonstrator and Su-30MKI air superiority fighter respectively, and planned fifth-generation Russian-designed aircraft such as the Sukhoi Su-57 will use the technology as well. In addition domestic Russian Su-30 fighters will be upgraded with thrust vectoring engines.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Thrust vectoring is most useful while performing maneuvers such as the aerial J-turn, where the nose of the aircraft is pointed upwards (and thus the engine thrust counters gravity as well as providing attitude control). It is generally considered impossible, in fact, to perform a true J-turn maneuver without vectored thrust. Other maneuvers that are considered impossible to perform under control using only aerodynamic maneuvering include the Bell (a 360° loop with negligible altitude change) and the controlled flat spin (360° of yaw around a point of rotation that lies inside the aircraft).


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Pilots can pitch the noses of supermaneuverable aircraft up to extreme pitch angles (as much as 70 degrees) allowing them to potentially gain an advantage, by being able to lock on to a target and fire at it, but at the expense of the altitude and/or speed of the aircraft. Quantifying such a potential advantage using metrics was not really possible in the early 1990s—traditional metrics such as instantaneous or sustained turn rate plots did not highlight the differences which pilots described when flying such aircraft.


title: Supermaneuverability

text: Several research projects were conducted through the 1990s and one in particular, entitled "Performance Assessment of Fighter Aircraft incorporating Advanced Technologies" by Antony Kutschera, not only reviewed the suitability of existing metrics to measure the effects of supermaneuverability, but went on to develop a new metric for quantifying advantages and disadvantages while in flight. The new metric allows a quantitative assessment of the aircraft to be made, in terms which designers, pilots and tacticians alike can easily understand, unlike many newer metrics which combined existing metrics to develop "magic" numbers which have little meaning.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Bucks County is a county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. As of the 2020 census, the population was 646,538. It is the fourth-most populous county in Pennsylvania. The county seat is Doylestown. The county is named after the English county of Buckinghamshire.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The county is part of the northern boundary of the Philadelphia–Camden–Wilmington, PA–NJ–DE–MD Metropolitan Statistical Area, more commonly known as the Delaware Valley. It is located immediately northeast of Philadelphia and forms part of the southern tip of the eastern state border with New Jersey.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Bucks County is one of the three original counties created by colonial proprietor William Penn in 1682. Penn named the county after Buckinghamshire, the county in which he lived in England. He built a country estate, Pennsbury Manor, in Falls Township, Bucks County.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Some places in Bucks County were named after locations in Buckinghamshire, including Buckingham and Buckingham Township, named after the former county town of Buckinghamshire; Chalfont, named after Chalfont St Giles, the parish home of William Penn's first wife and the location of the Jordans Quaker Meeting House, where Penn is buried; Solebury Township, named after Soulbury, England; and Wycombe, named after the town of High Wycombe.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Bucks County was originally much larger than it is today. Northampton County was formed in 1752 from part of Bucks County, and Lehigh County was formed in 1812 from part of Northampton County.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: General George Washington and his troops camped in Bucks County as they prepared to cross the Delaware River to take Trenton, New Jersey, by surprise on the morning of December 26, 1776. Their successful attack on Britain's Hessian forces was a turning point in the American War of Independence. The town of Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania and Washington Crossing Historic Park were named to commemorate the event.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of , of which is land and (2.8%) is water.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The southern third of the county between Philadelphia and Trenton, New Jersey, often called Lower Bucks, resides in the Atlantic Coastal Plain, and is flat and near sea level, and the county's most populated and industrialized area.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Bucks County shares a western border with Montgomery County, and also borders Philadelphia to the southwest, and Northampton and Lehigh Counties to the north. From north to south, it is linked to Warren, Hunterdon, Mercer and Burlington Counties in New Jersey by bridges.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Tohickon Creek and Neshaminy Creek are the largest tributaries of the Delaware in Bucks County. Tohickon Creek empties into the river at Point Pleasant and Neshaminy at Croydon (Bristol Township).


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: As of the 2010 census, there were 625,249 people. The population density was 1,034.7 people per square mile. The racial makeup of the county was 86.6% Non-Hispanic white, 3.9% Black or African American, 0.3% Native American, 4.1% Asian (2.1% Indian, 1.1% Chinese, 0.7% Korean, 0.5% Filipino, 0.3% Vietnamese, 0.1% Japanese, 0.4% other Asian) 0.1% Pacific Islander, 1.7% were of two or more races, and 1.5% were of other races. 4.4% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: As of the census of 2000, there were 218,725 households, and 160,981 families residing in the county. There were 225,498 housing units at an average density of . 20.1% were of German, 19.1% Irish, 14.0% Italian, 7.5% English and 5.9% Polish ancestry.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: There were 218,725 households, out of which 35.30% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 61.20% were married couples living together, 8.80% had a female householder with no husband present, and 26.40% were non-families. 21.50% of all households were made up of individuals, and 8.10% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.69 and the average family size was 3.17.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: In the county, the population was spread out, with 25.70% under the age of 18, 7.00% from 18 to 24, 30.70% from 25 to 44, 24.30% from 45 to 64, and 12.40% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 38 years. For every 100 females there were 96.30 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 93.40 males.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The median income for a household in the county was $59,727, and the median income for a family was $68,727. Males had a median income of $46,587 versus $31,984 for females. The per capita income for the county was $27,430. About 3.10% of families and 4.50% of the population were below the poverty line, including 4.80% of those under age 18 and 5.50% of those age 65 or over.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The 2013 population estimate of Bucks County was 626,976. This ranked the county fourth in the state, well behind (more than 10%) the counties of Philadelphia with 1,553,165 (247% of Bucks), Allegheny with 1,231,527 (196%), Montgomery with 812,376 (130%), and well ahead of Delaware with 561,973 (89.6%).


