OTO Melara contract for delivery of 81 Hitrole Light turrets for Italian army Lince 4x4 armored 3003

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Defence & Security News - Italy

 
 
Monday, June 30, 2014 11:52 AM
 
OTO Melara contract for delivery of 81 Hitrole Light turrets for Italian army Lince 4x4 armored.
OTO Melara secured a contract worth about 20 million Euro with the Italian for 81 Hitrole® Light turrets that will be installed on Italian Army Lince light multirole vehicles. The turret is a derivative of the Hitrole® B and is much lighter and easy to install.
     
OTO Melara secured a contract worth about 20 million Euro with the Italian for 81 Hitrole® Light turrets that will be installed on Italian Army Lince light multirole vehicles. The turret is a derivative of the Hitrole® B and is much lighter and easy to install.
Lince (LMV) 4x4 Light Multirole Armoured Vehicle equipped with OTO Melara Hitrole® Light turret.
     

This order follows a request from the Italian Army as an Urgent Operational Requirement following some casualties among Lince machine gunners who operated the weapon without protection. The initial order was for 64 turrets, which was then increased to 81, one of them being the prototype which will undergo the qualification trials.

The Italian Army asked for a turret which should be easily installed on all existing and future Lince, to maintain unchanged the current hatch in the vehicle roof, to install the turret in front of the hatch in order to be able to use it also manually in a back-up mode (the weapon being aimed at about ±45° from the vehicle centreline).

Reload under armour, which was possible with the base model, was abandoned, allowing to reduce the interface opening from a diameter of 800 mm to some 40-50 mm. The interface between the turret and the vehicle has a weight of 10-20 kg, while cabling and the command console weigh some 15-20 kg.

As for the turret itself, this has a weight of 130 kg when armed with an MG 42/59 7.62 mm machine gun, 140 kg with an M2 12.7 mm, and 145 kg with a Mk 19 40 mm AGL, with a saving of 70 kg compared to the base model which was installed on some Italian Army Puma 6x6 armoured cars in early 2008.

     
OTO Melara secured a contract worth about 20 million Euro with the Italian for 81 Hitrole® Light turrets that will be installed on Italian Army Lince light multirole vehicles. The turret is a derivative of the Hitrole® B and is much lighter and easy to install.
OTO Melara Hitrole® Light turret armed with 12.7mm machine gun.
     
The Hitrole® L has a maximum elevation of 70° and a maximum depression of 20°, with all three weapons; the optics group can be decoupled from the weapon and be used for surveillance while keeping the weapon at maximum elevation when operators want to keep an unthreatening profile to the locals, the decoupling being used also for superelevation when the fire control system requires it for AGL aiming.

The optics include Selex Galileo Mini-Colibri 3rd generation uncooled thermal imaging with a 4.6x3.4° FOV, a daylight colour camera with a 23x continuous zoom, and an eye-safe Class 1 laser rangefinder; the FCS shows the predicted impact point, angular speed being obtained from turret gyros. The Hitrole® L is based on an open architecture electronic and OTO Melara already considered functions such as automatic surveillance, auto-tracking and the adoption of more sophisticated optics (for target acquisition), while hardware/software solutions have been developed for full turret stabilisation.