Challenger 1

I dare say, this page is delightfully British. Spot of tea?

Base Model

ROMOR Battle Package. AKA the toughest of nuts

The Challenger 1 is the British third generation main battle tank that takes the concepts of the Chieftain but updates it for a network centric battlefield. Seeing action in the Gulf War under the crews of the Desert Rats, the 1983 system was a fast, hard-hitting tank with an L11A5 cannon, a Rolls-Royce diesel engine, and the first Chobham armor introduced to the world: a composite of ceramics and steel that would become the standard for all tanks across the Western world.

Unlike the Chieftain, the Challenger was designed to be a fully stabilized tank that could fire accurately on the move. Equipped with the armour to serve the British preference for defensive positions and the speed and firepower to outmatch the East’s armoured forces, the concept would remain used until the modern day with successors like the Challenger 2.

In Team Yankee

Tally Ho!

This is the camper's Leopard 2. The premier tank of the Brits serves as the faster, costlier cousin of the Chieftain. World War III in 1985 has caught the British Army's tank forces in a state of transition, as the Challenger only entered service in 1983, so only the luckiest of British Army crews will get to use the state-of-the-art "Chally" against the oncoming communist hordes.

Trading cost-efficiency for being one of the most heavily-armoured (and most expensive Hello M1A1HC...) tanks in the game, the Challenger is like a Chieftain turned up to 11. 11 points gets what is in effect an armour 20 Chieftain, and a 2 point upgrade takes you to armour 21, giving it a good chance of repelling almost any attack currently in the game. However, the high cost means you're always going to struggle not to get flanked because of low numbers, and this makes the moving ROF even more of a penalty than it is on Chieftains; you'll have very few tanks, so you won't have many shots, and moving loses half of them. Park them at the back, shoot them, blitz them.

The Formation HQ comes in units of 1-2 (and, seeing as how units of 2 tanks suck in TY V2, you'll probably always take the single tank); the Combat Unit comes in squadrons of 3-4. All that has been written about the Leopard 2 being cripplingly costed applies to the Chally 1 as well.

This DOES counter anything of AT21 or below very effectively, like Milans and their ilk. With base armor, a 2+ defeats. With ROMOR, you auto pass on them frontally, and ignore most autocannons from the side. Anything besides a tank's main gun you can basically IGNORE outright! For reference, the Leo 2 has AT22. The C2 needs a 3+ to remain unchanged penetrated, or with ROMOR a 2+. You need at least AT 21 to threaten the C2, or AT22 to make a pass at the ROMOR.

In Real Life

Scuse me, pardon me, tank coming though

Obviously the Challenger is the successor to the Chieftain.

Team Yankee starts in 1985, and the Challenger 1 was introduced in 1983, and still hardly a mainstay vehicle during the period depicted in TYV2. The turret of the Chally was extra thick: there were no guns at the time that could penetrate it. When introduced Britain was keen to show the new tank off to NATO allies so entered two teams of them into the Canadian Army Trophy, considered the premier inter NATO tank gunnery competition. Due to varying levels of fail, including rushing tanks straight off the production line without the proper gun sights and not giving crews time to train, the shiny new much hyped tank placed last and Britain decided never to enter the completion again while the government cut funding and quickly started looking for an alternative tank, even considering purchasing German Leopard 2s. The tank finally got to prove itself in Operation Granby, the UK operation in the 1991 Gulf War, where despite huge doubts around reliability, concerns it was outclassed by Iraqi T-72Ms and only 22% of tanks being operational due to a crippling lack of spare parts as well as manufacturing faults the Challenger performed well, including scoring the longest tank on tank kill at 5,110 metres against an Iraqi tank.

The Challenger has been succeeded by the Challenger 2. The latter is a complete redesign and only three percent of their parts are interchangeable. Both are contemporaries of the Leopard 2 and the M1 Abrams. Considering how expensive the Challenger 2 is, any replacement during the 2040s would likely to be a foreign platform if common sense was used, but British pride being what it is (and the fact they are a blockadable island), they're likely to give another crack at making a local model. Chally 2 is currently undergoing an extensive Life Extension Program to bring it up to modern specs, this includes swapping the 120mm L30 rifled gun with a 120mm smoothbore Rheinmetall gum, the same gun on Leopard 2, for logistical (unify ammunition with other NATO countries) and supply (the factory making HESH for the British Army shut down) reasons.