Hi -- would late war camo (i.e. 1945 onwards) be more a hard-edged pattern? And would this have been the trend had the war dragged on for a couple more years? Am planning for an E100 and would just want to depict as camo patterns would have supposedly progressed. Thanks.

Hello Tat,

I think that once you start wandering into E-100 "What If" territory, this is definitely an area where you definitely have some scope for a bit of the old artistic license, without having to worry too much about what the "official" line was.

After all, the thing was never actually put into the field, and who knows what painting directives would have been handed down had the war dragged on for another year or two.

Just keep it plausible.

Here's an E-25 that I did a while ago with a camo scheme that I suppose you could call "tortoise shell". Not the best photo, but it should give you an idea.



Other than that , probably two-tone hard-edged 'grün / gelb' (with the emphasis on the grün) would work nicely. Or even a nicely modulated all-green scheme could look quite effective. Or "octopus" .... like I said, the possibilities are varied.

Tip: If you're doing an E-100, I'd leave off some or all of the track guards. Doing that makes the beast look a whole lot meaner and nastier.

- Steve

The way i see it by that point Germany has lost the war, urban camo would be a common site as battles reached Berlin and other major citys. anything late war is acceptable or anything you like, who know's what lengths the Germans would go to camoflage their vehicles.
cheers
Mat

Hi Tat
I know it isn't an E series vehicle, but this panther II is like your E 100 a "Paperpanzer". In my opinion the most realistic colors would be olivengrün for the basecoat and then stripes of dunkelgelb and/or chokoladebraun. The best part of these "What if's" projects are that you're free to choose what ever camouflage/paintjob you like.

Jacob

Steve, I really like the camo scheme on the E-25. To reiterate what you said I agree with the artistic license thing, sometimes it is nice to be free of particular pattern/ color restraints and take it a step into the "what if" realm by doing the paper panzers

Hi Jacob, i was wondering what those bulges were near the top front of the turret.

Stereoscopic rangefinder. Very advanced concept for 1945. Look at pics of an M-60 turret, they have the same thing.

Nice Panther II model BTW.

John

Not really a Panther-II at all, with a Panther-F Schmalturm and such

Anyway, if one wants to follow camouflage orders given for the latter half of 1945, it is my distinct belief that what is known as Octopus camouflage would be used.

Jentz describes the post July 1945 camouflage as being a basecoat of Oliv Grun with wandering bands of Dunkel Gelb, in hard edge. Rot Braun was not part of the camouflage scheme anymore.

Thanks Steve. Plausible was the word I was looking for -- just want to be sure that am not veering away from what could have been, although the possibilities may be endless.




This is what I have in mind for the last couple of days. Add to that is keeping the lower part of the hull -- say from where the track guards are attached down to the road wheels, as red primer. Storyline goes: either paint is getting scarce or the rush to deploy such that they only painted gelb and grun on the upper part. The gun can probably stay in black lacquer (?) as I've read on some posts. Hmmm...




Agree! My compliments to your E-25! Cheers -- Tat

Thanks for the replies, guys!

Matthew, just curious on the urban camo, what colors would they typically be?

Jacob, nice Panther II, plan to paint one in stripes as well. Yep, I recall reading that some late war panzers had green and brown on them.

Herbert, I'll go for hard-edged then.

Cheers

Hey Tat,
Just like this: (this photo is purely for discussional purpose and in no way am i credited for the picture.)


Lots of hard edge block shapes in brick, stone and black colours
Cheers
Mat

Thanks for the pic Mat! -- now I know what you meant. I think I've seen something similar with the Marine units here. Will keep this reference handy. For the E100 I may go for the grun+gelb combo. Cheers. Tat

About urban camouflage, it isn't like the Germans first started fighting in city-areas until 1945...

They had experience on the Eastern Front with city-warfare. Which is where vehicles like the SturmPanzer IV and such were designed for, to blow up (reinforced) housing.

Anyhoo, those and other vehicles for urban combat, were supplied in the 3-tone camo. So I don't see any special urban scheme on the charts for the Germans. Nor for the Allies I may add.

