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.