The story behind China's 'Minecraft' military camouflage | Hacker News Reader

The story behind China's 'Minecraft' military camouflage

bbc.com

88 pointsyannis60 comments

The US Army is ditching the digital pattern for a more traditional, splotchy pattern, Scorpion W2: http://tacticalgear.com/ocp-acus

That's a fantastic page. I was in from '03-'08, and was issued woodland BDUs, desert DCUs, and finally the UCP ACUs. Multicam and the new OCP pattern have come since. I had 2 versions of the PT uniform (which have changed once or twice since), and narrowly avoided having to purchase the new dress uniform.

Overall, the Army needs to find a uniform that it likes and stick with it. Particularly for something that does not affect combat effectiveness (PT, Dress), a single style should be good for decades.

I think that the Army should define a garrison uniform that they can stick with, something along the lines of the BDU with the additional pockets of the ACU. Then define a combat uniform for different terrain or combat theaters as needed.

> Particularly for something that does not affect combat effectiveness (PT, Dress), a single style should be good for decades.

Completely agree.

> I think that the Army should define a garrison uniform that they can stick with, something along the lines of the BDU with the additional pockets of the ACU.

The garrison uniform should be what the Navy terms a 'service uniform': polished leather shoes, trousers, a long- or short-sleeved blouse depending on the weather, and a cover, with optional coat and tie. It doesn't ever need to change, except maybe slightly in cut to keep up with civilian styles.

Camouflage should only be worn when actually fighting, or training to fight. Anyone sitting at a desk outside of a war zone should be wearing a service uniform, not camo.

> Anyone sitting at a desk outside of a war zone should be wearing a service uniform, not camo.

But how will you feel cool if you're not wearing your BDUs?

I find that the camouflage itself can be alright, but the way soldiers use it can make them stand out a lot. This became very apparent to me when I was a conscript and we had foreigners visiting, often to do winter training.

They would all be wearing just winter camouflage, brand new, extremely white, or just woodland. Making them stand out in basically any winter environment. We would, on the other hand, almost exclusively wear winter pants and woodland top, and make sure that the pants were kind of dirty. When the backdrop was, as it usually is, forest covered in snow, you stand out a lot with all white or all green.

This article describes how some of the camouflage field tests were performed:

http://www.stripes.com/news/reports-army-selects-new-camoufl...

Makes sense - The article mentions that the only reason the squares were used in digital camo is because they had a 2" roller when making the tests, so that is the most natural shape

Having left the Army just as the awful ACUs were being phased in, I have to wonder which politicians and/or general officers got their palms greased for that to have become the uniform pattern.

The trick with UCP is to roll around in the dirt and the lighter colors will blend in perfectly with your area and the darker shades will provide darker shades in your area. While this doesnt really work with sand it works perfectly with more traditional soils.

Ship camouflage, particularly "dazzle camouflage", is another example of a counterintuitive pattern at first making sense; see the first picture here:

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

Dazzle wasn't intended to hide the ship but rather make it difficult to ascertain it's class, speed and heading.

And with modern cruise missiles, where they acquire the target autonomously, identifying the best target (value, easiest, etc) and attack vector without human intervention, camouflage like this will once against be quite important.

Also if you care about your privacy.

Camouflage from face detection: https://cvdazzle.com

I'm sorry, but you're statement is contradictory:

   a.) Dazzle wasn't intended to hide the ship
   b.) make it difficult to ascertain it's [sic] class, speed and heading

   Hide = hard to find
   Difficult = hard
   Ascertain = to know, to find out, to determine

The point of camouflage is to hide 'information', and while that can be to make something blend in with its location/surroundings, it can also certainly be to make it appear to be something else, or doing something different from what it is actually doing.

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

You can't be serious with this.

"Hide the ship" means:

    All I see is open ocean, sir!

"Difficult to ascertain its class, speed, and heading" means:

    I don't know what kind of ship that is, sir! Nor do I know
    what direction it's traveling in! Hell, it's hard to see how
    fast it's going as well, sir! But I do know this, sir, there's a
    ship there.

But I think you're smart enough to figure that out.

No, these are all degrees of the same thing, concealment. That is the point of camouflage. There are two main strands to camouflage: 1. prevention of detection (crypsis), 2. look like something else (mimicry).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_camouflage https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage

Oye. Ok, so the parent comment was this:

> Dazzle wasn't intended to hide the ship but rather make it difficult to ascertain it's class, speed and heading.

