camouflage scale

Yes, I'm back on the subject of scale again. This time, though, it's not about range, model size, bases, or the various other factors that we, as gamers, don't have a direct say in. This time I'm talking about the camouflage schemes that we apply to our models with paint. 

With the huge variation in terrain across even a small country like Ireland, camouflage schemes are a vast and diverse range for any historical force. When we take our games to other planets, or, more mundanely, our forces to different warzones, the range of camouflage, by necessity, has to expand. Consider, say a dark grey Panther in North Africa during WWII,  or an olive drab vehicle in the enclave of West Berlin: to a limited degree their scheme will work because it's a nondescript bland tone, but that's a very limited degree. 

As modellers we want to recreate those schemes, in part for appearance, in part for immersion, and in part in the hope that the camouflage will work and make our opponent miss a unit. So it is that debates rage over the specific shade that is "dark gold", and other such topics. For many of us, planning a force, whether historical or science fiction, we'll spend weeks or even months studying resources on the uniforms and the camouflage we want to emulate, and often at least as long experimenting to achieve it. 

What we tend not to do, though, is to scale down the camouflage schemes to the scale of the models. 

Sometimes it's just not practical, since a 3mm dot in a weave, once reduced to Heroics scale is 0.05mm wide, and that's just not something you can paint easily. In that case, it's either a case of leaving out the dots or scaling them up. I'm not going to say one option is right, as I've done both, depending on the circumstances. 

Other times it's just easier to paint a pattern that's not been scaled down as far, or it avoids the model looking fussy and confused, or gives a nicer finished look than it would otherwise. Again, I'm not going to criticise, painting models, after all, is an art. And, of course, i have adjusted the scaling on patterns for all of the above reasons myself in the last few years alone. 

With larger models, there's less excuse for being lazy with the scheme (not that I've not been myself myriad times). By larger, i mean larger, whether scale - a complex pattern being much easier on a 1:58 model than the same in 1:72 - or relative size - a tank being bigger than an infantry model. Indeed, there are screeds of treatises on camouflage for armour.

Let me take you back a few years. I was running and playing in a 40k narrative campaign (think Kill Team, before Kill Team got any standalone support). This campaign swung from single models fighting through tunnel systems up to duels between titans and Knights (and is why i found myself needing to rapidly increase the quantity, range and quality of my terrain, leading to the suggestion that I should do so as a job). In one of my gangs i had Lance Corporal Miguel Guevara, a basic guardsman (well, the model was the loader for a stormtrooper heavy weapon, back when they had such). He was a basic human with a flak jacket, a knife, a pistol and a lasgun. He quickly became a thorn in my opponents' sides, though, as he gained advances from never being injured. 

Why was he never injured? Was it because he was a simple guardsman with basic kit? That would explain the first few games, but, as the campaign progressed, he became known as my sniper, and sought out. What saved him was camouflage, literally. When painting him i looked at my terrain and at relevant patterns for those landscapes, and reproduced one used by the Bolivians in the 1960s (hence the name), matching the scale of the splotches more than the colours. The colours were the colours of the terrain: a basic sand, because my boards were worn down to the wood, a russet, because a lot of the new terrain was made using flower pots, and Goblin Green, because most of my terrain was that old. It sounds like a boast, and to a degree it is, but there were numerous times my opponents would seek out Miguel, and completely miss where he was, to the point of moving assault units right past him as he hunkered in the corner of a ruin.

This got me thinking about whether camouflage can actually work on the tabletop. Since then, while I've played fast and loose at times to either get a unit ready for a game or for a more appealing appearance, I've been looking at the actual size of the patterns and what they'd scale to. 

One of the schemes that i most want to try is the early digital scheme employed in the 1980s by the vehicles of the UK's Berlin Infantry Brigade. The scheme was never tested in actual combat, thankfully, as the Cold War never went hot, but its eccentricity makes it popular with modellers for display pieces, or even some Team Yankee forces.

I'm far from the only person to think of doing a 40k Guard force in the scheme, and there are numerous examples out there. What I'm noticing, though, is that debates rage about effectiveness when applied to the very different shapes of the Imperial vehicles, colours, variations in the application schematics provided by different publishers, etc. What's not being looked at is the fact that the pattern had a rigid principle of uniformity (all vehicles of a hull-type had to match to within 5mm (in 1:1 scale), and that the pattern wasn't scaled for different sized vehicles, but made up of blocky shapes no more than 18" along any straight edge. This means that a force arrayed in this livery would have every Russ, for example, would have the exact same pattern, to an accuracy that is impossible to scale down. It also means that the maximum length of a straight edge would be 18", which scales down to 8mm. This is a very intricate scheme, if you choose to actually scale it, and will be a time consuming process to paint. 

Of course, to me that sounds like a challenge. The Berlin Infantry Brigade had 18 MBTs, so, 18 Russ, which is possible in a 3000 point force, albeit not tournament legal. Once that's done, of course, you'll want some Sentinels, and some mechanised infantry, and...