And as to paint shortages, even though this was included into the 3-tone specifications, the later 2-tone specs for July '45 do not mention the allowed use of PanzerGrau.

Herbert, would it be plausible that there could have been shortages on the Oliv Grun basecoat -- such that some parts like roadwheels or areas such as the lower hull would have remained in red primer? Thanks -- Tat

Oh No.

Not this again !!!!

Not the dreaded RED OXIDE PRIMER question!!

Some months ago, I started a thread on that very subject, which opened up a whole can of worms, got very nitty-gritty and - in places - quite heated. It ran backwards and forwards for a few months, with guys chiming in on either side, and some of them posting images (and their various interpretations of these images) to back up their arguments pro and contra.

So for heavy-duty "red oxide" discussions, the best place to do it is probably here, rather than take this thread widly off topic:

https://armorama.kitmaker.net/forums/129487&page=1

I think the general consensus (such as it was) in the end was that if strict accuracy is your thing, red oxide primer shouldn't really be used as part of a camo scheme - at least not on models of actual vehicles.

But as I said above, with an E-100 we're into the realms of "What If". So if you went down that route, I think it'd be a bit disingenuous for someone to come over all pedantic and shout you down over it. Your model - your call. Just don't do a red oxide barrel .

- Steve

Well, What if does not equate to "just do what ever the hell you want" since a proper what if still uses sound physical logic, where some people have narrowed down the front face of a Maus/E-100 turret that in no way, the 128/150mm gun cradle could ever fit, and STILL also have the coax 75mm gun.

And same goes for painting, if you for instance go ahead with a Waffentrager, which was teeetering on prototype/production model at war's end, you would best still use what is known for camouflage.

IMO the best what if is not a SciFi aproach but a technically sound approach.

Steve, Herbert, thanks for the comments. And no -- I didn't mean to start this red oxide thing agan; have followed that thread long enough to see it came to heated exchanges. How plausible was it / is it for an E100 given the situation that supply shortages were present -- I guess that's where I'm coming from, would it be a likely scenario so to speak.

Hmmm, red oxide barrel?

Cheers,

Tat

PS -- just kidding on that barrel. I now recall another discussion somewhere that barrels got black / gray (not just around the muzzle), or got darker because of the heat from rapid firing.

Well, barrels didn't get black from firing, they were delivered in black lacquer, and sometimes after a barrel change, tanks were photographed with completely black barrels, thusly.

