Thursday, February 11, 2016

Space Camouflage

Over at The Learning Cliff podcast episode 37 they got into a discussion about how some of the Tech II ships have camouflage patterns on their hulls and what's the point. Up until recently I thought it was just a poor design choice by the artists but after playing World of Warships and learning about things there I have come to a new conclusion.

You see, in World War I, and to a lesser extent World War II, ships were giving what was called Dazzle Painting which "the intention of dazzle is not to conceal but to make it difficult to estimate a target's range, speed, and heading".

Much like its hard to hide a ship in open space, its hard to hide a ship in open sea, but the dazzle painting made it hard for that era's optics to accurately determine heading.
By Ian Alexander - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46167419
Its possible that space camo has the same purpose, to make it more difficult in theory for targeting computers to properly track and estimate position for firing solutions.

Just a thought.

3 comments:

  1. Cool, I enjoyed this - and love the learning cliff!

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  2. Cool, I enjoyed this - and love the learning cliff!

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  3. I'd love to see actual space camouflage integrated into the game. What if the Gila, while staying completely still within 2000m of an asteroid disappeared from d-scan and overview? And the moment it started moving it would pop up? There are a lot of interesting ways space camouflage could be integrated I think.

    Here is a camouflaged Gila: http://saftsuze.tumblr.com/image/104949667466

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