At the Feria Internacional de Muestras de Asturias (FIDMA) 2026 exhibition in Gijón, General Dynamics European Land Systems (GDELS) Santa Bárbara Sistemas unveiled a new infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) demonstrator integrating Valhalla Turrets’ MANGART 30 remote-controlled weapon station onto the ASCOD 42 tracked combat platform. This latest technical iteration leverages the ASCOD 2 design philosophy—originally developed under the Austrian Spanish Cooperation Development framework—and explicitly utilizes the heavier 42-tonne chassis variant. By leveraging the ASCOD 42’s expanded gross vehicle weight capacity, upgraded power pack, and enhanced transmission, the platform accommodates the advanced mission equipment and physical envelope required for heavy combat deployments. The deployment emphasizes a growing market demand for modular, multi-mission tracked platforms that provide enhanced baseline protection and vehicular growth margins while maintaining highly lethal, unmanned direct fire capabilities.
The core lethality of the demonstrator is driven by the MANGART 30 architecture, which organizes a high-performance, remote-controlled envelope around a 30×173 mm Northrop Grumman MK44S Bushmaster Next Generation chain gun as its primary armament. Carrying 300 ready-to-use rounds, the system provides significant sustained fire alongside an auxiliary FN MAG 7.62×51 mm coaxial machine gun supplied with over 1,200 ready rounds. The platform exhibits high tactical agility with a maximum angular tracking speed of 75 degrees per second across both azimuth and elevation axes, supported by a specialized fire control system delivering a highly precise aiming accuracy of less than 0.7 milliradian. Mechanically optimized for complex verticality, the weapon mount provides a substantial elevation range spanning from -10 degrees up to +75 degrees, making it natively capable of engaging high-angle urban targets as well as emerging low-altitude aerial threats.
Based on its organic gun systems, the MANGART 30 integration capitalizes on an open-architecture, modular payload philosophy explicitly engineered to support quick-change mission upgrades as contemporary battlefield threats evolve. The turret’s baseline physical parameters—featuring a height of 843 mm, a width up to 2,565 mm, a swing radius of 3,560 mm, and a total combat weight of 3,000 kg—allow for the clean structural integration of supplementary subsystems without disrupting vehicle dynamics. Operational enhancements can include dedicated anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) launchers, a secondary Gatling gun Remote Weapon Station (RCWS), acoustic threat detection arrays, and Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar panels for localized situational awareness. Furthermore, the platform accommodates specialized multi-mission pods designed to deploy counter-unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS), loitering munitions, and first-person view (FPV) aerial assets directly from the safety of the armored hull.
Ultimately, the marriage of the MANGART 30 remote turret with the ASCOD 42 chassis represents a calculated effort by GDELS to capture international export markets seeking deeply adaptable and highly survivable land combat systems. By separating the crew from the fighting compartment through an unmanned turret design, the vehicle optimizes internal space allocation and protection metrics while ensuring the platform can transition fluidly between direct fire support, air defense, and electronic warfare roles. The system showcases how interoperability and modular architecture have shifted from peripheral design goals to foundational requirements in modern mechanization, ensuring that the next generation of land combat vehicles can rapidly absorb emerging technologies. As militaries face increasingly fractured threats ranging from conventional armor to asymmetric drone swarms, this combined technology demonstrator provides a clear roadmap for flexible, evolution-ready armored capability.
