this tank chats going to be about the vehicle beside me which in dutch service
is known as the PRTL were very fortunate today to be able to have this
vehicle here it's 2019 and it's about to be our tank fest event and the dutch
historic collection have brought this vehicle over so we can see it
demonstrated now many of you may know this vehicle in a slightly different
format as to the Gepard it's developed in the 1960s in germany
the first five pre-production prototypes to the dutch standard and the dutch
standard has different radars on two different types of radars they are
delivered in 1972 for trials and the actual Dutch military accepts as series
three different batches of the vehicle from 1977 to 1979 and they actually
order in all its 95 vehicles go into service they they come with slightly
different modifications they're called batch ca1 ca2 ca3 now the Dutch to end up
using a radar system designed by Holland signal as opposed to the German systems
that's being used this radar system you can detect planes coming in from about
15 kilometers away and once they are detected by the radar system which is on
the back of the vehicle it's then electronically handed over as it were to
the tracking radar which is on the front of the vehicle and that will track the
incoming plane out to about 13 kilometers now the system just like the
Gepard is actually armed with 35 millimeter Oerlikon kDa cannons and they
can put a tremendous amount of fire onto a target very very quickly out to about
five and a half kilometers these things when the two cannons are firing together
you've got about 1100 rounds coming out - that would be equivalent of a minute
it is a ridiculously fast system fires and if you see one of these firing
what comes out the side is the empty spend ammunition cases so a very short
burst of this fire onto a target should do the do business now some of the weapons
systems so if the ammunition it's firing it mainly fires armor-piercing a
type of armor-piercing that's actually designed specifically in an
anti-aircraft role it does a separate type of armor-piercing if for other
types of target but the idea being that what they call frangible armor-piercing
discarding Sabot it's called FA P DS frangible armor-piercing discarding sabot
and the idea behind that is the type of round when it hits an aeroplane or or
the target a helicopter etc the metal of the armor-piercing round breaks up by
its frangible and that causes more damage or has a potential to cause more
damage to the target so a very effective ground defense system and it was put
into service really to go with the armored units so that it can keep up
with tanks going forward so it's got them a level of close air defence and
close air support to protect those vehicles when they're on the battlefield
now as you can see you may recognize a hole here it's based on the leopard one
chassis and it has slight modifications it's slightly lengthened if you look at
the wheel stations the middle wheel stations are slightly further apart
they end up taking where the ammunition would have been stowed for the 105
millimeter gun on the leopard one next to the driver they take that away and
they put in there it's got a mercedes-benz engine in there
instead to give about 60 kilowatts of power so that power is then available to
traverse the turret and not necessarily take power off the main engine drive so
it's the equivalent of a dolly engine or an APU in other vehicles the power
source by the way goes to a generator to convert that into electricity and out
the side here you can see along the side is where the exhaust
would be to vent away the fumes from that secondary engine in the back is the
standard MTU diesel engine that powers all the Leopards but overall with the
complexity of that turret system with two crew members inside and the driver
in the standard position down the front all of these adds up to a very complex
and expensive vehicle one of these costs three times the amount of leopard one
tank costs and there's another side to that because of course with the increase
in speeds and tactics of jet fighters doing ground attack roles that meant
this system had to be upgraded so over time the standards on these vehicles
were upgraded not all of them were upgraded to the same standard and for
example this particular vehicle it's not digitized in the way that some in the
the netherlands army the royal netherlands Army's fleet was what the
dutch actually did once they'd done a digital conversion they put out a
photograph of one of the newer vehicles it was seen online it belonged to C
company and C company name all their vehicles after animals and the furni was
called C Cheetah that photograph appeared in the dutch press in the year
2000 the public started calling these vehicles cheetahs and after trying to
correct it for a number of occasions the Dutch military in the end gave up and
said no let's call it cheetah and for them they actually quite like that
because PRTL pronounced pruttle by the troops which means like splutter almost
the noise of the guns when they're firing didn't sound as good actually
cheetah sounds quite sexy so it ended up being called cheetah in the later Dutch
service their outer service now in Holland some were sold on 60 the Dutch
ones were sold on to Jordan some other countries kilee for example were buying
some Belgium also had get parts in service some of those have been sold on
Chile had a look at them but as an indicator of how complex these vehicles
are to keep running keep them in service and very expensive to maintain
Chile ended ended up handing four of them back saying look we just can't afford to do
this we can't actually maintain them and keep them going so for many countries
the idea of anti-aircraft guns mounted on a hull has gone out of service most
of them now have missile systems on an armored hull instead and in fact Gepard
at one point was adding missiles on the side of the turrets along with other
features it could be remotely controlled there was a version where you could
actually put the vehicle almost as a camp defense weapon unmanned by the
crews but it would be linked into a central control point that would then be
able to trigger it off but again we're very very grateful to our friends from
the royal netherlands army and the historic collection that looks after
this particular vehicle for bringing it over to us so people can see it at Tankfest
and you can see it on one of our tank chats
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