The Polish defence industry will reveal a new PT-16 main battle tank on 6-9 September  at the MSPO International Defence Industry Exhibition, which takes place in Kielce.

According to the sources in the organizing committee of the exhibition, one of the Middle East countries is interested in purchasing new Polish PT-16 main battle tank. During the exhibition in Poland, the negotiations will be conducted on the possible involvement of the tank in the drills in 2017.

The PT-16 is the latest version of the Polish PT-91 main battle tank and based on the T-72 chassis. The new PT-16 tank is armed with a 120mm calibre  gun that can fire standard NATO ammunition as well as the latest natures such as the DM11 high-explosive with a programmable fuze and DM63 APFSDS.

The new turret has to include a new autoloader to load the longer 120  x 570 mm unitary catridges for Rheinmetall’s smoothbore gun design; how exactly this has been solved by the Polish engineers is unknown, but the Anders light tank and the Pl-01 concept tank utilized bustle mounted autoloaders.

The new tank powered by a Polish developing 1,100 horsepower (hp), which gives a maximum road speed of 65km/h.

Cet article est aussi disponible en français