DLS awarded more Ratel work

19 August 2011 by Leon Engelbrecht defenceWeb

Denel Land Systems Lyttelton has been awarded a R6.874 million contract to repair Ratel Mk3 F2 20 mm cannon. The order follows a R424 699 award earlier this month for the supply of kits and the servicing of the Ratel Mk3's F2 20mm gun after firing 8000 rounds. The new deal, announced yesterday, includes work to prepare, preserve, pack, mark and deliver the guns.

The order takes the known amount spent on keeping the Ratel Mk3 infantry combat vehicle product system operational with the South African Army to over R94 974 734.21 since 2007.

The French-origin F2 is a quick firing, twin-feed, non-stabilised automatic cannon mounted in a two-person turret. It is rated as being able to fire 700-750rpm. Some 1200 rounds are carried. The expected barrel life is 16 000 rounds, with some components replaced every 4000 and 8000 rounds.

The Ratel has now been in service for 34 years. It is an indigenous design developed in the early 1970s to replace the Saracen armoured personnel carrier. The prototype was delivered in 1974 and the first production vehicle in 1976. The Mk2 entered production in 1979 and the Mk3 in 1988. The Mk3 fleet was upgraded in 2001 when about 70 modifications were made.

Writing in the Engineering News in October 2008, Keith Campbell described the development of the Ratel as follows: “This programme started in the early 1970s, when the South African Army evaluated four AFVs - the Unimog UR-416 from Germany, the French Panhard M3, the Brazilian Engesa Urutu, and a vehicle from local company Springfield Bussing, confusingly named Buffel” [confusingly, as this name was already being used for a mine-protected troop carrier].

Campbell added the three foreign designs were all armoured personnel carriers – “basically, armoured ‘battle taxis', armed only with a machine gun, which carried troops into battle, at which point they had to disembark to fight”. He noted the SA Army decided to go with a new concept instead. Variously called the armoured infantry fighting vehicle (AIFV) or infantry combat vehicle (ICV), this was pioneered by the Soviet Army in the form of the BMP-1 and the West German Army in the shape of the Marder.

“An AIFV carries a powerful gun (20mm or 30mm) as well as a squad of troops, who have their own vision ports and firing ports, so that they can fight from within the vehicle,” Campbell wrote. “So, around 1975/1976, the South African Army decided to adopt an AIFV based on the Springfield Bussing vehicle. This became the Ratel (honey badger, in English), which was mass-produced by Sandock Austral. A monocoque design, the Ratel hulls were made in Sandock Austral's Durban dockyard and taken by rail to Boksburg for fitting out. The turrets were based on those on the Eland armoured cars - the 20-mm gun turret of the standard Ratel IFV, for example, was a redesigned Eland 90 turret.

A whole family of Ratels was developed - command vehicles, fire support vehicles (with 90mm gun turrets taken from Eland), mortar vehicles (with 60mm breech-loading mortar turrets taken from Eland 60s), and, later, tank destroyers armed with Denel Dynamics ZT3 Ingwe antitank missiles, and mortar carriers with 81mm muzzle-loading mortars carried in what had been the troop compartment.

The Ratel is scheduled for partial replacement by the Badger, some 264 of which are slated for production under Project Hoefyster. The venerable vehicle serves with 1 SA Infantry Battalion at Bloemfontein, in the Free State, as well as 8 SAI Bn in Upington in the Northern Cape. Mechanised infantry Reserve Force units allocated the Ratel include 1st Bn, Regt de la Rey, Potchefstroom; 1st Bn, Regt Northern Transvaal, Pretoria; the Cape Town Highlanders, Cape Town; the Durban Light Infantry, Durban; Regt Westelike Provincie, Cape Town; and the Witwatersrand Rifles, Johannesburg. The vehicle is also used in the tank-destroyer role by 1 Special Service Battalion as well as by various units of the SA Artillery as command and observation post vehicles and by the SA Signals Corps, among others.

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