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Growth began in the early 1950s, when William Levitt chose Bucks County for his second "Levittown". Levitt bought hundreds of acres of woodlands and farmland, and constructed 17,000 homes and dozens of schools, parks, libraries, and shopping centers. By the time the project ended, the population of Levittown had swelled to almost 74,000 residents. At the time, only whites could buy homes. This rule however, was soon overturned. Other planned developments included Croydon and Fairless Hills. This rapid sprawl continued until the mid-1960s.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: In the 1970s, a second growth spurt began. This time, developers took land in townships that were mostly untouched. These included Middletown Township, Lower Makefield Township, Northampton Township and Newtown Township. Tract housing, office complexes, shopping centers, and sprawling parking lots continued to move more and more towards Upper Bucks, swallowing horse farms, sprawling forests, and wetlands. At this time, the Oxford Valley Mall was constructed in Middletown, which would become the business nucleus of the county.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Growth has somewhat stabilized since the 1990s, with smaller increases and less development. However, the main reason for this is not a lack of population growth, but loss of land. Lower Bucks now lacks large parcels of land to develop. Smaller residential and commercial projects must now be constructed. However, redevelopment of existing building sites is now a leading coalition in Lower Bucks. Many areas along the Delaware River have surpluses of abandoned industry, so many municipalities have granted building rights to luxury housing developers. Also, as the regions that began the suburban boom in Bucks, such as Levittown, begin to reach their 50th anniversaries, many commercial strips and other neglected structures are being torn down to be replaced with new shopping plazas and commercial chains. Also, with rising property values, areas with older construction are undergoing a renaissance. At the same time, Central and Upper Bucks are still seeing rapid growth, with many municipalities doubling their populations.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The boroughs of Bristol and Morrisville were prominent industrial centers along the Northeast Corridor during World War II. Suburban development accelerated in Lower Bucks in the 1950s with the opening of Levittown, Pennsylvania, the second such "Levittown" designed by William Levitt.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Among Bucks' largest employers in the twentieth century were U.S. Steel in Falls Township, and the Vulcanized Rubber & Plastics and Robertson Tile companies in Morrisville. Rohm and Haas continues to operate several chemical plants around Bristol. Waste Management operates a landfill in Tullytown that is the largest receptacle of out-of-state waste in the USA (receiving much of New York City's waste following the closure of Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, NY away).


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Bucks is also experiencing rapid growth in biotechnology, along with neighboring Montgomery County. The Greater Philadelphia area consistently ranks in the top 10 geographic clusters for biotechnology and biopharma. It is projected by 2020 that one out of four people in Bucks County will work in biotechnology.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Another important asset of the county is tourism. The county's northern regions, colloquially referred to as Upper Bucks, are known for their natural scenery, farmland, colonial history, and proximity to major urban areas, including Philadelphia, New York City, Allentown, Reading, and Atlantic City, each of which is within a two-hour radius.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Bucks County is home to twelve covered bridges. Ten are still open to vehicular traffic. Two other bridges, both located in parks, are open only to non-vehicular traffic. All Bucks County bridges use the Town truss design. The Schofield Ford Bridge, in Tyler State Park, was reconstructed in 1997 from the ground up after arsonists destroyed the original in 1991.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Popular attractions in Bucks County include the shops and studios of New Hope, Peddler's Village (in Lahaska), Washington Crossing Historic Park, New Hope Railroad, Bucks County River Country and Bucks County Playhouse Theater (in New Hope). Rice's Market near Lahaska is a popular destination on Tuesday mornings. Quakertown Farmer's Market (locally called "Q-Mart") is a popular shopping destination on weekends. The county seat of Doylestown has the trifecta of concrete structures built by Henry Chapman Mercer, including the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, the Mercer Museum and Fonthill, Mercer's personal home.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Southern Bucks, colloquially referred to as Lower Bucks, is home to two important shopping malls, Neshaminy Mall, Oxford Valley Mall, and Sesame Place, a family theme park based on the "Sesame Street" television series. Also within Lower Bucks County is Parx Casino and Racing in Bensalem, a casino and thoroughbred horse racing track. The casino was built on the grounds of what was originally Philadelphia Park Racetrack. The complex includes the throughbred horse racing track, expansive casino, a dance club, numerous dining options, and the Xcite Center.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The Bucks County Library System was founded in 1956 by a resolution of the Bucks County Commissioners. Their mission statement reads: "Within our libraries and outside our walls, Bucks County Free Library fosters meaningful library experiences for the residents of Bucks County. We welcome our community by providing enthusiastic and effective staff, inviting buildings, a virtual presence, current materials, dynamic programs, and innovative services."


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Many artists and writers based in New York City have called Bucks County home, settling mainly in the small stretch between Doylestown and New Hope and along the Delaware River. Notable residents have included Margaret Mead, Pearl S. Buck, Oscar Hammerstein II, Stephen Sondheim, Charlie Parker, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, James Michener, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Stan and Jan Berenstain, Daniel Garber, Alfred Bester, Annie Haslam, and Jean Toomer. Bucks County has been the home of writer/musician James McBride, writer Eric Knight, Academy Award-winning film composer Joe Renzetti, musician Gene Ween of Ween, painter Christopher Wajda, photographer Michael Barone, and furniture designer George Nakashima. James Gould Cozzens lived in Lambertville, New Jersey, just across the river from Bucks County, and used Doylestown as the model for the setting of two novels; he is considered a Bucks County artist. Allen Saalburg relocated to Bucks County in 1947, and named his press after the canal.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The county boasts many local theater companies, including the long-established and recently reopened Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Town and Country Players in Buckingham, ActorsNET in Morrisville, and the Bristol Riverside Theatre, a professional Equity theater in Bristol. The Bucks County Symphony, founded in 1953, performs in Doylestown throughout the year and the Bucks County Gilbert & Sullivan Society, founded in 2009, performs a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta with full orchestra each June.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The "Wild River Review", an online magazine that publishes in-depth reporting, works of literature, art, visual art, reviews, interviews, and columns by and about contemporary artists, photographers, and writers, is based out of Doylestown.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The seemingly autobiographical novel "The Fires of Spring" by James Michener takes place in and around Doylestown.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Alecia Moore, more commonly known as Pink, was born in Doylestown, as was motion picture writer and director Stefan Avalos. Three "American Idol" contestants live in Bucks County: Justin Guarini, who was born in Atlanta, but moved to Bucks County; Jordan White, who was born in Cranford, New Jersey and moved to Bucks County; and Anthony Fedorov, who was born in Ukraine and was from Trevose, in Lower Southampton Township. Singer/actress Irene Molloy and classical tenor David Gordon were born in Doylestown. Musician Asher Roth was born in Morrisville. The Tony Award-winning Broadway play "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" is set in the county. The main members of the rock band Ween are from New Hope.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Local print publications include "Bucks County Courier Times", "The Intelligencer", "The Advance of Bucks County", "Bucks County Herald", "Bucks County Town and Country Living", "Radius Magazine", "Yardley Voic"e, "Morrisville Times", "Newtown Gazette", "Northampton Herald", "Langhorne Ledger", "Lower Southampton Spirit", "New Hope News", "Doylestown Observer", "Warwick Journal", "Fairless Focus". Online news publications are Levittown Now, NewtownPANow, Bucks Happening, New Hope Free Press. WBCB is a local radio news station.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The Bucks County Sharks rugby league team played in the AMNRL from 1997 to 2010 season. They returned to play in the AMNRL in 2011, until the league's fold in 2014, when they subsequently joined the USARL.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The county has a considerable history of producing Little League baseball contenders. Since its inception in 1947, four of the seven Pennsylvania teams to compete in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania have come from Bucks County: Morrisville (1955), Levittown American (1960 and 1961), and Council Rock-Newtown (2005). Two of these squads, Morrisville and Levittown (1960), went on to win the World Series title. In 2007, Council Rock Northampton won the PA State championship, and lost in the finals of regionals.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Like most of the Philadelphia suburbs, Bucks County was once a stronghold for the Republican Party. However, in recent years it has become more of a swing county, like Pennsylvania at large. In presidential elections, Bucks has been swept up in the overall Democratic trend that has swept the Philadelphia area, although the trend in Bucks has been less pronounced than in Delaware and Montgomery. It has gone Democratic in every presidential election since 1992.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Until recently, Republicans still held most local offices. However, after Democratic gains in the 2018 elections, Republicans hold all but four state house seats covering portions of the county, while the Democrats and Republicans hold two state senate seats each. The Democrats and Republicans each hold four of the row offices. As in most suburban Philadelphia counties, Republicans tend to be conservative on fiscal matters and moderate on social and cultural matters.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: All four statewide winners (Barack Obama for President, Rob McCord for Treasurer, Jack Wagner for Auditor General, and Tom Corbett for Attorney General) carried Bucks in November 2008. Earlier in 2008, Democrats took a plurality of registered voters. The GOP statewide candidates in the 2010 midterms, Tom Corbett for Governor and Pat Toomey for Senate, both won Bucks.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Bucks County is represented in U.S. Congress by , (map) formerly numbered as the 8th District. While concerns about gerrymandering are on the rise, the 1st District remains one of the few districts in the United States that is almost fully encompassed by a single county. In order to comply with population requirements, the Bucks County-dominated 1st Congressional district also includes slightly over 100,000 residents in the Hatboro-Horsham area of Montgomery County.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The executive government is run by a three-seat board of commissioners, one member of which serves as chairperson. Commissioners are elected through at-large voting and serve four-year terms. In cases of vacancy, a panel of county judges appoints members to fill seats. The current commissioners are Diane M. Ellis-Marseglia (D) (Chairwoman), Robert "Bob" J. Harvie Jr. (D) (Vice-Chairman), and Gene DiGirolamo (R). The current terms expire in January 2024.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: In the 2016 elections, Democrats Hillary Clinton (President), Josh Shapiro (Attorney General), and Joe Torsella (State Treasurer) won Bucks County while Republicans Pat Toomey (U.S. Senate), Brian Fitzpatrick (U.S. Representative), and John Brown (Auditor General) won Bucks County in their respective races.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The current Bucks County Sheriff is Frederick "Fred" A. Harran. Three members of the Sheriff's Office have died in the line of duty. One was shot and two others died in traffic accidents. The first, Sheriff Abram Kulp was murdered in February 1927.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Under Pennsylvania law, there are four types of incorporated municipalities: cities, boroughs, townships, and, in at most two cases, towns. The most populous borough in the county is Morrisville with 10,023 as of the 2000 census. The following boroughs and townships are located in Bucks County:


