I’ll be honest, having seen a little bit of gunnery at sea and targeting thereof, I’d say the opinions of the RN after 1943 were pretty valid, that all schemes, be they razzle-dazzle, splinter, etc. were useless, and not just because of radar. The opinions were that there wasn’t a single instance where any paintwork, no matter how elaborate, had made any difference in targeting a ship. It just didn’t work, and they’d tried it in both world wars so there was a lot of information to base that opinion on. Radar put the last nail in the coffin, but the idea was long dead before then. Even Bismarck notably had her stripes painted over when she went on her final voyage.
The utility of the various camouflage schemes also falls down heavily in a fleet action, where you can use triangulation with other ships in your line to get a solid fix on your target; I suspect that its value peaks as a countermeasure against submarines, which have no real way to exchange target data with another vessel, and have extremely limited rangefinding ability, so it would come down to the judgement of the man at the periscope, and anything that makes his job harder is worth it.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. The trend started in WW1, when the performance of submarines and torpedoes was quite limited so that anything that stopped the sub getting into a favourable firing position helped. While we have records of sinkings I’m not aware of studies of aborted attacks against disruptively patterned vessels. What does surprise me was that in WW1 every U.K. vessel had it’s own scheme (many of the small models actually survive) rather than going for a few limited designs within a class; I suppose it kept a number of artistic types from other sorts of service. Radar didn’t actually eliminate warship camouflage, I seem to recall during the Falklands hostilities the Chilean navy donning warpaint, and some RN landing craft gaining improvised disruptive patterns, while modern Scandinavian low-observability small (littoral?) vessels are painted more like a tank than a warship.
Cheers,
M
Not complete, still the weathering to do and a few more overlays/removals of white to finish, but essentially the white-washing of the P1000 is complete. Am wondering whether to leave the large AA as grey, but will probably white those twin guns over too. Thought that the areas where most crew would walk would have worn off the white, especially since it’s often clearly only a thin coat that’s applied on tanks. Also, tried to achieve some form of scale which is only partly visible on the photos, I mean, this was supposed to be 1/72. Anyway, so goes my meagre effort.
Finally, with a bit of weathering, and just lacking the 1/72 figures to man the AA guns, (probably have to settle for panzer crew figures since all the AA figures come with a gun which I don’t need, so anyone who knows of a set of AA crew figures plese leave a note) here’s the finished P1000. Will probably make a new post since I also finished the P300 companion model by MC. Anyway, my meagre effort.