Interesting how history can repeat itself.
In World War 1, Royal Navy officer (who also happened to be an artist) Norman Wilkinson came up with the idea of Dazzle Camouflage.
It was based around the fact that gun ranges were calculated using a Coincidence Range Finder. This was, essentially, a very wide pair of binoculars - the idea being based around range calculation using triangulation.
These were used both on land and sea.
Because of the greater ranges involved, the naval versions could be much bigger.
The point of dazzle camouflage was to break up the shape of the ship and make it much more difficult to accurately predict its distance. This also worked against submarines using a periscope to target a ship.
The results were inconclusive on how effective the dazzle paintwork actually was but it is still painted on some RN ships as part of their heritage rather than any operational requirement.
Now, let's fast forward to our own time. A form of dazzle paintwork, it is being reported, is something that the Russian ships in the Black Sea are experimenting with. It seems to be primarily the bow and stern of the ship that is being painted a darker shade of grey than the rest of the hull. The reason is to make the ship look shorter than it actually is. Ukranian drones tend to rely on visual means for detection and target classification and this evolution of dazzle paintwork might make it much harder to target ships of the Black Sea fleet.
Who knows if it will actually work but, after a century, it seems like dazzle camouflage may actually have a use against the rapidly emerging area of drone warfare.
In World War 1, Royal Navy officer (who also happened to be an artist) Norman Wilkinson came up with the idea of Dazzle Camouflage.
It was based around the fact that gun ranges were calculated using a Coincidence Range Finder. This was, essentially, a very wide pair of binoculars - the idea being based around range calculation using triangulation.
These were used both on land and sea.
Because of the greater ranges involved, the naval versions could be much bigger.
The point of dazzle camouflage was to break up the shape of the ship and make it much more difficult to accurately predict its distance. This also worked against submarines using a periscope to target a ship.
The results were inconclusive on how effective the dazzle paintwork actually was but it is still painted on some RN ships as part of their heritage rather than any operational requirement.
Now, let's fast forward to our own time. A form of dazzle paintwork, it is being reported, is something that the Russian ships in the Black Sea are experimenting with. It seems to be primarily the bow and stern of the ship that is being painted a darker shade of grey than the rest of the hull. The reason is to make the ship look shorter than it actually is. Ukranian drones tend to rely on visual means for detection and target classification and this evolution of dazzle paintwork might make it much harder to target ships of the Black Sea fleet.
Who knows if it will actually work but, after a century, it seems like dazzle camouflage may actually have a use against the rapidly emerging area of drone warfare.