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: Census-designated places are geographical areas designated by the U.S. Census Bureau for the purposes of compiling demographic data. They are not actual jurisdictions under Pennsylvania law. Other unincorporated communities, such as villages, may be listed here as well.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: According to the Trewartha climate classification system, the Piedmont (United States) section of Bucks County, which is located roughly northwest of U.S. Route 1, has a Temperate Continental Climate with hot and slightly humid summers, cold winters and year-around precipitation ("Dcao"). Dcao climates are characterized by at least one month having an average mean temperature ≤ , four to seven months with an average mean temperature ≥ , at least one month with an average mean temperature ≥ and no significant precipitation difference between seasons. According to the Köppen climate classification system, the climate is a hot-summer, wet all year, humid continental climate ("Dfa"). During the summer months in the Piedmont, episodes of extreme heat and humidity can occur with heat index values > . The average wettest month is July which corresponds with the annual peak in thunderstorm activity. During the winter months, episodes of extreme cold and wind can occur with wind chill values < . The plant hardiness zone at Haycock Mountain, elevation 968 ft (295 m), is 6b with an average annual extreme minimum air temperature of . The average seasonal (Nov-Apr) snowfall total is between 26 and 36 inches (66 and 91 cm) depending on elevation and distance from the Atlantic Ocean. The average snowiest month is February which correlates with the annual peak in nor'easter activity. Some areas of the Piedmont farther south and along the river below New Hope are in hardiness zone 7a, as is the Atlantic Coastal Plain region of Bucks.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: According to the Trewartha climate classification system, the Atlantic coastal plain section of Bucks County, which is located roughly southeast of U.S. Route 1 has a Temperate Oceanic Climate with hot and slightly humid summers, cool winters and year-around precipitation ("Doak"). Doak climates are characterized by all months having an average mean temperature > , four to seven months with an average mean temperature ≥ , at least one month with an average mean temperature ≥ and no significant precipitation difference between seasons. According to the Köppen climate classification, this region has a humid subtropical climate ("Cfa"). During the summer months in the Atlantic Coastal Plain, episodes of extreme heat and humidity can occur with heat index values > . The average wettest month is July which corresponds with the annual peak in thunderstorm activity. During the winter months, episodes of extreme cold and wind can occur with wind chill values < . The plant hardiness zone in Andalusia, Bensalem Twp, elevation 16 ft (5 m), is 7a with an average annual extreme minimum air temperature of . The average seasonal (Nov-Apr) snowfall total is between 24 and 26 inches (61 and 66 cm) depending on elevation and distance from the Atlantic Ocean. The average snowiest month is February which correlates with the annual peak in nor'easter activity.


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: According to the A. W. Kuchler U.S. potential natural vegetation types, Bucks County, Pennsylvania would have a dominant vegetation type of Appalachian Oak ("104") with a dominant vegetation form of Eastern Hardwood Forest ("25").


