The Surprising Reason Why You Shouldn’t Wear Camo on a Cruise Ship
www.mentalfloss.com
Wearing your favorite old pair of camouflage shorts on a Caribbean cruise could put a real damper on your vacation.

Many of the cruise-friendly Caribbean countries have camouflage as their military uniform and so it’s illegal to wear it in these countries.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      32·
      3 days ago

      Its not the thread and would actually look okay (or, at least, not like you are a cosplaying goober) as clothing but

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_camouflage

      It speaks to the actual role of camouflage as breaking up silhouettes. Which… if you are on the open sea is a major problem because there is nothing to blend into. Hence stuff like dazzle that is more about making it hard to distinguish exactly what kind of ship you are, what your direction is, or what your speed is. And it is genuinely wild how effective it was. Some of the more realistic WW1/2 naval milsims implement it and it makes you understand just how important radar/sonar actually was when you are struggling to make a firing solution for your torpedoes against what MIGHT be a destroyer.

        • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          I mean… if you actually read the article (or even the comment you are replying to…) you’ll see it isn’t ironic in the slightest.

          Camouflage from other ships really isn’t a thing. You can paint your ship grey or blue but that still stands out against the horizon at sea probably 20 hours a day. And is worse than useless if you are near a shoreline.

          Odds get a lot better against aerial spotters (e.g. planes) but that also has mostly been rendered pointless in an era of radar since you anti-radar paint is VERY expensive and you don’t have many options to add the angles that actually make the biggest difference for stealth purposes.

          Which is why Dazzle et al were generally the popular approach. You were going to see the ship no matter what, so the point is to make it as hard to get actionable data out of that visual contact as possible. And… once radar and sonar took over there wasn’t even much point to that.