TatBaqui,

Some thoughts:
1. Camouflage is -always- environment specific. And usually 'environment modified'. In the thick of the Berlin fighting where Soviet Artillery was bringing down whole blocks of apartment buildings on their inhabitants, one of the most common comments was the dust. Damn stuff got everywhere, from the brick masonry and the concrete (yes, Berlin had some of the first prefab). And by 'leveling' the reflectance levels' it actually served quite well as camouflage. The infamous 'Afrika Korps Mud' is another example.
2. Cover, Then Camo.
Especially on a great beast of gun platform like that, you are going to be seeing more use of cut foliage and even sheets or debris to break up the outline. Paint alone will not be effective at all, especially against jabos and while the German army in WWII was not known for use of netting, they frequently did wrap or twig up the barrels and of course used a lot of naturals elsewhere on their tanks (I don't like making 'realistic' armor models in this fashion as 40 bucks is a lot to pay for a bonsai bush).
3. Armor Up.
Though not as common on actual tanks, a lot of (Finnish) Stugs had everything from logs to cement added to them which greatly changed the nature of the overall outline as camouflage. Could be interesting on an E-10/25 or perhaps Krokodil.
4. Shape, Shine, Shadow.
What most people get wrong is the notion that anything is seen relative to it's (internal) shape alone. What differentiates, particularly camouflaged objects first, is the specular reflectance level. i.e. The contrast between the main plain of reflection and the background. Tone does matter but not as much as brightness and brightness will depend on viewing distance as much as time of day or incident angle (which is why most aircraft look like black-hole shaped silhouettes against a bright sky). In a general sense, this means that you will always lighten the darker areas (no dark red road wheels) and darken the uppers to the extent that you are beyond 500m or so that the shape is seen as a whole against the background. Look at a deer in the wild and note the white belly exactly where you wouldn't expect it, lying on the ground. Same goes for barrels and also turrets. Where the latter is high enough to noticeably break the skyline, it will be lighter, not darker, to match an irregular horizon.
5. Brown is uncommon, Black Never Seen.
With the exception of very dry places like steppes and deserts where there is a lot of sand and stone, there is very little brown in nature, even on 'dirt' resulting in the color being more commonly used as an accent (twigs and branches). Black is virtually unheard of because shadows are never that deep -except- in winter where dark greens of conniferous forests are sometimes black looking. Indeed, most shadowed colors are -pastels- with a halftone effect laid over the natural background (brown yellow over rich green = grey green translucent effect) the military always gets this wrong, insisting on very hard tones. As such, if you are serious about camouflaging this beast, you would be well advised to use mixes of Oliv Grun, Grau Grun and Dunkelgrun with only streaks of Dunkelgelb as light lines, trying your best to get their specular values to match (neither dull nor glossy) within a half tone or so.
6. Call in the Engineers!
A single dozer tank can improve the fighting position of a tank platoon to that of a company level effectiveness with scrapes. Primarily a target-area and occasional ballistic improvement, this will also change the nature of the apparent camouflage effect and require careful blending (snow or dirt, bushes burn too easy) around the edges of the skirts/tracks so as not to create hard 90` angles and the regular/linear shadows that go with. Another uncommon event in nature. In this, it's worth noting that if you put something over the top of the turret (hay comes to mind) and leave the hull revetted, the enemy will see something too short to be a tank, if it's buried.
7. While generally shape breakup is not as important as matching the speculars, the human eye is very good at peripherally tracking shape differentiators at night. And in this, Dark Red has a functional purpose because the eye also has a very poor response in the red region at or below .76 microns. We see it as a 'negative' color much darker than actual black. Hence, particularly under artificial flare illumination, a combination of reds and panzer greys with a -few- yellow highlights can help break up the shape of the vehicle by adding low reflectance and no-response zones that essentially cut the vehicle into segments that make no sense to the human visual psychology system trying to resolve a regular shape (see the F-16XL #2 for a similar effect). The Allies had some early generation night vision equipment at the end of the war too of course and against that, reds tend to show up quite well.
8. I seem to recall reading that German tank camouflage returned to the factories, mid '44, because it was cheaper and simpler to gather the little that remained of pigments and thinners at a single location with access to compressors and air guns to apply the coatings very thinly and effectively. During this time, at least for the King Tigers, the camouflage returned to a hard edged (presumably mat-masked) set of patterns. I would anticipate the same rules and conditions would apply to the giant E-100 with all that square surface area.
9. Pick a scenario.
If the tanks are bunkered up in Festung cities while Hitler turns the local German countryside into self lighting parking lots for any Allied force that comes near, local troops will do what they can to match the conditions (edge of city first with fallbacks). Probably emphasizing overhead cover against airpower (as in drive into building) and frontal camouflage matching what is locally present as scene background with more artificial colors (greys and whites and tans, in angular shapes) than natural ones.
If you are fighting back East, either under the umbrella of a U.S. Army coordinated push on 'the last Axis' partner after defeating Japan (OD E-100 vs. OD IS-3!), or because Hitler's battlefield nukes actually push the Allies out of Germany proper (which is possible, if he has the reach to hit Moscow and London, from Norway) then it could well be that the Germans are fighting in the heavily forested regions of Poland, East Czechoslovakia and Hungary with defactor air superiority and again, it's time to go for a heavy green on green influence with little or no brown.
If it's winter, you will need to make the tanks white with large vertical black and dark green 'tree shadows', using the least possible whitewash coating (or even Luftwaffe colors).
If it's a desperation defense as the Allies push back with their own nukes, you are likely talking 4 week or less life expectancies and vehicles leaving the factory with a few lines sprayed euphemistically over a ruddy rust brown primer is not at all unlikely.
Germany's panzer war ends in mid-late 1945 when they run out of chromium for armor steel. So 'one way or the other', this needs to be either a lot later (1947-50) when there has been a little room for recovery. Or a function of a last chance attempt to fend off total defeat and secure another 'Armistice' that respected the Reich's borders.

