Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Digital Camo F/A-18.

Its just a matter of time before our ships, tanks, and airplanes are all in digital camo.


2 comments :

  1. Is this real? Which wing is it a part of?

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  2. Digital Camouflage only works when it breaks up a lighter color with a duller one and both are within half a shade of being the same tonal saturation so that, both are bright against the skyline but one is blue and the other is white. Think of it like the equivalent to an 'Aztec Pattern' on a Star Trek ship.

    What this means is that the huge contrast shifts shownon the Hornets don't work versus the human eye because the human eye has such poor image grain resolution that it sees only the block outline and if you have four or five tonal variations, it's going to average them out to the darkest one which means a black gunship colored will make a black airplane shaped hole in the sky, not a series of cool looking digital fractals.

    For electrooptical imagers, the problem is the opposite, they have very good pixel resolution (much bigger focal aperture) and so any deliberate light-dark shift is magnified by the thermal differentiation which tends to act like a TV with the contrast/saturation busted, leaving a very vivid smeary image even at the near IR of 'tv' (TISEO/TCS) vs. mid IR (IRST and most LDP).

    Like some of the more exotic Heatley/Ferris paint schemes, this kind of camouflage can break up apparent aspect as 'tilt' (roll and yaw) in plane of airframe motion but only at distances where the shape itself has been tracked for quite awhile. With HOBS weapons and Helmet sights along with MSI, usually the tracked target will be taking a face shot long before he has to worry about fooling a gun-track.

    At shoot-them-with-a-rifle distances, pixellation effect occurs where the background seems to be moving/disrupted, even when the target is standing still. This is a major failure with the MARPAT and other 'digital' camouflage uniforms in that, by the time the contrast area is close enough to break up the outline as more than a single shade of grey-green, the overall image field is too dense with shape blocks to fool the eye.

    If you want to see good camouflage, look at some of the more recent Army attempts (which they were close to fielding before the whole fractal/digital craze went viral) that uses softer, larger, image blocks of two-three stacked color tones that reverse shadow and light as countershades.

    The outline separations are not unlike those of elevation lines on a topomap and the larger color gradation shapes serve to 'lift' a false contour as raised shape that serves better to push-and-pull apart the sum-area of a man-sized outline.

    This type of camouflage is very environment sensitive and it tends to work better with a cape or poncho to remove torso to limb shadows as a larger working area.

    But oh my, when it works, it works _outstandingly_ well.

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