Gorka L. Martinez-Mezo

Don’t know, but at least one has been captured by the Russians, apparently after stepping over a mine:

The 120mm APDS was rather slow but with more energy than either the 105 or 110mm round. The 110mm seems to have been a dead end right at the time it was developed

All the vehicles sent so far were fully operational after a complete refurbishment

The only vehicle which was ruined was the one in the museum at El Goloso. The others could and had been refurbished. Don’t know how many have been stripped of parts so badly they’re not economical to refurbish, although with money everything is possible….. In any case, these vehicles will all end up in Ukraine, fully operational or as spares hulks

They don’t look that bad after a good overhaul…. https://x.com/gcivilbizkaia/status/1868600526503629006 Those Leo’s weren’t in a scrapyard in any case; they were stored to use the hulls for special versions like AVBL, engineer and sapper versions, the original plans killed by the 2008-2016 economic crisis. But they could and are being refurbished

Probably they have better things to do than indulge tank nuts….. still, the front of the turret is anything but resilient.

They have been having problems to source spares, specially since the Leo1 showed in Ukraine. They would need a considerable investment to keep these old tanks in service for 15 more years

I would say wartime lessons were forgot rather quickly. M47s came with hull ammo storage under the turret, safer but inconvenient, while the M48 moved to conventional racks lass than 10 years after WWII….

M1150 uses the same armor package than the M1A1?

In the early 1980s the French (and other AMX-30 users) were limited to the HEAT OCC-105, aka Obus G, with the OFL-105 APFSDS being available in the mid 1980s. It is known France bought a test batch of M735 but as far as I know only for tests. The bore design of the DEFA F-1 was optimized to use the OCC and could not fire APDS. No such problems with APFSDS rounds. The DM23, aka M111 became available in the late 1970s so I doubt the Leopard 1 fleet was limited to APDS until the A5 upgrade. As mentioned, vehicles fitted with manual FCS only neded the reticles being modified. This was done to the M60A1 fleet, for example.

Looks like something burns inside the array……

This one suffered an internal explosion; I wonder if Iranian crews didn’t fill the ammo bins with liquid or if the concept wasn’t as good in practice.

DM73?

How’s the propellant situation? With the closure of propelling charge manufacturing I was under the impression the L30 operational life was dependent of existing charges shelf life hence the move towards NATO standard ammo…..

Stuart, do you know if the Swiss simulator is the same as the Chieftain one? I knew of the Chieftain driver simulation which is older than this Pz68 sim and I was wondering if the Swiss army bought or licensed the British technology.