title: Bucks County, Pennsylvania

text: The traditional seal of Bucks County, Pennsylvania takes its design from the inspiration of the county's founder, William Penn. The center of the seal consists of a shield from the Penn family crest with a tree above and a flowering vine surrounding it in symmetric flanks. The seal has a gold-colored background and a green band denoting Penn as the county's first proprietor and governor. In 1683, Penn's council decreed that a tree and vine be incorporated into the emblem to signify the county's abundance of woods. The seal was used in its official capacity until the Revolutionary War. The county government has since used the official Pennsylvania state seal for official documents. Today, the Bucks County seal's use is largely ceremonial. It appears on county stationery and vehicles as a symbol of the county's heritage. The gold emblem is also the centerpiece of the official Bucks County flag, which has a blue background and gold trim.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: The Witness is a 2016 puzzle video game developed and published by Thekla, Inc. Inspired by "Myst", the game involves the exploration of an open world island filled with natural and man-made structures. The player progresses by solving puzzles, which are based on interactions with grids presented on panels around the island or paths hidden within the environment. The game provides no direct instructions for how these puzzles are to be solved, requiring the player to identify the meaning of symbols in the puzzles. A central design element to the game was how these puzzles are presented so that the player can achieve a moment of inspiration through trial and error and gain that comprehension themselves.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Announced in 2009, "The Witness" had a lengthy development period. Jonathan Blow, the game's lead designer, started work on the title in 2008, shortly after releasing "Braid". The financial success of "Braid" allowed him to hire a larger production team without ceding creative control over the final product. To create the game's visual language, the team developed their own game engine and retained artists, architects, and landscape architects to design the structures on the island. This required a protracted development process, and the game's release was delayed from 2013 to 2016. Blow desired to create a game around non-verbal communication, wanting players to learn from observation and to come to epiphanies in finding solutions and leading to a greater sense of involvement and accomplishment with each success. The game includes around 650 puzzles, though the player is not required to solve them all to finish the game.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: "The Witness" was released for Windows and PlayStation 4 in January 2016, with later versions released for the Xbox One, Nvidia Shield, macOS, and iOS. Original plans for release on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were abandoned as the game engine became more demanding, and the team ultimately opted for an initial release on Windows and the PlayStation 4, with support for other platforms following. "The Witness" received generally favorable reviews from critics, who praised the difficult but surmountable puzzles and the game's art and setting. Within a week of release, the game had sold over 100,000 copies, which was about as many copies as "Braid" had done within a year of its release, nearly recouping all of the development costs for the game.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: "The Witness" is a first-person puzzle video game. The player, as an unnamed character, emerges from an underground bunker and explores an island with numerous structures and natural formations. The island is roughly divided into eleven regions, arranged around a mountain that represents the ultimate goal for the player. The regions are differentiated from one another by changes in vegetation, and the puzzles within each region are similar to one another (e.g. their solutions may all involve symmetry). Throughout the island are yellow boxes housing turrets. These can be activated once the puzzles within the box's region have been solved. When activated, the turrets emerge to shine a light toward the top of the mountain, indicating that a section of the game is complete. Several such turrets need to be activated to unlock access to the inside of the mountain and ultimately reach the game's final goal. Additional puzzles can be discovered if all eleven turrets are activated. Once the player finishes the ending puzzle, they are carried through the air by a cage and returned to the bunker where the game began.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: There are additional optional puzzles scattered around the island. One such set of puzzles, accessible after entering the mountain and colloquially referred to as "The Challenge", is a time-based test to complete about a dozen algorithmically generated puzzles of various types within seven minutes. The sequence is set to music from Edvard Grieg's "Anitra's Dance" and "In the Hall of the Mountain King". The game has more than 650 puzzles, which Jonathan Blow estimates will take the average player about 80 hours to solve. The puzzles include one that Blow believed that less than 1% of the players would be able to solve.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Mechanically, all puzzles in "The Witness" are solved in the same way: a path is drawn on a grid. For a path to be a solution to a puzzle, it must satisfy a number of rules. The rules are usually simple. For example, in a grid with white and black squares, a path may be required to separate the different kinds of squares, as illustrated to the left. The rules are taught to the player throughout the course of the game by the puzzles themselves, as such, there is no text or dialogue directly explaining a puzzle's rules. While the rules a path must satisfy can differ substantially across the game, at least three rules apply to all puzzles: paths must always begin from a round node, end on a line segment with a rounded end, and avoid self-intersection. As such, many of the game's puzzles can be classified as mazes.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: The game has two modes of interaction. The first, a walking mode, allows the player to move around and explore the island. The second, the path-drawing mode, is the one the player uses to attempt to solve puzzles. This mode is distinguished from the former by a white border around the screen. In path-drawing mode, the player's avatar is prevented from moving and instead allows the player to use their controls to trace the path through the puzzle's grid. The mode ends once the player solves the puzzle or cancels the mode. Normally, this mode is activated in front of a panel, moving the player's view directly to the panel to solve it, but it can also be activated at any other time. Nearly all puzzles provide immediate feedback if they have been solved correctly or not through sound effects or visual indication.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Most puzzles are easy to identify, located on recognizable eye-level panels scattered around the island. Sometimes several panels will be clustered together, as is typically done when the game is teaching a rule to the player. Most panels are daisy-chained to one another with power cables; solving one will light-up the cable, and unlock another panel. When this occurs in one of the game's regions, the complexity of the puzzles increases as the player works towards unlocking the region's yellow box (the size of the grids may increase, the region's rules may be refined, or new rules may be created). Though puzzles in a given region usually need to be completed in order, the regions themselves do not. This gives the game an open-world feel and allows players who get stuck in one region to move on to another.