Cool E-100s
http://www.internetmodeler.com/2008/april/armor/trumpeter_e100_lg_pic2.jpg

http://a.modellversium.de/galerie/bilder/2/5/6/5256-3099804.jpg

http://www.modellversium.de/galerie/img/1/3/3/8133/3109457/e-100-trumpeter.jpg

I do love a good "what if disucssion! Pleased you relivened this old dog LopEaredGaloot!

One of the "what if" thoughts I have is that most of these scenarios are based on actual history up until mid '45 and then imagine Germany clinging on for a few more months / years.

In reality I would have to say that the more likely way of a "what if" scenario existing would have been if Hitler never got into the mess in the first place.

Repeating Napoleons error and turning his back on the unconquered lump of rock in the Atlantic that I call home, and having a pop at Russia was really the start of the end IMHO.

The most likely "what if" I can imagine is the delay of Operation Barbarossa for a few years and an investment in the Luftwaffe enabling them to win the Battle of Britain 2. This is followed by the successful execution of Operation SeaLion resulting in no second front and no space for the Americans to build up reserves and launch a counter offensive, no long range bombing of factories and cities and the total subjucation of Western Europe.

With that mission complete and with the fear / hatred of the Russians still likely to be a driving force, Operation Barbarossa would no doubt have started in 1944 or so.

On the armour front, because they had not got into a fight with a T34 yet, the Germans would still probablly be in PzIII or the like and would not have bothered inventing the Tiger or Panther.

When they did need to step up their armour game, because their cities and factories were not getting bombed by the Allies from the west, raw materials, pigments and all that stuff would not have been so badly affected with the Russians having little or no capability of getting their planes that far.

Thus we would have seen the likely evolution of the tank in a similar way, upgunning to the 88 in the Tiger, sloping armour like the T34 in the Panther and the evolution to E100, Panther II etc as normal.

But in this case you do not have to imagine tanks scraped together with bits left over and not painted properly. You can instead imagine state-of-the-art equipment with paint jobs designed for work on the steppes of Russia in winter etc and the profilic use of IR and all sorts of other good stuff.

One of my favorite books of all time is Len Deighton's SSGB set in London in the late 40's after we had been invaded and conquered. Well worth a read if you can find it.

If you imagine history changeing in 1942 rather than 1945 you don't restrict yourself to tanks built in the last second in Berlin but imagine what else could have occured. That is the fun part after all of "what if".

TL: DR.

BTW, most computers have a key that puts a blank line between paragraphs. Check with your repair shop if your's is broken.

C

***In reply to LopEaredGaloot's long post above, but which did not post as a 'reply'***

Tat:

You sure have engendered a lively discussion, and there's been a whole shelf-load of great and interesting exchange... so I'll toss in yet more opinion and attach a pic showing one of my interps of post '45 German stuff...

My opines:

Anyone's guess on what and how that putative camo would have looked must hinge on a whole bunch of assumptions and some scenario - for example, one might posit a "resurgent Germany" rolling back those Sov's and maybe having struck some peace with the western allies - so in this scenario one could have renewed production (no big bombing campaigns to hide from) and maybe more orderly development and production of vehicles, weapons, IR systems, etc., and maybe concurrent "good" painting. Alternative scenarios may be some version of desperate hold-outs and somehow having dragged on the war a few months - which versions might call for more hodge-podge finishing, incomplete painting, etc. There's certes a whole range of possible scenarios to choose from!

My point here being; you need to choose some scenario, and maybe shoot for consistency within your build.

