Panzer Olympia

The Panzer Olympia, short for Panzerkampfroboter Olympia, is an Austrasian made unmanned ground combat vehicle. Olympia was created to meet the requirements set out by the Austrasian Reichwehr's Panzerkreis as part of their realization of the armed forces Kohorte-30 concept, which laid out a vision of a battalion-sized combined-arms armoured force based on manned-unmanned teams. Olympia built on prior work by RKW and REST in the 1970s and 1980's studying concepts for MBTs that combined very high power-to-weight ratios, advanced fire control and high ROF main armament and combined it with contemporary developments in the Austrasian industry led by Talos Technik and ElektronWerke in automation, networking, remote-sensing and active protection. The radical step of removing the crew entirely from the vehicle was made in anticipation of a future battlefield where advanced in anti-tank weaponry would make it impossible to guarantee an acceptable level of safety for the crew; by removing them the Olympia could maintain the traditional place of the MBT at the spearpoint of the attack.

Firepower
Panzer Olympia's primary armament is a pair of composite-wrapped 140mm cannons mounted co-axially. This exceptional armament was chosen to enable rapid two-round salvos, a method selected because it showed great promise in extending the effective range of fire against both moving and stationary targets when fired either from the move or a stop. The Olympia is consequently the first Austrasian panzer since the Grand Campaigns whose regulations do not mandate a halt before firing. To assist in its operation the Olympia's FCS includes dynamic muzzle tracking & muzzle position prediction coupled to fully-automatic target tracking in the radar/infrared/optical bands, vehicle state tracking through the GPS/INS and continuous tracking of outgoing shots for complete closed-loop fire control solutions. When firing salvos ballistic corrections are automatically computed from tracks of the first round and target and applied before firing the second round allowing additional compensation for errors not accounted for before firing.

Olympia's radar can provide ground, dismount and air moving target indication in a hemisphere around the vehicle as well as tracking of incoming projectiles and automatic estimation of the point-of-origin for counterfire. Leveraging its capabilities the Olympia is recognized in regulations as an integral if non-traditional, company short-range air-defence asset. It also has a limited capability to perform in the counter-mortar role.

Olympia is further armed with a coaxial 15.2 mm HMG, consistent with Austrasian preferences, and two semi-autonomous 5.6mm MG remote weapons stations on either side of the turret. Leveraging the same automatic detection and recognition technology employed in the primary gun FCS, the guns can find and engage hostile dismounts, soft vehicles and helicopters or UAVs close to the panzer. The level of autonomy and firing arcs provided to the RWS is selectable from the crew, from fully automatic to fully manual remote control. In normal operations, the guns are automatically cued to suspected targets and the vehicle operators are notified to authorize engagement.

The Olympia's main guns are provided with fire-out-of-battery recoil systems to minimize swept volume inside the vehicle and to manage the potent recoil of a 140 mm salvo. The small possibility of a catastrophic failure of the recoil system during a hangfire was judged an acceptable risk in an unmanned vehicle as its vital systems were required to have a high level of shock hardening notwithstanding, for protection from landmines and IEDs.