Effectiveness of Camouflage During Wartime

Exactly right.

Or maybe they are just tying to look like some carnival cruise ship. :-)

I would guess that this is just one of many stealth and anti-detection devices used....this one looks pretty good....↓

http://www.shipbucket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=198&start=30

What one?

camo is only for visual...... in todays military, objects can be seen other than visual.

may make it a little more difficult for spy satellites though

An Israeli company has developed an IR camoflage system. I assume by now others have as well.

I like Mercedes camo…..

Nice if you could link to the blog so we could make informed answers.

Did´nt do it cause the blog is in Spanish.... sorry!

Why not? I can read spanish, i.e.

And.... translators can be useful, for other peoples

Please link to the source...

For non spanish speakers, I think most of the browsers have built-in translators.

Gracias!

Hi Abel: In reply to your request, please check my latest comment (#14) Un abrazo desde Argentina! (greetings from Argentina)

I saw a picture of an entire aircraft plant in Los Angeles that was camouflaged so from the air, it looked like an ordinary neighborhood. Can't remember where I saw it, but it was a pic sent to me.

Cottage industry!

With regards to ships, I read once that camouflage was intended to make the vessel look like waves in moderate seas.

I think the best camo for ships was a sea-like color just below the deck and light sky-like color above that. It's supposed to make the ship look like part of the horizon from afar. Of course, if the sky was overcast, the light color would stand out.

Personally, I think camo for ships doesn't give much protection against being seen, especially from the air (while underway) and with the advanced technologies today. (",)

Hi there, I have written my first post on a hurry. Sorry! Making a long story short: Earlier today, searching for spray guns for a project I´working on, for some reason I got into a site about early XXth century painting: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubism; I looked into English artists that used this technique and the name of Norman Wilkinson came across. This guy happened to be the "father" of the Dazzle camouflage, a technique widely used on war and freighter ships during WWI and also part of WWII. Although this "countermeasure" against submarines was easy and quite cheap to implement, it seemed to have lost favour when the allies started sailing in convoys escorted by warships. In this site you can find some good images, and two videos in EN (one by James May) about the subject. http://tectonicablog.com/?p=48832 These sites have good illustrations and lousy texts: so if you do not understand the language of Cervantes, don´t care, you aren´t missing much! v=oLgc2q4LCuEhttp://www.taringa.net/posts/imagenes/14639372/Barcos-camuflados-en-la-Primera-Guerra- Mundial.htmlhttp://www.taringa.net/posts/info/12493379/Camuflaje-de-barcos-en-la-I-Guerra-Mundial.html

The idea of "razzle dazzle" was that a submarine periscope is monocular only. (depth perception only works for a couple hundred feet anyway). When a convoy is sailing along, the ships overlap each other in the view of the periscope nad the random shapes make it hard to identify them and determine their distance, making it hard to fire torpedoes.

Walt Disney designed some of the fake tarp covers that hid factories and airfields.

It appears that even today, elements that don't necessarily work to conceal are used in war ship paint schemes.

Due to hard times the Navy gets all its paints at a discount from the Lowes paint returns table. Some colors may not match.

or paints where the label came off.

There's a great article on Dazzle here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zty8tfr) in the BBC's educational section.

I was particularly interested in the way Dazzle was used to give a false impression of speed, distance and direction of travel: making the smokestacks look as if they were pointing the other way, altering the size of the vessel with false painted bow and stern, bow shapes painted on stern to confuse direction, false 'bow wave' patterns painted on the bow to give a false indication of both size and speed.

Of more current interest was a Bristol University study of Dazzle which showed that dazzle can alter the perception of speed, as long as the target is moving fast enough. "Participants saw two moving patterns on a computer screen, one plain and one dazzle. They were asked to estimate which was travelling faster. There was a reduction of around seven per cent in the perceived speed of some high contrast dazzle patterns.

This would not have made a difference to a WW1 U-boat commander hunting slow merchant ships. But it could make a difference today where handheld rocket propelled grenades are fired at short range against moving vehicles.

Dr Nick Scott-Samuel, who led the study, says: "In a typical situation involving an attack on a Land Rover, the reduction in perceived speed would be sufficient to make the grenade miss by about a metre.". All things come around.

A little like a stripe and red paint making cars go faster?

OR...

a business suit....corporate camo. Hides the useless creep inside it.

The question that remains is: HOW EFFECTIVE this camo was during WWI and II, and what the countermeasures from the enemy were to deal with it (should it have been of some effect): like replacing monocular periscopes for binocular ones for improving telemetry, etc.

Binocular periscopes might be more comfortable to use, but depth perception does not extend to typical distances involved.

It is difficult to say how well any single passive countermeasure works for several reasons.

First, nobody ever employs just one countermeasure technique during war. So a comparison of before and after results renders no useful information.

Second, when this countermeasure works nothing happens. Most of the time nothing happens because nobody is in range. Some times when adversaries are in range of each other and one does detect the other but a myriad of other reasons causes nothing to happen, too.

The argument that dazzle camouflage on ships is no longer used implies that it didn't work is an invalid point because technology advances in the use of radar, sonar and aerial reconnaissance has changed the game. An equally specious argument can be made that these technology improvements were needed because this camouflage worked.

Transparent Aluminum would really help....... maybe

it is used on MRAP's you know....

So if we allow corundum might simply be called 'transparent aluminum' doesn't that lead to a conundrum?

.

In Star Trek VI, supposedly set in 1986, does trading knowledge of corundum represent an anachronism or a dupe?

I just found a paper on German Rangefinders http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-078.htm saying that german stereoscopic rangefinders could not be "spoofed" by changing the profiles of the target, which meant that the British wasted a great deal of effort during WWI by adding various extra details to their ships with that intent. How true is this?

The British used "Q" boats which looked like fishing boats. Torpedo boats which looked like trawlers. On land, they used inflatable tanks and trucks. Floating "buildings" in English harbours caused bombers to miss their target. At Antitam, they used fence posts and wagon wheels to make the Union think their artillery force was ten times bigger than it was.

Its an old story. Dazzle camo can be VERY effective in the right place. Useless in these days of 25 mile radar directed shells. But even so, radar can be jinxed, redirected and delayed. (making the target seem farther out than it is) The question to the launcher is "which target is the right one?". Of course nowadays, we only want to catch pirates and drug runners...a shell in the cockpit is against conventions.

How long, in yards or meters do you think this ship is?

When you try to estimate it, it seems to change shape and size. This is a good picture...imagine trying to do it with just a periscope and nothing else in the picture to estimate size. It could be anything from a fishing smack to an aircraft carrier.