As to colours... there's been a lot said above on this. Personally, I sort of go with the idea that the Germans were switching to a base-coat of olivegrun, with or without one or both gelb and braun stripes, blotching, etc., in the later war period. These of course were applied over the rotoxide - and, IMO, the rotoxide was NOT likely part of the camo - in part because it would not be an effective colour either alone or in combo with the others being used in any of the environments of central - western Europe (the ToO of the later war). And whatever else the Germans were and did, they did know quite a bit about camo. There would likely have been some effect on what colours and how much due to supply issues... if your scenario holds for resurgency and "coming back up", you might posit better paint availability. More desperate scenarios would suggest less paint, and maybe evident conservency in a paint-job...

As to application styles: well, IMO, this goes back to the scenario. The Germans kept a great deal of spray equipment in the field and evidently even late in the war had crews doing their own follow-ons over the initial base coat (I need only point at some great pics published in Spielberger and Feist's book on the Tiger I and II actually taken of a crew doing their Tiger II most carefully...) . This said, there has also been lots of discussion all over about late-war factory paint jobs including hard-edged stencil work (i.e., pics of late Hetzers at the factory in 1945 all painted the same and in hard-edge 3-colour patterns). So would it be soft or hard? Would it be "octopus" or "ambush" or "leopard" (like the E-25 posted above)? Maybe this would depend on where, when and by whom your E-100 was to be painted!

I also need to say that I concur with any above who are in any way dubious as to "urban" camo by the Germans. They had been fighting in cities for years and still treated their vehicles with colours and schemes largely calibrated for use in the non-urban field. NATO was doing the same in the 70's, when I helped paint my unit vehicles, and current Euro schemes still use much of these green-tannish-brown-black mixes. But if you posit some scenario where the Germans are either using whatever paint there was lying around, or maybe someone was trying some experimental scheme... hey! Why not? In any case, if you are speaking urban, maybe not the best place to use the E-100... but, if you do, dust and debris could figure into any scheme.

I have attached here a pic of my "recon-command ausf C" E-10 as an illustration of my interp:

I posited that a sort of peace had been struck with the West, and the Germans had some opportunity to enjoy both less bombing = greater production and a chance to bring together some techno developments in early '46. I posit that nothing new had actually been done (hence, the standard Leitz IR rig), but stuff under actual development (the E-10) had been fielded and was evolving with combat experience- hence the factory mods I have added to up-grade the E-10 above its initial "plain Jane" release (things like actually having a spare, after all...). On the other hand, I figured paint might be somewhat limited in supply, but still available in front-line areas that were stabilized, so I allowed my crew to be the painters using typical gelb and braun over a base-coat of olivegrun. Because they were "old-timers" and experienced survivors, they were given one of these new "recon-tank-destroyers" and were not under too much rigid top-down control, so they could paint pretty much in styles they were used to doing and did not want to spend too much time getting too elaborate - as in the time-costly octopus schemes. The factory had saved on paint, though, and applied the O-G only on the uppers- so the under-sponsons, lower panels, suspension are in rot-oxide. I figured that shape-charge stuff was pretty common, so the mesh "Thoma schurzen" would be used- save on steel and on weight. I would have loved to spend the time and dollars on adding some veg (those Germans loved to add tree braches, etc.), but... enough is enough.

It's just, of course, my opinion and expression of my version of a "what-if". I claim ZERO factual knowledge nor any sort of authoritative expertise on any of it! So, enjoy! And have lots of fun working up what you will on that monster!

Bob

Bob, neat lookin' E10! Oh well, work has kept me from completing builds (and even posting) -- didn't realize this thread to be picked up after a year or so. If I recall, I was planning for some what-if scheme on an E100 -- a scenario where it had to be put into action so soon that some areas still had exposed red oxide primer. As I went along, I've read about zinc phosphate as a late war primer -- so bye bye red oxide. Got to a point of putting it on plus olivgrun as base color, and got stuck. Anyways hope to finish it some day. Cheers and all the best for the holidays -- Tat