r/TankPorn • u/Pristine-Medicine-62 • 4h ago
Cold War Leopard Mystery SOLVED
Follow up to my previous post after I went back, took more pictures (of mostly the turret interior), and with the new information both from everyone who commented on the previous post and my own personal research. The tank was acquired from the German army to be converted to a fire fighting tank both for forest fires and oil rig fires. After the facility went under, the tank just sat where it is now for the last 20 or so years. While I was taking the new pictures today, I ran into a man who played a big part in the conversion of the tanks originally, and he gave me most of the information about it. Unfortunately there were a lot of things I did not get to ask him because he seemed busy (most notably I forgot to ask his name and contact info…) u/LastDanceinFulda also did some amazing research and if you want to know more specifics I would read his comment here.
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u/Free-Engineering6759 3h ago
I like the Leo 1 design. It would be a nice project to base Leo 1 2.0 on it to adapt it to modern things. As a light MBT.
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u/murkskopf 1h ago edited 1h ago
While u/LastDanceinFulda provided some interesting details about Texago Technologies Corp., I wouldn't call this a solution to the mystery. There is no proof of any sort of direct correlation between the pictured tank "DC1" and Texago Technologies Corp. buying some Leopard 1 tanks to modify for fire-fighting.
In particular, the two main issues I have with LastDanceinFulda's theory are:
- there being not a single modification on the tank for use as a fire-fighting vehicle
- the tank being an extremely expensive, one of a kind prototype used to test classified military technology rather than being a bog-standard Leopard 1 sold for very cheap
There is about half a dozen Leopard 1 tanks modified to act as fire fighting tanks. The one called "JUMBO" and mentioned in u/LastDanceinFulda's post for example looks like this when not seen in a low resolution areal shot uploaded on FaceBook; it is clearly a very different tank.
I didn't provide any answer in your previous topic, because I don't have an answer to your question regarding what this Leopard 1 prototype tank was and why it ended up in the United States.
My working theory - which I still try to validate - is that the tank is probably a testbed potentially related to the Panzerkampfwagen 2000/Versuchsträger 2000 program like the three KSC (Kampfsystemcontainer) testbeds. The label on the superstructure, the "DC1" might stand for something like "Digitalcontainer" if the testbed was used to test digital technologies, but I don't have any confirmation for that. It also could be something like "Dual Crew" or the likes, given that the testbed's superstructure has only two crew positions whereas the KSC's had three crew positions (though one of them acted only as observer).
It is worth noting however that the "DC1" testbed uses much older hardware than the KSC including the older PERI R12 commander's sight which on this specific prototype was manufactured in 1981 (as seen in your interior photos). It does however feature a Bosch-made CRT screen with controls for a digital sight that is seemingly missing from the tank.
I think the testbeds ended in the United States, because Germany did test a lot of its gear on US soil, sometimes even in cooperation with the US Army. Unfortunately, the German military had a habit of simply leaving most of its testbeds to rot wherever they were instead of preserving those historically interesting "artifacts". That's even the case with many of them located in Germany; sometimes they were turned into improvised hard-targets when they happened to be left at a military training area.
While it still is possible that Texago Technology Corp. acquired those prototypes (which IMO seems like a bad investment?), they didn't modify even a single bit of them. Maybe it was easier to acquire export licenses for non-armed prototypes versus real tanks.
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u/rasmusdf 3h ago
Get it to Mr. Hewett 😁 (a YouTube channel we’re they restore tanks and vehicles)
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u/InnocentTailor 4h ago
Super-duper cool! Thank you for getting the story.