Going back to the initial release of the game in 2012 there have been several trees officially released as a plan for the future. With the release of every standalone tree since we have gotten a new planned tree but, not all the vehicles in these plans (especially the older ones) have made it into the current game. So, as a fun project I’ve gone through and tried to find each of the vehicles that have not made it into the current game.
Each of the planned trees I used for this project can be found HERE.
I’ve put all the vehicles in a spreadsheet accessible HERE.
The majority of these ‘missing’ vehicles are fairly minor variants of ones that are already ingame, for convenience’s sake I’ve arbitrarily highlighted the most interesting vehicles green. This generally includes: new airframes, historically significant variants, and ones that would play differently from vehicles currently ingame.
My criteria for making the list was simple, if a vehicle in a planned tree was not in the current version of the game in the tree it was planned for then I wouldn’t add it. So for example, I do know the F6F-3 and STB-1 were added but currently they have become the F6F-5 and STB-2 therefore the F6F-3 and STB-1 are not in the current version of the game. Also another situation that came up often was a plan saying something vague such as “B-24D”. I usually counted these cases as covering every subvariant of the vehicle. So the “B-24D-25-CO” currently ingame counted as the “B-24D” in the subtree. This wasn’t a strict rule but I stuck with it most of the time. Certain vehicles on the list are ingame now but not in the tree they were originally planned to be in (CW-21, Ju-86, etc) so I still counted them as missing. One final note on the list is that there was a lot of odd formatting of names and I stuck with the spellings on the planned trees even if they were weird or inconsistent or even just misspelled (IK-2M and Panter 2 instead of IL-2M and Panther 2).
I likely missed some vehicles or got confused with certain variants, especially with ones I’m not familiar with such as British or Japanese aircraft so please be forgiving if you notice a mistake.
Now onto some of the most notable vehicles ‘missing’ on the list.
The X-4 Bantam would be unfeasible to add as it was purely a research aircraft and was never even planned to have a fighter version or armament even as a paper project so I’m quite confused as to how that ended up in the planned tree. Especially when the US has such a large wealth of actual combat aircraft that could have been chosen instead.
The AJ-1 even got a special little section on the page announcing the planned US tree along with the A-1 Skyraider and a handful of other planes and yet has not ended up ingame.
There’s many paper German jets as well such as the Me 262 HGII and III, the BV.215, and the Ta.183 I don’t have too much to add other than it’s interesting to me how the game was going less historical and more luft '46 early on.
Britain is sadly still missing the bomber Mosquito variants along with many naval planes like the Fulmar, Barracuda, and some more Seafires.
I also think that China is one of the larger losers with how many of their ‘missing’ vehicles would have added something pretty unique for the tree, in particular I’m sad we haven’t yet seen the ZTS63A. You might notice that I put the T-26 in the ‘missing vehicles’ for China but with an asterisk. This is because the variant in the planned tree graphic is a different variant of the T-26 and the one that China actually used unlike the ahistorical variant currently ingame.
Overall, I don’t expect any of these ‘missing’ vehicles to come in future updates nor do I really want many of them. The game will survive just fine without 8 more He.111s. I just thought it would be neat to look back and see what the old plans for the future were.