MY ICM Panhard 178 shows the older, more elaborate French camouflage paint schemes as color suggestions. But I read that by 1940, French armor was painted in simple dark green with reddish overspray. What's the story?

Only the first production run had the black borders (liners) on a two tone green camo. The others were either olive green, two tone green or green and brown.

Can you give me the registration number of the vehicle you plan to build? I will see if I can be more specific for you.

And yes, the first series camo survived until 1940, so you can go with it if you wish.

French AFVs were camouflage painted at the factory. The patterns are distinctive for each production batch, i.e., you can distinguish different production runs of the same vehicles by the paint scheme sometimes.

That said, yes, by 1939-40 there were AFVs being built with two-tone grey and green or grey and brown camouflage. But that's not to say that existing AFVs were being repainted in plainer schemes. AFAIK they retained their colorful 1930s schemes.

Thanks for the info. The Panhard kit lists four different marking and color options; I want to depict anything that survived the Battle of France.