A Leopard 2 A5. This tank is the tank of choice for pretty much any modern nation that doesn't produce its own Main Battle Tank (MBT) nationally.
The kit itself was frustrating in places. The frustration started with me looking at the tracks. The tracks came in four pieces, which you were supposed to bend via hot water into the proper shape. The instructions came with a helpful note: "Bend with the help of hot water, do not use boiling water in any case!" Long story short, the tracks were a nightmare jigsaw of superglue and tepid water when I followed the vague instructions and got nowhere.
After the fact I did work out a procedure for making the tracks work.
A proper assembly would read:
1. Assemble drive sprockets, return wheels, road wheels.
2. Boil a kettle's worth of hot water.
3. Just after boiling, pour 2 cups or so of hot water into a medium bowl, preferably something that doesn't absorb heat. The large amount of water lets it retain the heat a bit better.
4. Throw the track into the water. Wait a minute, then fish the track out with a tool of some sort.
5. Bend the track around the wheel/sprocket. Do not do this with the wheel/sprocket on the chassis, it will break something.
6. Repeat steps 2-5 as necessary, until the track looks right.
7. Glue tracks to sprockets/wheels.
8. Paint.
9. Mount on tank chassis.
Aside from that, the kit was normal, though the side skirt is pretty shoddy - it glues on, but is at a place where you have to keep touching (and thus it keeps breaking.) Mine are mounted with bluetac.
The camouflage was also shaped with bluetac, and it requires more work than you would believe to do two different colors via this method. For weathering I pulled the old trick of a dilute overspray of Tamiya buff to take the shine off of everything and mute the colors, and then use ground pastels in a light application.
It's made up to look like a German Army Panzer; which was really the only option in the kit. (You can make it up as a 'NL' [IE a Netherlands version], which changes the grenade launchers and the mounted machine gun, but the paint is the same.
Steel tow cables seem carelessly stowed.
The turret on an Leo 2 A5 is gigantic; the upgraded version has fore and aft additions to give the tank a little more survivability against anti-tank shaped charges.
Though the end result is that the turret is a big angular wedge, like a robot's head. The flaps along the side actually open, like the crest of some frilled lizard, to further protect the sides of the turret from RPGs.
Pioneer tools were done by hand.
The angle can things along the turret sides are smoke grenade launchers. Like Batman, the Leo 2 has smoke grenades, utility cables, and is bulletproof. Unlike Batman, the Leo 2 weighs 62 tons and would most definitely get stuck in Gotham city traffic.
Ikea-style stowage was added onto the back. Actually useful as when on the move, tankers have to haul all their gear with them like any other soldier.
Business end of the tank is the same 120mm L/55 smoothbore gun used by the American M1A1 Abrams. Fires many types of ammunition, is hydraulically dampened, and is gyroscopically stabilized so the tank can fire accurately while doing all sorts of goofy stuff.
Sunlight shows off the tricolors a bit better.
Compared to the T-72, the Leopard 2 is higher, bigger and heavier. But it does have air conditioning and a modern sensor suite, can survive being hit with modern anti-tank munitions, a hit on the ammo magazine doesn't kill the crew, etc.
Quarter for scale.
The Challenger 2 is just as tall, but a bit wider. If this were some episode of old Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson would talk about the British tank having the longer gun endlessly.
James May: "You've both done it wrong! The T-72 has everything you really need in a tank. You aim the gun yourself. You can get your arm ripped off if you put it in the wrong place, how manly is that?"
Jeremy Clarkson: "Rubbish."
Richard Hammond: "I agree! Old fashioned ideas about tanks are nonsense! That's why you want the Leo 2. It has a loader, it doesn't rip your arm off..."
Clarkson: "You would - if you couldn't get six point six meters of rifled British magnificence."
Hammond: "How much is that in feet?"
Clarkson: "A lot."
Nope, moving on...
