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.
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.
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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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 35.5 ms ] threadAs 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
It all makes sense now :)
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.
http://cvdazzle.com/