Dazzle Camouflage Affects Speed Perception

[maxim]

One of the leading journals in natural sciences published an article about the influence of dazzle camouflage:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi ... ne.0020233

[EJFoeth]

"So at the sort of ranges typical of naval warfare, we have no evidence that dazzle camouflage disguised the speed of ships in the two World Wars."

I guess not. Nice link, btw.

[maxim]

The US Navy abolished the use of Dazzle Camouflage in 1945, because they thought it would attract Kamikaze attacks.

It was thought to be useful against submarine attacks, but it was introduced in parallel with the convoy tactics in the First World War, which could have been misleading...

[Tracy White]

Eh.... I have a couple of issues.

There has been little research into the effects (if any) of dazzle camouflage. To date, evidence of its military usefulness is largely restricted to anecdotal reports (e.g. [17]), and the British Admiralty's 1918 analysis of naval shipping losses in WWI was inconclusive, with changes in colour schemes on ships confounded with ship size and other changes in military practice during the war [9], [11]

I see nothing in their references that indicates that they did any research in official US Naval documents in the US National Archives. There was an awful lot of research and scientific testing done by Everett Warner, Charles Bittenger, and others.

If one mis-identifies the course/direction a vessel is traveling in, and tracks it's movement across an arc, then one has mis-identified the speed. If you are off by enough to put a torpedo ten feet BEHIND your target, isn't that enough to invalidate their argument? Seems too "clean room"-ish to me.

[Russ2146]

Aside from the pre-experiment research failure noted above, the study appears to fail in accounting for naturally occurring interruptions of the view which would exist in the environment in which dazzle was used and the purpose for which it was used.
In other words,the experiment procedure made no attempt to duplicate a periscope view of the image from a height of what? maybe three of the waters surface? with intermittant obscuring of the image by waves, at a distance dictated by optimal torpedo range. Thus the experiments cannot claim to show that dazzle was ineffective during the two world wars. The rigor of the experiments simply doesn't allow it.