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Sometimes the rules of a puzzle depend not on the elements in its grid, but on the environment itself (for example, studying a tree whose branch structure mimics that of a nearby grid). There are also a number of optional environmental puzzles, where a single path is disguised in the environment. As with the game's grid puzzles, these are solved by entering path-drawing mode and tracing out the path. However, the components of such paths are distributed across different parts of the environment and disconnected. Only when a path is viewed from a certain perspective do the components join together to form a continuous path. The player then needs to find the correct viewpoint to complete the puzzle. Completing one such puzzle early in the game leads to an alternate ending, which culminates in a live-action sequence, apparently from the player's point-of-view, as they finish the game and take off their virtual reality (VR) headset, having seemingly been lost in the game for several days. They try to get back to their senses but still look for the game's puzzles in the real-life environment.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Throughout the island are audio recordings that provide insightful quotes for the player, from people such as Buddha, B.F. Skinner, and William Kingdon Clifford. Voice actors for these logs include Ashley Johnson, Phil LaMarr, Matthew Waterson, and Terra Deva. The player can also encounter a theater where short video clips, such as from James Burke's "Connections" series or the ending of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Nostalghia", can be viewed. A number of visual illusions based on depth perception from the player's position can be found in the game's environment, such as two seemingly disparate human figures at different parts of the island that appear to be holding hands when viewed from the right position and angle.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: "The Witness" was envisioned after Jonathan Blow released "Braid". After seeing the title become a success in 2008, Blow took time off from "serious development" to prototype new game concepts, spending a few months on each. The concept that proved to be the basis for "The Witness" was a prototype that Blow considered to be "very ambitious and challenging". He considered it risky as it would include the development of a 3D gameplay engine, and feared that he would "fall back to square one"—referring to his lifestyle before the success of "Braid"—should it fail. Despite these challenges, Blow continued to go forward with "The Witness" as it was also the most compelling prototypes he had crafted. Direct development work on the title began in late 2008.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: The game concept itself is based on an earlier title that Blow had envisioned but never completed. According to Blow, in this unfinished title, there was a side gameplay aspect with a "magic moment" that would have made the title exciting. "The Witness"s gameplay is based on distilling out this "magic moment" and wrapping it within its own game and story. Blow compared this moment to a spoiler for a movie, and thus avoided disclosure of the mechanic or other aspects of the game before release. The maze panel idea came from an earlier idea that Blow had around 2002 for a game involving wizards where the player would cast spells through mouse gestures, a popular element of video games at the time, with the ability to modify the effect of the spells through slight alterations of specific gestures.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: One of Blow's goals for "The Witness" was to explore the types of non-verbal communication that can be achieved through the medium of video games, an exploration he felt to be important to understanding them as an art form. The name "The Witness" is derived from the core gameplay aspect of making the player attentive to the surroundings to discover meaning and solutions to puzzles without verbal communication, similar to the approach taken by "Myst" (1993). Blow attributes much of "The Witness"s design to "Myst", citing "Myst" as a game that inspired him to become a developer. An aspect of "Myst" that Blow desired to correct was the nature of "pixel hunting" in some of its puzzles; the player would have to click on various parts of the virtual machinery without knowing what the end result was until sometime later in the puzzle. Within "The Witness", Blow created the maze panels as a unifying mechanic for all the puzzles to avoid this confusion. While the basic mode of interaction is the same for every maze in the game, the rules for solving each puzzle differ depending on the set of symbols included on each specific maze. The game map was divided into sections so that the information the player needed to understand the puzzles in that section would be segregated to one general location, "[cutting] down a lot of ambiguity that used to exist in adventure games". Puzzles within the game were designed to be unique and meaningful within the context of the rest of the puzzles in the game.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Part of the game's concept is a balance between puzzle-solving and perception, giving the player the freedom to explore "The Witness"s world and creating a non-linear approach to gameplay. Two of the first puzzles Blow created involved "clues in objects that populate the world", which led him to recognize he needed to create a world to support these puzzles. This would form a dichotomy between exploration and puzzle-solving, which "made a lot of sense" to Blow. Blow felt that a common issue among most adventure games was punishing the player for being stuck, so he created the island as an open world, allowing players to abandon puzzles they were stuck on to explore others. Blow wanted puzzles to be clearly presented in the open and without any red herrings, similar to the approach he had taken with "Braid". Exploration is encouraged through the game's narrative, which is told through audio logs the player can find on the unpopulated island; Blow used the audio logs to create a "feeling of loneliness in a beautiful space" for the player. Because these logs can be found in any order, Blow hopes that each player may have a different perception of the narrative depending on how they have approached the game. These audio logs were initially intended to be more story-driven, but Blow opted later to replace these with more obfuscated and obtuse information, similar to the text elements used in "Braid", to avoid directly relaying the story to the player and allow them to figure out the narrative for themselves instead. Blow's team designed the narrative so that players will gain a more concrete understanding of the story as they solve more puzzles.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Blow designed the game to allow the player to self-direct and explore and learn about the world through their own curiosity. Blow saw achievements as hollow and false rewards for the player in comparison to puzzle-solving epiphanies and only implemented them because of requirements for certification by the game console platforms. Blow was also concerned about the immersion-breaking pop-up messages that announce achievements, as he considers "The Witness" a "subtle kind of game" and external cues can be jarring.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: For Blow, the ideal player "is inquisitive and likes to be treated as an intelligent person". He was very careful to avoid "over-tutorializing" the game, noting that when a new idea is introduced in a game, the decision to immediately explain it to avoid confusion "kills epiphany and related things like the joy of discovery." He considers "The Witness" to be "anti-Nintendo", saying that "if you play a Nintendo game, there's a little character telling you every obvious thing over and over again for hours." "This is going the other way. It's more like the original "Legend of Zelda", which didn't tell you anything." Blow designed the puzzles to be "as simple as they can be" while still being challenging enough that players would have "miniature epiphanies over and over again." When asked how he felt about the fact that some players may not finish the game due to its difficulty, Blow said he would rather make a game that people who like to be challenged can appreciate than "scale it back so that more people can feel like they got everything."


