In the late 1970s West German engineers set out to field a new battle tank that could shrug off both kinetic penetrators and shaped‐charge warheads. Drawing on Britain’s secret Burlington armour research handed over in 1970, they layered alternating high-hardness steel plates, elastic materials and non-metallic composites to create the Leopard 2’s spaced multilayer armour, with its frontal arc originally rated to resist 125 mm APFSDS strikes at 1 500 m.When the first Leopard 2 A4s appeared in 1979 their turrets boasted up to 800 mm of physical armour thickness, while the hull sides carried heavy ballistic and rubber-reinforced skirts to defeat medium-calibre rounds and RPGs. Inside, ammunition and hydraulics sat in separate compartments behind blow-off panels, and a Dräger NBC overpressurization system kept crews safe from nuclear, biological and chemical threats. Wegmann smoke mortars and an automatic halon fire-extinguishing network rounded out the original secondary protections.By the mid-1990s, combat experiences drove the Leopard 2A5 upgrade: crews cut open the turret roof to insert angular, arrowhead-shaped composite modules that boosted frontal protection to the equivalent of nearly 1 000 mm RHA, added 25 mm spall liners and improved side skirts. Later A6 variants swapped the L/44 120 mm gun for Rheinmetall’s longer L/55 barrel and welcomed newer DM53 APFSDS rounds capable of punching through 750 mm of RHA at 2 000 m.Into the 2000s the A7 and A7 V models continued the evolution: belly armour and mine-blast plates defended against IEDs, modular side-armour adapters let crews bolt on extra protection against RPG-7 warheads, and plans to fit the Israeli Trophy active protection system on select A7 A1s aim to neutralize incoming ATGMs by 2025. Urban-theatre kits—composite flank panels and slat cages—further transformed the Leopard 2 into a true 21st-century multirole platform.Under the turret’s bustle sits a fully stabilized Rheinmetall 120 mm smoothbore—first the L/44, then the L/55—fed by a bustle-rack autoloader magazine in the hull and 15 rounds in the turret, all protected by blow-off panels. The EMES 15 fire-control suite, with its Nd:YAG laser rangefinder and HgCdTe thermal imager, lets gunners engage moving targets at up to 5 000 m day or night, guided by the commander’s panoramic PERI R17 sight and backed by a coaxial MG 3 machine gun.All this armour and firepower rides atop an MTU MB 873 Ka-501 1 500 PS V12 twin-turbo diesel and Renk 4-forward/2-reverse auto gearbox, giving the 62-ton tank a 68 km/h top speed and 500 km road range. Seven dual-rubber-tired road wheels per side, torsion bars and advanced dampers soak up shell-pocked terrain, while a snorkel lets the Leopard 2 ford four-metre‐deep rivers—proof that Germany’s drive for protection never sacrificed the mobility that earned the Leopard 2 its reputation as one of the world’s fastest, best-protected MBTs.

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Leopard 2 Tank