Turkey develops indigenous Altay powerpack

Turkey has developed an indigenous powerpack for its Altay MBT. (Otokar)

Turkey has developed an indigenous powerpack for its Altay main battle tank (MBT), which will be fitted in all serial production vehicles from lot-2 onwards, Serhat Erpolat, senior associate at Turkey's Defence Industry Agency, said on the second day of SAE Media's Future Armoured Vehicles Power Systems conference held in Wokingham, UK, on 27 and 28 September. He addressed the conference on the country's progress in developing a fully indigenous engine, transmission, and cooling system for the Altay programme.

Turkey has been developing the Altay tank since 2008 but encountered a significant challenge in 2018 when Germany placed restrictions on the export of military equipment and components to the country in response to Ankara's military operations in northeastern Syria. With the Altay then fitted with MTU's EuroPowerPack, the export restrictions left the tank without a powerpack for serial production, which had been given the go ahead. Since Altay had been built around the EuroPowerPack, which is one of the smallest and advanced powerpacks for its output specifications on the market, Turkey was left with a challenge of independently matching the size and performance of the most compact powerpack of its class available on the market from a standing start, Erpolat said. “Replacing such a state-of-the-art pack is very, very hard,” he added. “It [EuroPowerPack] is a parallel U-shaped design, which makes it highly compact, up to a metre shorter than any comparable design in use today.”