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: "The Witness" was announced in 2009 following the release of Jonathan Blow's previous game, "Braid". At the time, Blow had no firm plans to release or publicize the game, and had allocated a budget of about for the game.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Blow created the Thekla, Inc. team for the development and publication of "The Witness". The company's name is taken from a city in Italo Calvino's novel "Invisible Cities". Starting in December 2009, Blow worked remotely with a 3D artist and a technical programmer full-time. Blow stated that by 2015 there were about eight full-time members on his team, though there were ten or eleven people involved around 2011 and as many as fifteen at its peak. "The Witness" incorporates other artists' and programmers' contributions in smaller roles, such as David Hellman, who had previously worked with Blow on "Braid"s art design and worked on conceptualizing the design of "The Witness". Other contributors include Eric Urquhart, who provided 3D concept artwork for the game, and Ignacio Castaño, who developed a rendering system for the game's illumination and visual effects. Blow gives much credit to Orsolya Spanyol, a freshly graduated graphic artist he hired around 2011, for transforming the original sparse imagery of the island to the more vivid scenery that was included in the final game. By diversifying work on the game, Blow was able to focus more of his time on the core game design, allowing his team to implement his vision, in contrast to the development of "Braid", where he also had to program much of the game himself.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: "The Witness" took seven years to complete. Blow attributes this long period to the expansion of the game's scope as he and his team continued to work on it. He opted against time- and cost-saving solutions that would have affected his ambition for the game, such as condensing the game's scope or using an off-the-shelf game engine. Instead, he put revenues from sales of "Braid", totaling around as of April 2014, into development costs. Blow had to seek out additional capital in February 2015 after exhausting the "Braid" revenues, but believed that regardless of the costs of extra development time, the debt would be justified in the long run. Final development costs were estimated at just under . While Blow considers "The Witness" to be an indie game due to the lack of funding or support from a major publisher, he also feels that the scope of the project by time and cost is closer to what a AAA studio would produce, and that it represents a new type of game development in the industry.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: "The Witness" uses its own engine developed by Blow and his team, which took a significant portion of the development time. Blow was insistent on using his own game engine instead of an existing solution such as Unity, as he would be able to fully control every element of a game engine that he created himself. As a compact game world compared to open-world games, the whole of the island of "The Witness" was treated as one zone, simplifying the gameplay and engine development. This presented a secondary challenge to the team, because to concurrently work on the project, they needed to find a means to allow multiple developers to edit areas without resorting to using locking on their version control system, as well as being able to work without being connected to a central server. Blow and his team developed an unconventional means of serializing the game world into text files that would have revision control while at the same time making it easy to find conflicting edits. They also converted the 10,000-some entities in the game world into their own individual files for tracking to further reduce conflict between edits. Other features of this system include using defined control points for terrain elements to automatically recalculate seamless connections between them within the game's rendering engine, and a built-in world editor within the game engine to easily access existing serialized elements and create new ones.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: The development team had incorporated support for upcoming VR hardware within "The Witness", following a November 2013 meeting between Blow and two Valve developers demonstrating their upcoming SteamVR technology, which Blow found to help enhance the player's ability to explore the island. Though the technical support for VR is present in the released game, "The Witness" was not designed to take advantage of virtual reality, as many of the puzzles could be "cheated" if the head movement could be separated from the body movement, according to programmer Andrew Smith.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: The design and layout of the island in "The Witness" has been nearly consistent since the start of the game's development, with the team working on populating the world with specific puzzles, and detailing the landscape and other art assets. Sam Machkovech, a writer for "Ars Technica" who had played a demo of the game in 2012 and again in 2015, noted that the island had remained familiar between these two sessions. One aspect of the design of the game world is the use of power cables running across the island, connecting puzzle panels to the mechanics they control. Blow found these to help in the initial parts of the game to provide "extreme clarity" of where the player was to go next, but discovered that this also made the game too much of a grind of repeating the same pattern. Over the course of development, the power cable aspects remained, but the designers changed how easy they were to trace across the landscape as a means to guide the player towards potential objectives.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: The island has been structured to provide a fair mix of puzzle-solving, exploration, and narrative elements while avoiding a "paradox of choice" by giving the player too much freedom and confusion about where to go next. According to artist Luis Antonio, one of the first things that Blow wanted the player to see was the mountain, to make them aware that this was their ultimate goal. The game initially started the player in an abandoned bunker converted to a living space, but as it was originally arranged, the player would exit the bunker not facing the mountain. Though they attempted to move and rotate the bunker space to meet Blow's goal, it was ultimately scrapped in favor of a simpler space with interior elements that fit with other portions of the game, and which the player would climb out of into the external environment with the mountain in full view. This introductory area was also meant to serve as the game's tutorial, helping players to understand the fundamental mechanics of switching between solving puzzles and exploring the environment to find others, and Thekla spent a great deal of time fine-tuning the details to be clear without verbal explanation. The team's artists worked to support Blow's objective of guiding the player by using contrasts of color and of natural and man-made structures to highlight areas that the player would be drawn towards. Blow wanted the game's art to start off with bright colors and high saturation, to present a type of optimism to the player, while later settings in the game would become less bright. He also wanted to make sure all elements of the game world stood out to avoid visual noise within the game that may have interfered with puzzle solving. To accomplish this, he and his team often had to review the game as if they were new players to it, and identify what elements they were visually drawn to; this would often identify features of the island they had incorporated early on but were no longer appropriate for the final game.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: The art style was influenced by a simplification approach, eliminating enough details but keeping overall shapes to make objects clearly recognizable. According to Antonio, they took inspiration for simplification from real-world photography, from artwork, and from the environments of the games "Journey", "Team Fortress 2", and "Mirror's Edge". They still wanted to ensure that a player would be able to recognize an area of the island they were in based on the visual appearance, such as by the types of trees around them, and ensured there was enough distinction while simplifying the assets to make this possible. Blow's team also engaged with Fourm Design Studio, a real-world architecture firm, and Fletcher Studio, a landscape architecture team, to help develop the environments for "The Witness". According to Fourm's founder, Deanna Van Buren, they developed the various man-made and cultivated areas based on the concept of three different civilization periods, with later civilizations building on the structures from earlier ones and repurposing these structures as needed. Their studios helped to bring design principles to the main development team, allowing them to then extrapolate their own ideas for the final game. Blow said that the guidance and advice of the architects helped to craft the island in a way that "feels more immersive just because the details are in place, and your brain kind of picks up on it". Blow gives an example of how many of the buildings on the island are in various states of deterioration, but were designed as fully detailed and complete structures and purposely worn down to create the ruined look; the resulting structures retain logically consistent details, such as the remains of wooden support posts for rotted-away stairways in a castle, which aid in immersion for the player.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: The final game shipped with very little music, instead relying on the ambient sounds of the environment, which were developed by Wabi Sabi Sound. Blow felt that the addition of music was a "layer of stuff that works against the game". The ambient sound effects were difficult to include, as the game world has no wildlife, making the player aware of how alone they are while on the island. Most of the ambient sounds were recorded by Andrew Lackey of Wabi Sabi Sound, capturing them while walking around Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. Lackey layered the various sound effects to enable many different variations depending on the player's location on the island while also providing a seamless transition from one environment to the next.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: The game was quietly revealed to the public by Blow at the 2010 Penny Arcade Expo with the help of independent developers Chris Hecker and Andy Schatz, who were sharing booth space for demonstrations of their own games, "SpyParty" and ""; the two provided a table for demonstrating "The Witness" without any signs or other markings. Blow wanted to keep the demonstration subtle and a surprise and to see players' reactions without the pressure of other players waiting in line to try the game. Blow himself was present at the Expo but kept his distance from the demonstration table. The fact that "The Witness" was playable at the Expo was only fully revealed after the Expo by both Blow and Stephen Totilo of "Kotaku", who saw and played the game but did not mention its presence until later. Players who tried the game at PAX or saw footage of it from the Kotaku article afterward became concerned that "The Witness" would simply be a series of mazes to solve. Blow reiterated that there was more to the game than mazes, and that he encountered similar problems when trying to promote "Braid", since seeing videos of portions of the game does not serve to demonstrate "what happens in the player's mind during the puzzle-solving process".


