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U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

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211–220 of 309 posts

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#211
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it is related to dazzle camoflauge used on ships? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage There the goal is less to avoid detection and more to make it hard to determine direction/orientation.

Dazzle camo wasn't so much a "hide me" camo as it was a "hide data needed to shot me" camo. It was designed to make it harder to estimate heading and speed so it was harder to calculate accurate shots by submarines and naval guns which needed data about the target ship's speed, distance and heading to calculate an accurate shot.

Radar killed dazzle.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#212
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Very very few things in nature actually are made of large blobs of a single color (unless you're very shortsighted). Honestly, it baffles me why militaries didn't realize this earlier.

Source: former military member. In combat, camouflage is really the VERY last line of defense possible, and a fairly weak one at that. If the difference between staying alive and being dead is the pattern of your clothing, a lot of things have already gone seriously wrong and your chances of survival are not great. In the grand scheme of things, camo relatively high-hanging fruit. Money and time have mostly been spen…

> camouflage is really the VERY last line of defense possible

Doesn't it go: 'don't be seen, if you're seen don't be acquired, if you're acquired don't be hit, if you're hit don't be penetrated, if you're penetrated don't be killed'? Camouflage ('don't be seen') is the first layer on the onion, not the last!

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#213
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When determining weaker sections visually, wouldn't you go by "mass" of soldiers? I don't think anybody would count individual soldiers. In any case, given the technology of the time, if you were beyond engagement range, I don't think you would have been able to pick out individual soldiers by sight regardless of which uniforms they were wearing... My theory is that vibrant color uniforms were chosen simply to make i…

It helped to identify friend-vs-foe yes, but not formation, as formations were distinguished by the lining of their uniform, which wasn't very visible! Also red was just an easy colour to get hold of and to dye with, and it hid blood. The red mass of undistinguished soldiers created an imposing sight on the battlefield. It's not about wanting to hit individuals (why would you?) it's about the shock factor. This is on…

Wikipedia (I know, I know) seems to imply it was simply that the die was common, that it was a traditional symbol of an English soldier, and for identification of friend vs foe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_coat_(military_uniform):

> However, in the days of the musket (a weapon of limited range and accuracy) and black powder, battle field visibility was quickly obscured by clouds of smoke. Bright colours provided a means of distinguishing friend from foe without significantly adding risk. Furthermore, the vegetable dyes used until the 19th century would fade over time to a pink or ruddy-brown, so on a long campaign in a hot climate the colour was less conspicuous than the modern scarlet shade would be. As formal battles of the time commonly involved deployment in columns and lines, the individual soldier was not likely to be a target by himself.

and

> In his book British Military Uniforms (Hamylyn Publishing Group 1968), the military historian W. Y. Carman traces in considerable detail the slow evolution of red as the English soldier's colour, from the Tudors to the Stuarts. The reasons that emerge are a mixture of financial (cheaper red, russet or crimson dyes), cultural (a growing popular sense that red was the sign of an English soldier),[64] and simple chance (an order of 1594 is that coats "be of such colours as you can best provide").

There is no mention of "dazzle" camouflage or of confounding numbers at all.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#214
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason why you're getting some pushback is because we've heard all these before with another aircraft that had similar teething and development problems: the F-15. The F-15 project was supposed to be a small and light fighter but feature creep" blew the project up into a massively expensive boondoggle. Some of this was due to the fear of the MIG-25; an aircraft we later learned wasn't so scary. Yet today,…

I believe the list is long of airframes where you could initially find this complaint. I think the F18 had similar concerns after it originally lost its experimental competition to the F16. But the F18 found itself as a capable workhorse for the Navy for decades. Same with the Space Shuttle, etc.

Space Shuttle is a clinker, here. It never did anything well, and its costs gutted other, overwhelmingly more valuable programs.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#215
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hunters in the US wear a blaze orange vest or hat to identify themselves to other hunters. In some states it's codified by law, and in others it's strongly encouraged (in California it's a big part of the mandatory hunter safety course, but is not legally required). Many big game animals are color-blind (or more specifically, see color differently than we do), so a camo pattern with orange can still hide one fro…

What if the deer is also color-blind? What colors do deer see anyway?

Deer have more cones and less rods than humans. They have no red-sensitive rods at all. They also have no ultraviolet filtration, so they see blue much more acutely and pick up on UV-wavelength brighteners quite easily.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#216
post #214
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the list is long of airframes where you could initially find this complaint. I think the F18 had similar concerns after it originally lost its experimental competition to the F16. But the F18 found itself as a capable workhorse for the Navy for decades. Same with the Space Shuttle, etc.

Space Shuttle is a clinker, here. It never did anything well, and its costs gutted other, overwhelmingly more valuable programs.

Generalization (not specialization) was it’s strong point as well as it’s weakness. The reason why it was a design boondoggle was because it had to meet the requirements of many masters. People forget it has a number of DoD missions in addition to the more publicly known NASA missions.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#217
post #146
post #124

It is 21st century. Flex OLEDs displaying pattern depending on your background is your camo. Your tank is covered with 80inch displays too.

color e-ink displays would be kind of fun

It's a pretty excellent application if flexibility can be solved.

The issues with color in e-ink boil down to having to float more kinds of ink dot, making it slooooow. But instantly changing to match surroundings isn't ideal, because it's change, and change is what we notice.

Granted that if it could change instantly then that process could just be run slowly, but it seems like a lesser disadvantage compared to any user interface.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#218
post #177

Question (from somebody who only skimmed the article): how much variance exists of that fabric? Is that pattern repeated after x meters if fabric? If so: wouldn't knowing what to look for greatly increase the ability to automatically extract the pattern from image data? (Like how it is possible to extract signals from below the noise floor in LoRa communication?)

My thought too: a cheap, simple NN attached to the raw image in scopes and sights, programmed to highlight anything it recognizes.

Now I imagine uniform fabric with adversarial patterns added, for those.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#219
post #3

It appears that someone circumnavigated the scientific process and forced UCP in. That would be whoever benefitted financially from the decision to fuck our soldiers over.

Having worked (as a civilian contractor) for the military it's equally plausible that the decision was screwed up for other reasons. High up decision makers that "trust their gut" over what the data tells them or who arbitrarily decide that a certain pattern looks silly to them. It's absolutely not intuitive that the digital looking blocky camouflage patterns [1] are going to perform better than the blob style camo p…

Berets.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hunters in the US wear a blaze orange vest or hat to identify themselves to other hunters. In some states it's codified by law, and in others it's strongly encouraged (in California it's a big part of the mandatory hunter safety course, but is not legally required). Many big game animals are color-blind (or more specifically, see color differently than we do), so a camo pattern with orange can still hide one fro…

For deer (with guns), yes. For things like turkeys, ducks, geese, deer with bows, etc they do not. In hunter safety they really stressed to be careful hunting turkeys.

You seem to be saying that fowl have good color vision, so hunters of those need to avoid the orange stuff, and other hunters can't rely on seeing it to avoid shooting one another.

But where does "deer with bows" come into that?

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