The competitions (perhaps I should have used the word "demonstration") were in Europe and at Sill, and were held for various foreign military and government officials "in the market" for SP howitzers...

I know that less sophisticated armies may use archaic fire control techniques, but I would think that the European armies have something roughly comparible in speed and effectiveness with our AFATADS and other FDC software/hardware...

Currently I'm picking my way through the US Army artilley manuals of this period, and related documents such as the field artillery Journal, and various reports, and I'm hoping to accquire similar material for the French.

Software for ballistic computation is now much the same throughout NATO, because NATO (well a handful of nations really) developed the NABK which is Ada95 source code that's put in processing apps.  After that its a matter of the user interface quality.  Tactical fire control software is a different matter and very difficult to judge because is embodies national doctrinal matters.

 

Automated laying is also quite tricky, getting a algorithm that does not loop into 'hunting' for elevation laying seems to have been an issue in the early days.

 

The Germans are very good at demonstrations.  But demonstrations are not necessarily a good guide to reality!

 

The one 'novel' piece of technology in PzH2000 is barrel cooling, not particularly high tech!  But is does reduce the thermal management issue, and hence enables a high rate of fire for a few minutes (hence the large on board ammo load) at all charges not just low ones.  Interesting one report from Afg has been that after long self propelled moves the magazine system fails!   Maybe the Germans haven't yet quite got to grips with reliability growth programs (I read something recently that they weren't normal practice there - in the context of Boxer IIRC where NL had insisted).