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: At the time of the 2010 reveal, Blow had anticipated releasing "The Witness" on Windows and iOS devices, and on an unspecified set of consoles, including possibly the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Later that year, Blow restated his stance, and felt that there would be no console release on initial release, considering the amount of additional programming time and limitations of the console platforms. In November 2011, Blow was able to hire two more programmers, and had rethought the release for consoles; while he could not commit to a console release initially, the additional labor would help make it possible to have one console version ready at the time of the game's launch, with the version for other consoles to be made available at a later time. As the game's development progressed and its engine become more complex, Blow opted to forgo the development of seventh-generation console versions, citing their "relatively low system specs".


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Around 2012, development of "The Witness" for the next generation of consoles with improved hardware capabilities became a possibility, and Blow and his team started looking at this opportunity. They had discounted the Wii U, again citing low specs, and decided to choose between the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One platforms. At the time of this decision, Sony was able to provide hardware information and development kits. Sony also sought out independent developers like Blow to learn about the upcoming PlayStation 4 in preparation for its launch, while Microsoft had not yet released firm specifications for their console. Blow opted to go with the PlayStation platform; this decision was also aided by representatives from Sony who were interested in bringing the game to their system, and Sony's larger trend of bringing more downloadable and independently developed games to their next console, in contrast to Microsoft's tighter controls. Blow affirmed that there was no monetary deal involved with this decision. He also later acknowledged that he had had difficulties working with Microsoft in the past, and had previously explained several of the issues he had to go through with Microsoft to release his earlier game "Braid". "The Witness" had been planned as a launch-window title for the PlayStation 4 in 2013, a limited-time console exclusive. The Windows and iOS versions, at that point, were planned to be released alongside the PlayStation 4 version, barring any development delays that Blow and his team encountered. Other console versions would come later if they opted to develop for them.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: "The Witness" remained in development, missing the planned 2013 release while Blow and his team continued to improve and fine-tune the game. In September 2015, Blow announced that the game's release was set for January 26, 2016, simultaneously for PlayStation 4 and Windows, with the iOS version to follow shortly thereafter. Though the ESRB rated the title for the Xbox One just prior to the game's release, Blow clarified that they had no plans for release on that platform at the time and were only acquiring the ESRB rating for that console platform at the same time as the other confirmed versions to avoid having to redo that step prior to release in the future. About a week before its release, Blow announced that the game would be priced at , an amount he said was "fairly reflective of what the game is". The cost was met with some criticism that it was a high price for an indie game. Game journalists believed the price was justified given the estimated 100-hour playtime Blow had stated, and also compared it to a similar puzzle game, "The Talos Principle" (2014), which was released for the same price. To help promote the game, the development team created three "long screenshot" videos, inspired by the experimental film "Koyaanisqatsi", that slowly panned across the island and its features without additional commentary.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Blow stated that they had been in discussions with publishers for a physical release of the game, but opted to not do that step initially, citing the additional time that would have been needed for the manufacturing and distribution processes. However, with the game completed and released digitally, they are looking to potential retail versions.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Following release, some players reported getting motion sickness due to a combination of the narrow field of view used by the game and the bobbing of the player's viewpoint simulating walking motions. Blow stated that they were working on a patch to allow players to adjust their field of view, disable the head bobbing, and enable faster movement options. In August 2016, the Windows version was updated to provide support for Nvidia's Ansel extension, which allows players to compose shots to be rendered in ultra-high resolutions or for 3D and virtual reality devices. Following Sony's announcement of the PlayStation 4 Pro, Blow said they would patch the game for that console to support 4k resolution without sacrificing framerate. Blow is also working to support devices with high dynamic range (HDR) for both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: The Xbox One version of the game was released on September 13, 2016. Blow said in August 2016 that they were looking into porting the game to mobile devices, but it would require them to reduce the quality of the graphics and investigate an alternate control scheme that would work on touch screens. An Android version for the Nvidia Shield was released on January 16, 2017. The iOS version was released on September 20, 2017.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: "The Witness" received "generally favorable reviews" according to the review aggregator website Metacritic.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Chloi Rad of "IGN" awarded the game a perfect score of 10/10, calling it a masterpiece and stating that it was "[a] beautiful, powerful, and cleverly designed puzzle game with a wealth of mysteries to unravel." Brenna Hillier from "VG247" praised the game's use of a first-person perspective to present what otherwise could have been a simple series of puzzle boards, and was impressed by the steep learning curve that the puzzles presented, "impossible, incomprehensible puzzles melt into simple exercises after you’ve visited nearby locations". Aaron Riccio of "Slant Magazine" found that there was a "jarring shift" once the player reached the puzzles inside the mountain, with puzzles that relied more on obfuscation in a more clinical environment, contrasting with the rest of the island.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Julie Muncy of "Wired", though impressed with the game, noted that the lack of any narrative or gameplay guidance could cause "players to bounce off [the game] entirely". Muncy noted that Blow wanted to make games for people who read "Gravity's Rainbow", but whereas the novel was difficult yet "enamored with the world and the people in it", the game felt lifeless, concluding "It's hard, but empty. That's not the same thing." Cian Maher of "Rock Paper Shotgun" disagreed, describing the game as "hardcore postmodern", and concluding that Blow "actually did make a game for people who like to read "Gravity's Rainbow"." Oli Welsh of "Eurogamer" praised the game's puzzles for providing numerous "eureka" moments to the player and considered the title as the video game analog of the "Goldberg Variations", but felt that the narrative atop the puzzles was "self-involved and wilfully obscure" and believed that it could have been omitted, as Blow and his team "needn't have tried to make a puzzle out of art when he had already, so beautifully and so successfully, made art out of puzzles". Justin McElroy of "Polygon" gave the game an 8/10 rating, describing it as "uplifting but frustrating"; he criticized the length of time involved in solving certain puzzles while expressing concern that less-patient players would take shortcuts. "That will naturally lead to more cheating. It will snowball." Bob Mackey of "USgamer" was more critical of the game, giving it 2 of 5 stars. Though he praised its visuals and setting, Mackey found the puzzles to be very difficult, saying that "there's simply too much going on to give me the proper feedback about what I'm getting wrong" and suggesting that "Blow was maybe a little too close to his work".


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Several theories have been proposed as to the meaning of the story in "The Witness". In attempting to analyze the meaning of the game, David Roberts of "GamesRadar+" said he felt that "The Witness" was about the nature of epiphanies within the scope of epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Roberts stated that as one proceeds through the puzzles in the game, the player begins to recognize other elements of the island setting as puzzles, and to obtain the game's credit sequence (the "true ending" as described by Roberts), the player solves such an environmental puzzle built into one of the first puzzles they would encounter on the island: "the end of your journey becomes the beginning, and the beginning leads to the end – the very cycle of epiphany".


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: Within a week of release, Blow stated that sales of "The Witness" had nearly outpaced what "Braid" had done during its first year of release. He later specified that first-week sales were over 100,000 copies, with gross revenues over , on track to break even with development costs, with which Thekla would start considering porting the game to other platforms, potentially including iOS, Android, OS X, and Xbox One. During this time, Blow observed that the Windows version of "The Witness" was one of the top downloads through illegal BitTorrent sites, comparable to what he had seen for "Braid". He had opted to forgo strong digital rights management for the title, as he believes "people should have the freedom to own things", but has said he may change his mind and software piracy controls "might happen on the next game".


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: "The Witness" is widely regarded as one of the best games of the 2010s. The game appeared on 'Best of the decade' features from "IGN", "Polygon", "NME", "CNET", and "National Post". "Edge" considered the game the 22nd-best game of all time in 2017, and "IGN" ranked it the 59th-best in 2022.


title: The Witness (2016 video game)

text: "The Witness" has inspired the parody "The Looker" by Subcreation Studio, as well as puzzle game "Taiji" by Matthew VanDevander, both released in 2022.


title: T-34 (film)

text: T-34 () is a 2019 Russian war film written and directed by Aleksey Sidorov. The title references the T-34, a World War II-era Soviet medium tank used during the defense of the Soviet Union. The film narrates the life of Nikolai Ivushkin, a tank commander who gets captured by the Germans. Three years later, he begins to plan his ultimate escape, alongside his newly recruited tank crew. It stars Alexander Petrov as Junior Lieutenant Ivushkin, with Viktor Dobronravov, Irina Starshenbaum, Anton Bogdanov, Yuri Borisov, Semyon Treskunov, and Artyom Bystrov.


title: T-34 (film)

text: "T-34" was released in Russia by Central Partnership on January 1, 2019, and for hire converted into IMAX format. The film was released to generally positive reviews, with critics praising the production quality and visual effects. It was successful commercially, grossing 2.2 billion rubles (about $32 million), against a production budget of 600 million rubles, after a week in cinemas. It is in second place on Russia's biggest blockbusters list with over 8.5 million viewers and 2 billion rubles, and is currently the third-highest grossing Russian film of all time, behind "Serf" and "Going Vertical".


