In two recent wars, ABLE wars 129 and 132 (currently ongoing), there were some unexpectedly fast jumps in tech for only the Colonial faction's iron tree. In war 129, tier 5 Colonial artillery was unlocked just 98 hours into the war, and in war 132, Colonials are confirmed to have unlocked tier 12 battle tanks 445 hours into the war.

Many players might be unaware of how exactly tech progress is believed to work in Foxhole, and may not understand why this is so suspect, so let me explain. As players have had many wars to figure this out, we know that tech mats: aluminium, iron and copper, have a fixed global spawn rate that is unaffected by the amount of people scrapping for them. What this means is that, while a faction may boost its tech progress by getting better at gathering and transporting the materials to engineering centers, the actual rate at which a faction can possibly progress through its tech tree is *hard capped* by the global spawn rate.

Some players have been gathering data on tech unlock times for many wars now, which is helpful for setting expectations for when we can expect to see certain tech unlocks after the start of a war.

I made this plot using the data that a friend of mine gathered on Warden tech unlock times since the 1.0 update. This data gives us a clear picture of what's possible if a faction puts its head down, and what clearly is not possible without something fishy going on.

From this data, we know that tier 5 iron normally unlocks at about 124±5 hours, and tier 12 iron normally unlocks about 474±12 hours into a war. Knowing this, there is definitely something strange that happened with Colonial tech in these two wars, and players may be justified for suspecting foul play or something else (to the reasonable extent that any foul play is likely only propagated by a small group of players) because these tech jumps are statistically *impossible*.

The attached plot shows Warden iron tech time statistics for all wars since war 96, and the outliers in Colonial tech time for the two wars in question.

Proving that these tech jump(s) are statistically impossible