With the B‑52H already in the game, it got me thinking about how War Thunder could push into some of the crazier Cold War ideas, and the CL‑1201 is one of the few concepts big enough to justify its own mode. This wasn’t a normal aircraft — it was basically someone trying to turn an entire base into something that could fly. If something that massive was drifting across a map, players wouldn’t be able to ignore it. You’d have to react to it, fight around it, and deal with the chaos it creates. That alone gives the event a clear player goal: attack, defend, or disrupt a moving airborne fortress that changes the flow of the match.
How the Event Plays
The idea isn’t to make the CL‑1201 a flyable vehicle. It’s about building a mission around the chaos it brings. The real 1960s Lockheed proposal described a nuclear‑powered platform with a wingspan over 300 meters, designed to stay airborne for weeks and carry its own escort fighters. In the event, the CL‑1201 moves slowly across the map like a drifting steel city. Both teams fight around it using different tactics. The US/NATO side focuses on coordinated precision strikes against modules like radar arrays, lift engines, and the reactor housing. The Russian side brings heavier interceptors and missile platforms to punch through defensive fire and break open internal sections. The fight becomes layered: escorts scrambling, attackers weaving through AI guns, and the fortress itself constantly shaping the battlefield.
Why This Mode Would Stand Out
This mode isn’t about realism. It’s about giving players a cinematic, high‑energy event that feels completely different from anything currently in War Thunder. A giant moving objective, shifting frontlines, and coordinated team pushes create a style of gameplay the game doesn’t really have right now. It adds spectacle, teamwork, and a sense of scale that fits perfectly with the direction the game has already taken by adding aircraft like the B‑52H.
Closing Thoughts
If War Thunder wants a fresh event built around teamwork, spectacle, and controlled chaos, the CL‑1201 is one of the strongest concepts to build it around. It’s big, it’s weird, and it naturally creates the kind of gameplay moments players remember.
If you want to create a suggestion you can do so in the suggestion section here on the forum. That section is however pre-moderated and only posts that follow their rules and guidelines will get posted and it can take a couple of weeks for a post to get reviewed for publication. If it gets accepted and made public it then has a chance to get sent to the developers as a suggestion later on. (Also, just a guess here but don’t use AI when making posts)
hey Necronomica i did use AI name Grammarly to help make it more better for reading and im sorry if it sounds really fake ill write it with out Grammarly. I did not want it to be terrible because I suck writing.
AI can be a great tool to help in writing if you get stuck, don’t know how to structure a sentence or have trouble with the language. That is something it does really well and i personally encourage the use of AI in those cases.
If it however is used to write whole posts or paragraphs it starts to feel soulless and disingenuous. It also has a tendency to get facts wrong a lot of the time and it also often uses weird sources for some of it’s claims.
i know but it also took me around 3 weeks of writing this and getting everything perfect in my way.
is their anything that i should change next time i write something?
Yeah, it can take a lot of time and effort to make good posts. I recommend looking at other posts in the suggestion section (and in the category of your planned suggestion) that have already been accepted and published as that gives an idea of the quality, structure and content they usually accept.
Fine by me. With modern speeds and weapons, a truely epic scale is required and this game is pure fantasy anyway (f.e. every 2nd rockn and building have invisible parts sticking out and blocking shells, doesn’t sound realistic to me, 20mm WW2 cannons and explosive HMG bullets act like nuke launchers) so I have nothing against fully embracing what War Thunder really is, which is a pew-pew shooter with models resembling real life military vehicles.