title: T-34 (film)

text: In November 1941, just outside Moscow, Red Army Junior Lieutenant Nikolay Ivushkin (Alexander Petrov) is driving a ramshackle truck and trailer with a young private named Vasiliy beside him. A German Panzer III tank appears over a hill and opens fire on them. Nikolay, who has been trained as an armor officer, maneuvers skillfully and they escape injured, but alive.


title: T-34 (film)

text: Nikolay is assigned to command a damaged T-34 tank whose commander was killed, with orders to delay the Germans' advance with only the single tank and a small number of supporting infantry. Nikolay and his crew lay an ambush for a platoon of German panzers commanded by Klaus Jäger (Vinzenz Kiefer). Through a combination of guile and bravery, their T-34 destroys six panzers, but in a final duel with Jäger's command panzer, both tanks are disabled, and half the Russian tank crew is killed, and Nikolay and driver Stepan Vasilyonok captured.


title: T-34 (film)

text: Three years later, in 1944, Jäger, now a Standartenführer, gains permission from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and General Heinz Guderian to recruit an experienced tank crew from Soviet POWs in a concentration camp to act as opponents for training the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. Nikolay has been a prisoner for three years, and has refused to give his name, but Jäger recognizes his photograph from the camp records. Jäger proposes the idea to Nikolay through the camp's interpreter, bilingual Russian prisoner Anya (Irina Starshenbaum). At first Nikolay refuses, but agrees after Jäger threatens to kill Anya.


title: T-34 (film)

text: Nikolay picks out three other tankers from the POWs – driver Vasilyonok, loader Serafim Ionov, and gunner Demyan Volchok—to crew a T-34/85 that the Germans just captured. At first, the other tankers refuse to take part, but Nikolay says he has a plan to escape.


title: T-34 (film)

text: The Germans first order the Soviet prisoners to clear out the rotting and burned bodies from inside the tank, but as they remove the bodies, they unexpectedly find a small number of remaining live shells and hand grenades. Granted permission to bury their comrades, they hide the munitions with the bodies in a cairn on the edge of the training grounds. Not trusting the Soviets, Jäger orders anti-tank mines laid around the entirety of the training grounds. Anya convinces Nikolay to let her escape with them, as only she can steal a map from Jäger's office showing a safe route out of the area, and gain a pass letting her out of the camp for a day.


title: T-34 (film)

text: Before the training exercise, Nikolay and his crew retrieve the munitions and create a smoke screen to mask their movements. Believing the T-34 is unarmed, the Germans are unprepared when the trainees' first Panther tank is knocked out, and a second shell is fired directly into the observation tower, killing most of the officers inside, except for Jäger and Guderian, who jump out at the last second. The T-34 boldly storms through the training grounds’ car park (crushing many of the officers’ staff cars) and breaks through the main gate, avoiding the minefield. The tankers pick up Anya at a bus stop outside the camp; with her map, Nikolay plots a course toward Czechoslovakia and back to the Red Army's lines. In the first town they come to, Nikolay and his hungry crew find badly needed fuel, new clothing, and fresh food. They burn their ragged prisoner clothes as they drive out of town.


title: T-34 (film)

text: At first, Nikolay suggests abandoning the tank and splitting up, believing they have a better chance of survival if they separate, but the crew insist on staying with him. Before dawn, knowing that the Germans will be hunting them, Nikolay puts Anya out of their tank and tells her to make her way east on foot through the forests. Jäger meanwhile takes to the sky in a Fieseler Storch to find Nikolay's T-34. He then takes command of four Panthers and prepares an ambush in the small town of Klingenthal.


title: T-34 (film)

text: At night, the T-34 enters the town and stumbles into the first of the four Panthers. Instead of trying to pierce its front armor, Volchok fires a shot under its hull that ricochets off the pavement and penetrates its underbelly. Nikolay realizes they are surrounded by the remaining three Panthers, including Jäger's. Knowing they need to distract the other crews, he sends out Volchok, armed only with a grenade, to disable one. Vasilyonok crashes their T-34 through building walls before unexpectedly colliding with one of the other Panthers. The Russians manually turn their damaged turret and get a shot off just as the Germans are about to fire, destroying the panzer. Meanwhile, the two other Panthers have arrived on the scene and one takes aim at Nikolay. However, Volchok manages to fire a shell out of the German tank he just captured. The third Panther is disabled, but Jäger quickly disposes of the captured Panther, badly wounding Volchok.


title: T-34 (film)

text: Both Jäger and Nikolay emerge from the cupolas of their tanks. Jäger throws down his glove, inviting Nikolay to a duel. Nikolay asks for five minutes to pick up the wounded Volchok. Both tanks then move outside the town and face off over a narrow stone bridge across the river. As the tanks charge at each other, Jäger fires several shots at the T-34, but fails to disable it, while Nikolay waits to fire their last shell directly through the driver's vision port. As in 1941, the two tanks fire simultaneously, badly damaging but not disabling each other. Out of ammunition, Nikolay orders Vasilyonok to ram Jäger's tank, pushing it to the edge of the bridge. Jäger crawls out of his Panther while Nikolay aims a stolen rifle at him. Jäger shouts for Nikolay to shoot him, but Nikolay offers his foe mercy. Jäger extends his hand and the two adversaries exchange a handshake of respect. Nikolay tries to pull Jäger to safety, but Jäger lets go, allowing himself to fall to his death as his Panther tips over the bridge and plummets into the river.


title: T-34 (film)

text: With their tank's tracks disabled, the crew reunites with Anya outside the town, carrying the wounded Volchok on a makeshift stretcher, and they make their way towards the Russian lines on foot.


title: T-34 (film)

text: The film ends with a dedication to the Red Army tank crews of the Great Patriotic War, all of whom earned the status of heroes for fighting against the invasion of their country.


title: T-34 (film)

text: On September 10, 2015, it was announced that the Mars Media film company would start production of the high-budget war action drama "T-34".


title: T-34 (film)

text: Later, producer Leonard Blavatnik, an investor, owner of Amedia and Warner Music Studios, joined the project and chose this film from a large number of proposals, which was also due to personal motives (as Blavatnik's grandfather was a Red Army soldier), and other reasons - the best young artists, a first-class film crew and the successful experience of a partner, Mars Media, and personally Ruben Dishdishyan.


title: T-34 (film)

text: The shooting process of "T-34" started on 23 February and continued for 61 days. Some scenes were shot in Moscow, Kaluga and Moscow regions, others in the Czech Republic, Prague, Kačina (library), Loket (Sokolov District), Rudolfinum and Terezin. For the picture, more than 25 scale sceneries were built, among them a Russian village and a prisoner of war camp.


title: T-34 (film)

text: In the film, several real T-34 tanks were remade and updated for the film. The film also used several German and Soviet vehicles, such as the Sd.Kfz. 251 half-track. The Panther tanks with Zimmerit paste were made from T-55 tanks distinguishable by the five large main wheels.