

An Illustrated History of Camouflaged Ships - pepys
http://io9.com/an-illustrated-history-of-unbelievably-camouflaged-ship-676257937

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arethuza
Another subtle example of military camouflage was the UK Sherman Firefly of
WW2 - which was a Sherman tank with a gun upgrade to a 17-pounder to allow
them to take on German Panther and Tiger tanks.

As the size of the 17-pounder gun was quite noticeable and the Firefly
Shermans were a significant threat to German tanks the German tank and anti-
tanks crews were instructed to attack them first. So the guns of the tanks
were camouflaged to make them look like the standard gun.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Firefly](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Firefly)

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mfsampson
Couldn't see how this would help much however the first comment on the article
helped clear things up. The paint jobs were not meant to hide ships, just
break up their silhouette to make it more difficult to identify the ship and
it's heading from a distance.

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beloch
Actually, the biggest benefit of disruptive camouflage was that it made it
more difficult to get a range reading on a ship using a optical range-finder.

Here's how an optical range-finder works. You have two horizontal periscope-
like devices arranged so that they are several feet apart, or more. They come
together in single eye-piece split in half vertically, so one eye-piece
provides the top half and the other the bottom half. This is basically stereo-
vision on steroids.

Hold your finger out in front of your face at arm's length, and alternate
looking at it through your right and left eye. It'll jump back and forth
because of parallax. If you could tilt one eye in slightly you could get the
finger to stop doing that. Well, with an optical range-finder, that's exactly
what you do. You tilt one of the periscopes in slightly until the top and
bottom halves of the image match up. Then you measure the angle and use basic
trig to find the distance to the object.

Disruptive camouflage made it harder and slower to match up the top and bottom
halves of a ship in an optical range-finder. If your enemy gets their first
shot wrong that's a huge advantage.

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jpierre
Relatedly, for his masters thesis, artist Adam Harvey developed CV Dazzle to
camouflage from face detecting computer vision algorithms.

[http://cvdazzle.com/](http://cvdazzle.com/)

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rahvin
This is awesome but I'm just wondering why it took them so long to arrive at
just plain grey.

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alricb
As long as it took for radar to become the main targeting mechanism, so that
fooling rangefinders became obsolete.

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thisjepisje
>rangefinders

It all makes sense now :)

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idlewords
The false bow wave camouflage on the destroyer is especially subtle and cool

