Anyone know the colour of an active FROG 7 missile? I know parade and display ones are grey or metal but I find it hard to believe that active missiles would have been that colour mainly due to camouflage, I’ve seen Iraqi ones in sand and I would have thought that European ones would have been green?
Standard military factory base color for whatever national production run that they’re from. Ex: Soviet missiles would be in the standard Soviet army green.
I am not so sure that the FROG series were ever in green; every last pic I’ve ever seen ha shown them in a grey - sometime light - sometime a bit darker. The Scud series and beyond - “Yes” a green. I just wonder if the Soviets treated such an unguided weapon as merely a round of ammunition and it was accepted in the light colour because, well, because Directive 22/62/A at Rocket Factory No 13 stipulated that “all rockets will be finished in…”
I agree that it doesn’t make tactical sense for them not to have been in a more suitable, camouflage colour, but try as I might, I cannot recall seeing any in anything other than a light finish, and that includes scrutiny of BRIXMIS pics back in the day.
I have one picture of a green one but that is in a museum, most other pictures are either training or parade or black and white photos or the colour balance is too distorted to tell, I even have a half and half one warhead green, body grey, but all clear pictures are grey on exercise.
I fully accept that they may possibly have been grey, the question just popped in my mind give that Oka, spider, iskander and scud are usually green. Think I should play safe and go half and half mainly because I have a picture
I completely agree that they should be green (or similar); I suppose I was trying to say that they may have been considered a sort of more expendable piece of ammunition, compared to the technically more demanding guided systems such as Scud.
Spider and Scarab etc are more modern systems (in the scheme of things) so perhaps one would expect them to be coloured as they are.
It may be of course that the ones earmarked for combat ie with warheads were indeed stashed away in bunkers all over East Germany and painted dark green, and the ones used for training continued in light grey, including those with fuel (ie no warheads) for live launches.
I suspect we’ll not know for some time; so, at least that means no one will be able to gainsay your efforts on the display tables(!)
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That’s a good point; what show judge can confidently tell you your old Russian missile was never painted green or any other military color?
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I think I’ve even seen some video of Pakistani FROG-7s that were a hideous shade of bright green.
The only positive green one I’ve seen and a greenish warhead
I think there is a good argument to be made that they were a light or medium gray color given that the training rockets (i.e. live rocket motor, dummy or reduced charge warhead) and even tactical rockets fired in major exercises were gray.
Missiles (i.e guided projectiles) seem to have been camouflaged but rockets (i.e unguided) like the Luna and Mars were not.
KL
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