This little German armored car is about as close as I have to a normal sized vehicle to compare the Leopard 2 with. Like most modern MBTs, the Leo 2 is enormous: 3 meters tall, 3.75 meters wide, and nearly 10 meters long when the length of the gun barrel is counted. All that weight is driven by a 1500 hp diesel engine-transmission "power pack". The engine is a turbocharged V12 displacing 47.6 liters, the displacement of 28 Honda 1.7L engines. Probably the most amazing thing about this unit is that it can be swapped out for a replacement power pack in half an hour. Post World War 2 German tank designs place a great emphasis on field serviceability.
A lesson the Germans learned the hard way.
When what was West Germany began to rearm itself in the 1950s, it immediately began to think of tanks - both for the obvious military / industrial reasons, and because the tanks the Americans were selling West Germany were already looking a bit old-fashioned compared to projects being forged behind the Iron Curtain. Starting in the mid 1950s, the West Germans developed their own MBT, the Leopard. The Leopard was in one way very surprising: the first Leopard was a tank that had given up entirely on the idea of armoring itself against enemy tanks. The advances in tank destroying by the late 1950s had made the high-grade steel approach of World War 2 tank armor entirely obsolete. Directional shaped charges in the form of High Explosive Anti Tank [HEAT] rounds, and the soon to be unveiled Kinetic Energy [KE] Penatrator rounds made the high strength steel armor of the World War 2 era about as effective as soggy cardboard. While armored against machine gun bullets and light cannon, the first Leopard focused entirely on mobility and accurate firepower. It first entered service in the mid 1960s.
At some point in the late 1960s, West Germany's allies, the British and the Americans, sat Germany down someplace secure, and showed them Britain's latest innovation. Known later as Dorchester or Chobham armor, it was a new style of composite armor that gave yet undesignated tanks a fighting chance of shrugging off KE penetrators or HEAT rounds. The basic idea to the still highly classified Dorchester armor is that a matrix of steel plates, ceramic tiles, and rubber could twist the otherwise irresistible forces and use their extreme energy against them, deflecting the shot away from the tank's vulnerable interior. While the Germans declined to use Chobram themselves, it clearly gave them a few ideas, (or maybe the Germans just had some material science Dpl. Ings who couldn't wait to play around with the new concept.) At any rate, they developed their own version of Chobram, which didn't protect as well, but was 1) cheaper, and 2) easier to maintain and replace. The Germans were already in the early stages of developing a successor to the Leopard, so the addition of the new composite armor was made a top priority.
A long development process followed. The tank that would become the Leopard 2 is similar to many other Western MBTs. It has composite armor and a smooth-bore gun for firing modern tank rounds, a modern sensor and optics suite, and a emphasis on crew survivability. It has four crew stations - commander, gunner, loader, and driver, and the ammo is sequestered from the crew cabin to prevent a unlucky hit from killing the crew. By the time series production was ready, it was 1980.
The Cold War was by this point reaching new lows, and tank battles in West Germany were more than a theoretical interest to NATO. The previous Leopard had been a large export success, and so naturally many countries were interested in the new MBT. the Netherlands was the first to take an order of 445(!) Leo 2s in the early 1980s. There was no lack of domestic demand, either: the West German Army was at the time enormous compared to what it is today, having 12 divisions, nearly all of them being heavily mechanicalized. So many Leo 2s were produced - over 2000. The reunification of Germany and the subsequent military draw down saw most of these tanks excess to requirements, and thus Leopard became the deal going in modern MBTs. Canada replaced its knackered Leopard 1s during the war in Afghanistan with Leo 2s, one of the few procurement decisions that Canada has made in recent decades that actually went well. The Swedes recently picked the Leopard 2 as their MBT over the French Leclerc, and the Challenger 2.
In fact, that's why I think I dig modern tanks. Military Procurement has always been a bit of a mess, and the situation has gotten a lot worse for western nations since the Cold War's end. Somehow, western MBTs have avoided this rot. Tanks are not invulnerable super-machines (in fact, nearly all operational uses of MBTs stress how important it is that that they be supported by infantry.) Instead, the Main Battle Tank is the modern heavy cavalry. They operate as powerful mobile reserves, and as an armored lance to punch through enemy resistance. This isn't the existential battle for Germany the Leo 2 was originally designed for, but it is good to know that modern tanks are more than up to the task.
