Dazzle wartime camouflage

[mrs quoad]

http://www.maritimequest.com/liners/olympic_page_6.htm

Ooooooooooooooooooo.

And TY James May!

 

[Wookey]

Dazzle the schmizzle-pizzle.

 

[citygirl]

not very good camouflage though...ya could spot them things a mile off

 

[mrs quoad]

not very good camouflage though...ya could spot them things a mile off

Yes!

The whole point is to break up the outline, so's people don't know where things are headed from e.g. a submarine

But tbh who cares about the camouflaging benefits? I like! It's pretty darned interesting to my eyes at any rate

 

[JTG]

not very good camouflage though...ya could spot them things a mile off

tbh, you can spot them a mile off anyway - but as Mrs Q says, break up the outlines and that and you can make it harder to pin down what it's actually doing.

Nice idea, shame it never caught on

 

[WouldBe]

Yes!

The whole point is to break up the outline, so's people don't know where things are headed from e.g. a submarine

Paint the boat to look like an island then.

 

[Firky]

Bloke which came up with the idea was an artist, quite famous too. I forget his name. Although I am sure wiki will tell you.

Very effective at the time as rangefinders onboard were optically rather than radar powered. I think they tried the idea on tanks too.

 

[mrs quoad]

They attributed it to a bloke who painted a cubist harlequin

 

[WouldBe]

Very effective at the time as rangefinders onboard were optically rather than radar powered. I think they tried the idea on tanks too.

Stick mirrors to the hull of the ship then.

 

[Firky]

All the sailors would just groom themselves

 

[damnhippie]

there i was looking for a name for my mime collective and along came this thread...

 

[lostexpectation]

it looks so unreal, search...

matches the poster desing funnily enough http://www.gotouring.com/razzledazzle/articles/dazzle7.html
looks design republic - wipeoutish the red one does kewl


norman wilkinson one of his paintings
http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/the_age_of_the_engineer/01.ST.04/img/IM.0360_zl.jpg

line of ship
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~drmiles/images/murders_row.jpg

best one
http://www.gotouring.com/razzledazzle/articles/dazzle5.html

fantastic dazzle camo clothing would be cool

 

[moose]

That's absolute rubbish. They may as well have made it Burberry.

 

[DJ Squelch]

Always been quite interested in razzle dazzle camo from a graffiti writers point of view.

 

[dilute micro]

You know just when the design was finally completed by worn-out yardbirds word would come down to do a different one.

 

[Roadkill]

not very good camouflage though...ya could spot them things a mile off

It's kind of difficult to make an 800-foot steamship invisible, never mind the fact that most of them were coal-fired and therefore made a lot of very visible black smoke. The idea, like quoad says, was to make it harder for a submarine to see which way it was going. It wasn't perfect, but none of the big, dazzle-painted troopships was torpedoed...

@Wouldbe. Kind of hard to disguise a ship as an island, but around Rosyth naval base they did design the fortifications of some of the islands to look a bit like battleships in silhouette - either to scare the submarine off or encourage it to try and attack and thereby give away its position.

 

[MikeMcc]

not very good camouflage though...ya could spot them things a mile off

You can't though, that's the point. At any distance at sea it gets very dificult to see. I even saw a film of an experiment where scientists put a frame work of lamps on the side of a tank and then varied the intensity of them to match that of the sky, against the skyline you simply couldn't see the bugger, up close it looked like an expensive christmas tree!

 

[gsv]

SS War Penguin is fab!
Thanks Mrs Quoad


GS(v)

 

[Sweet FA]

SS War Penguin is fab!

That's not a war penguin.

This is a war penguin:

 

[editor]

Crazy arse wartime ship camouflage

Check out these crazy painted ships from WW1:

Forget about not being seen, that only solves their first problem. Focus on confusing them so they don’t know where you’re going. Then their torpedoes will be shot in vain because they thought you zigged when you really zagged.

British Artist and naval officer Norman Wilkinson had this very insight and pioneered the Dazzle Camouflage movement (known as Razzle Dazzle in the United States). Norman used bright, loud colours and contrasting diagonal stripes to make it incredibly difficult to gauge a ship’s size and direction.

It was cheap, effective, and widely-adopted during the War...

http://twistedsifter.com/2010/02/razzle-dazzle-camouflage/

 

[paolo]

Send that up the waterways of Birmingham. Invisible. Absolutely invisible.

 

[Diamond]

It's interesting stuff. I remember reading about it a while back. Linked to this lot:

The Vorticists

 

[Limejuice]

Brilliant designs on those ships. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when the suggestion was put to the Admiralty.

Maybe the modern navy could commission Banksy...

 

[rich!]

The book on this stuff, Churchill's Wizards, is pretty interesting. There's a lovely recounting of a chap in charge of a fake airfield phoning up his superiors at the real airbase, complaining that his decoys are being blown up. "Splendid, carry on" they say. "But they're blowing up my best decoys, sir!"

 

[i_hate_beckham]

Brilliant designs on those ships. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when the suggestion was put to the Admiralty.

Maybe the modern navy could commission Banksy...

Or someone new.....

 

[spliff]

The book on this stuff, Churchill's Wizards, is pretty interesting. There's a lovely recounting of a chap in charge of a fake airfield phoning up his superiors at the real airbase, complaining that his decoys are being blown up. "Splendid, carry on" they say. "But they're blowing up my best decoys, sir!"

 

[Bakunin]

The book on this stuff, Churchill's Wizards, is pretty interesting. There's a lovely recounting of a chap in charge of a fake airfield phoning up his superiors at the real airbase, complaining that his decoys are being blown up. "Splendid, carry on" they say. "But they're blowing up my best decoys, sir!"

Almost as epic as the US Navy office at Pearl Harbour who, on being informed by one of his radar operators that a large number of blips had just appeared on the radar screen replied:

'Never mind, I'm sure they're nothing to worry about.'



For anyone interested in camouflage and subterfuge, I can recommend they find out more about a certain Jasper Maskelyne, a British magician and camouflage expert known as the leader of the 'Magic gang':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Maskelyne

 

[Lancman]

The Royal Navy painted up two ships like that and carried out sea trials. They collided.

 

[pootle]

The Royal Navy painted up two ships like that and carried out sea trials. They collided.

Which kinda shows they worked as camo by confusion.

There was a camoflage exhibition at the IWM a few years ago which had a bit about camo through the ages, including the razzle dazzle stuff. It was very cool. They even had a bespoke camouflage, stilleto shoe. Very cool.

Camo is my favourite colour. Arf! I'm even wearing a camo hoody as I type this!

 

[selamlar]

There was also a period where war ships were painted a fetching shade of mauve (known as Mountbatton Pink) in an effort to reduce their visability at dawn and dusk. I believe it worked fine at the appropriate times, but had the unfortunate side effect of sticking out like a sore thumb at midday, so was discontinued.
Some of the dazzle, and false bow type paint schemes were really quite effective in disguising ships as other classes of vessel etc. Played merry hell with rangefinding etc, too.