Why is tank camouflage always so neat?

[antique_nova]

It's got me really curious, because it's always super neat and tidy.

 

Isn't the whole point of camo to break up the lines of the vehicle?

 

I can see that regardless of it being neat or not, that it would break up the line of the vehicle, but it would so much more time to just manual stick on the covers to spray only a portion of the vehicle and this would have to be done by human hands.

 

I understand that part of the vehicle is covered when spray civilian vehicles, because it's purely aesthetic and that the paint might be "Printed" on, but wouldn't a neat and stripey tank stand out more in the snow, regardless of it's colours and patterns, compared to one that is messily sprayed on?

 

Maybe it's a military thing, where they are OCD about being neat and tidy? (And with good reason for 99.9% of things)

 

What do you think?

 

 

Which one looks better? (Maybe I'm going for the lazy route and don't want to paint it so neatly, but this thought got me really curious)

 

 

[RolandTHTG]

The idea of stripe tank camo is to break up the visual profile so that someone casually looking doesn't go "Tank!".

For that, the hard lines are better, as they break up (through light/dark color contrast) the natural hard lines of the armor and hatches.

See WW1 Dazzler camo on ships for a similar effect meant to interfere with people trying to accurately access a ships speed.

 

If you want a 'soft' camo to just blend in with terrain, I recommended going full blotch camo, like traditional mossy oak woodland camo.

[antique_nova]

So, if I understand correctly. There's soft and hard camo. I'm guessing that snipers and mortar teams stick to soft camo with the blotches.

 

I'm guessing the hard lines would be better at extreme distances? Because I can't find any evidence as to why hard lines are better than blotches for camo at any distance for vehicles or large units such as ships. 

[Kinstryfe]

I'd imagine part of it is for what realistic advantage you can get. I'm not sure you could totally camouflage a tank without anything still showing. I mean, something will probably give it away, eventually, whether it's exhaust or movement or the jutting turret or something. If the camo can manage to obscure the profile enough so that the enemy can't tell what its facing is, or exactly where it starts and ends, it may be enough to make a couple shots miss because they thought the leftmost end of the tank was the middle, or something like that.

[antique_nova]

Ok, but I'm just wandering why the lines are so straight and not blurred. Even just a little. Like the difference between messily painting it on with a brush and being neat about it. I would have to go with being neat and it looking pro, because it's the military we're talking about because I doubt the lines being a little messy would make much of a difference compared to a neat one.

[Dark_Master]

Use the blu-tac method, it makes a very distinct line

 

DM

[MARK0SIAN]

Remember as well that a lot of the camouflage on vehicles is designed to stop them being easily spotted at a distance. It’s not really meant to hide them when you’d be close enough to tell whether the line was blurry or straight. If you wanted to hide them when they were that close you’d need additional things like tree foliage etc.

 

At a distance a blurry line would be pretty indistinguishable from a straight one so they may as well save time and effort and just use straight ones.

[Emicus]

Youre gonna be able to tell it's a tank as soon as you see it, but putting a shot through the 'weak spot'? Gonna be harder when you can't tell where the 'edges' are or what shape it actually is.

 

Could be this type.. Could be that..

 

Easier in the imperium of course where you pretty much only have russes :p

[spafe]

I imagine a the hard line of the edge of a vehicle is easier to pick out when the camo has soft edges that blur into each other, wheras if the tanks hard edges (edge of the actual tank), also has other hard lines in the form of the camo changing colour, then it can lead to being harder to define the 'hard tank edge' as opposed to the 'hard camo edge'.

 

Just a theory mind.

 

The dazzle camo of ww1 ships, that was to make it  harder to id the ship class, facing, speed and various other details, as it was assumed on the ocean that no amount of blue camo would hide a ship against the water, so better to make it harder to guess what 'that' ship is rather than 'where' a ship is (as it would be seen easily regardless).

 

The other one to consider is planes, ww2 now. Light blue/grey/white on the underside to blur with the sky, solid colour so it just blends in, but 'soft' camo from above, as the speeds they move at, at you would be moving at looking down on one, everything is a bit blurry, so the 'softness' allows for even more blur and allows it to be impossible to distinguish from the ground below it. 

 

Basically, ships try to confuse, they can't hide, other stuff tries to extenuate the difficulty that already exists (blurry for things that are already blurry, more hard lines for things that are already solid lines/shapes)

 

Hope that helps

[sarabando]

(did write out along post explaining this in detail but the forum ate it XD ) summary: Tank camo is designed to work at range from other tanks and aircraft. Small camo blends into a solid colour at range therefore looses its advantage so big strokes of camo help change the "shape" of the tank at a distance.

[old git]

Check out late war WW2 German tank camo schemes.

[sarabando]

Check out late war WW2 German tank camo schemes.

i play Bolt Action a 28mm ww2 skirmish game as German and when i see Astra Militarum players complaining about how hard camo is to paint i just laugh now days :D

[Ovidius Incertus]

Ok, but I'm just wandering why the lines are so straight and not blurred. Even just a little. Like the difference between messily painting it on with a brush and being neat about it. I would have to go with being neat and it looking pro, because it's the military we're talking about because I doubt the lines being a little messy would make much of a difference compared to a neat one.

 

In part this is a function of the scale we work at.  If you look at WW2 camo, especially a lot of German three-color patterns, on a real tank, you'll see they actually have soft lines.  During the war, I'm pretty sure most of these were painted with an airbrush at the depot level, given the fuzzy edges between colors.  When we go to the scale of miniature we work at, it's difficult to replicate these soft edges.  It can be done on vehicles at scale, but not much else.

 

If you venture into the world of scale model painting, you'll find much better representations of camo.  GW's Imperial Guard camo is lazy, by comparison, so don't get a false impression of what can be done or what is actually done, in the rest of the community.

[antique_nova]

When you mean soft lines you mean like it's been painted with what looks like lots of long thin and small splats compared to the giant tiger strips on the 40k tanks?

 

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8d/ec/ac/8decac5cb8d4c3654c9b31292266340a.jpg