Otokar’s TULPAR Passes Live-Fire Test With Leonardo’s 120mm Turret
Otokar and Leonardo have completed integration and live-firing trials of the Otokar TULPAR medium tank fitted with Leonardo’s HITFACT MkII 120 mm turret, the two companies announced on September 18. The tests, carried out at Leonardo’s UTTAT range at Nettuno near Rome, mark the point at which a Turkish-designed tracked platform and an Italian gun system move from static displays to a validated, fireable combination.
The companies said the trial campaign covered mechanical, electrical, electronic and software interfaces between hull and turret, followed by functional checks, safety inspections and live firing to confirm performance and reliability. Neither side disclosed the number of rounds fired or specific accuracy results.
Note: the photo above shows a TULPAR hull fitted with the smaller MIZRAK-30 turret, an earlier configuration Otokar has also displayed on the same modular platform. Neither company has released fresh imagery of the HITFACT MkII-armed TULPAR from this week’s trials.
A Tracked Hull, an Italian Gun
TULPAR is Otokar’s modular tracked armoured combat vehicle family, built on a scalable architecture spanning roughly 28 to 45 tonnes gross vehicle weight. Otokar has shown the platform in multiple roles — infantry fighting vehicle, fire support, air defence carrier, mortar carrier, recovery and medical evacuation — built around a common chassis. The company first displayed TULPAR with the ASELSAN KORHAN 35 mm turret at SAHA Expo, then unveiled the HITFACT MkII-armed version at the World Defense Show in Riyadh in February 2024, before showing it again at IDEF 2025 in Istanbul.
HITFACT MkII is Leonardo’s lightweight, fully digitalised 120 mm turret, offered with a low-recoil smoothbore gun compatible with NATO-standard and guided Vulcano 120 ammunition, alongside a 105 mm rifled option. Leonardo markets it as a way to put main battle tank-level firepower on lighter, more mobile platforms — the same pitch behind its Centauro II wheeled tank destroyer, which uses a related turret family and recently won a Brazilian Army serial-production contract. More than 500 HITFACT turrets have been sold to date, according to Leonardo.
“This achievement reinforces the strong engineering collaboration between Otokar and Leonardo and highlights our capability to deliver integrated solutions,” said Sedef Vehbi, Military Cluster Head at Otokar. Leonardo’s Luca Perazzo, deputy managing director for defence systems, said HITFACT “is currently the only system equipped with a 120 mm smoothbore gun offering MBT-level firepower on light or medium platforms.”
Why a Medium Tank
The TULPAR/HITFACT combination sits in a category several NATO and Gulf armies have been shopping for over the past few years: a tracked vehicle that can be airlifted or moved faster than a 60-tonne main battle tank but still carries a gun capable of defeating armour at range, rather than the autocannon-class weapons found on most infantry fighting vehicles. Otokar’s ALTAY programme already covers the heavy end of that requirement for the Turkish Army; TULPAR is aimed at export customers and mechanised infantry formations that want tank-level firepower without a heavy tank’s logistics footprint. It is a different market from Otokar’s wheeled COBRA II and light armoured vehicle lines, which compete on protected mobility rather than direct-fire punch, and from tracked APC programmes such as FNSS’s Kaplan, built for troop transport rather than tank-level firepower.
Otokar has already used the configuration to court customers outside Türkiye. At LAAD 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, the company presented TULPAR with the HITFACT MkII turret to Brazilian Army officials as they weigh next-generation armoured vehicle options. A completed live-fire campaign gives Otokar and Leonardo a stronger case to make with that and other prospective buyers: the pairing is no longer a paper configuration or a static exhibition mock-up, but a system that has fired 120 mm ammunition in a validated integration.
Neither company named a launch customer or confirmed a production timeline following the trials. Otokar has not disclosed unit costs or a delivery schedule for any TULPAR variant, and no contract for the HITFACT-armed configuration has been announced.
Part of a Broader Pattern
The trial also illustrates a trend in Turkish land systems: pairing domestic platforms with foreign firepower or subsystems to shorten development timelines and widen export appeal, in the same way ALTAY drew on South Korean turret technology in its early configuration before Turkish industry took over production — part of a broader push, discussed in our look at how self-sufficient Türkiye’s defence production really is, toward combining local platforms with select foreign subsystems rather than importing complete vehicles. For Leonardo, the tie-up gives HITFACT MkII a second tracked-platform integration alongside its existing wheeled applications, and a foothold with a Turkish partner that already exports armoured vehicles to several NATO members as well as customers across the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
For now, the milestone is integration and firing, not a contract. What happens next depends on whether Otokar and Leonardo can convert a validated test campaign into an order — from Brazil, another Latin American buyer, or elsewhere in Otokar’s existing customer base.