Here I am rephrasing it to fit your terms:

> Dazzle wasn't intended to [prevent detection of] the ship but rather make it [look like something else].

But for some reason you chose instead to read that as a contradictory statement?

You're glossing over that what's being disputed is whether you are hiding the ship, or attributes of the ship. In one case, the purpose to prevent detection, in the other, it's to prevent useful action after detection.

Digital camouflage has been used for a long time, with it's roots going back before WW2. Countries like the US and Canada who have advanced the technology. The main advantage seems to be it has more than one optimal viewing distance.

From wikipedia:

Traditional single scale patterns work well in their optimal range from the observer, however an observer too close or too far away will not see the pattern optimally. Nature itself is very often fractal, where plants and rock formations exhibit similar patterns across several magnitudes of scale. The idea behind multi scale patterns is both to mimic the cross-scale self-similarity of nature, and also to offer camouflage at close-range in addition to the traditional combat range camouflage.

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

Shouldn't minecraft be replaced with 'pixelated' ... its really got nothing to do with minecraft has it?

Nope. But this story is all over the internet today because the headline mentions Minecraft. Clickbait works.

The article's actual headline (though not the link title) uses 'Minecraft' in quotation marks. It's saying that the pixelated pattern resembles a series of Minecraft blocks -- not that there is any literal connection to Minecraft.

it's because the textures on the minecraft blocks look like the camo. has nothing to do with the blocks.

We're basically splitting hairs at this point. The camo pattern looks like the textures on the Minecraft blocks, or vice versa. It's not that the pattern literally looks like it's made of Minecraft blocks, and I'm sorry if I gave that impression.

This is one of the silliest arguments I've ever been involved in on the internet, and that's saying something. :) Can we just say "They used the word 'Minecraft' in the title because the camo kinda sorta looks like Minecraft textures" and move on with our lives?

But minecraft is most definitely based on voxels (3D), not the pixels used in the camo (2D).

They're talking about the textures on the voxels which are blocky and pixelated like the tank textures. The same is true for a lot of games these days with the resurgence of 8-bit graphics but it's the one people will know the most.

http://i.imgur.com/yyKp9SC.png

makes sense, thanks for explaining it to me!

Yeah. It's just digital camo. Its been used for a long time.

How is this a story behind "China's" camouflage? It's clearly a small blurb about the history of digital camo (or "texture match" camo") in general. The U.S has been using this for a long time, as well as dozens of other countries. Yet, the article doesn't do much to talk about China's application other than noting they too, use it (sometimes).

Agreed, mainly just some history of digital camo. Camopedia [1] has similar information, and it looks like China has been using these patterns since 2007.

[1] http://camopedia.org/index.php?title=Digital_patterns

I was more perplexed about the camouflaged vehicles being bright blue...

Those are amphibious fighting vehicles, used for landing from the sea. The sea, as we know, are blue colored.

These are amphibious?

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/1600_640/images/live/p0/3...

These are not. But they belong to the same unit of those amphibious light tanks, so used the same camouflage. During a landing operation, these long range rockets are likely deployed on the decks of flotilla as artillery support for the beachhead assault.

Those are transporter erector launchers for the YJ-62 anti-ship cruise missile. They are deployed as shore-based defensive batteries. The coloring is likely intended to make them blend in with the sky (when viewed from the ocean surface) and the surf zone (when viewed from above).

As for deploying rocket artillery on ships, that wouldn't be a good idea. Firing platforms need to be better secured in order to be used from a ship. Regardless, China doesn't have many amphibious assault ships with significant clear deck space.

There's a section about it in TFA:

"Another conundrum with the modern camouflage design seen during China's Victory Day parade is that the vehicles feature bright blue painted blocks. Why? Some experiments have been done with bluish tones to break up the shape of vehicles against the sky on flat terrain, or for use in icy or snowy areas. “If the vehicles are amphibious then they might have some concealment during their water-based maneuvers, but the trade off for being highly conspicuous on land is not worth having it permanently,” believes Guy Cramer of Hyperstealth Biotechnology. In this case, the blue scheme is likely there for decoration. It certainly made the parade a spectacle, but further muddies the murky world of military camo. —JS"

Makes it harder to spot them against the sky.

There are all different colors of camo depending on the environment it will be used in.

Where are tanks going to be used that bright blue is a good idea?

In the sea. When conducting a beachhead assault, these amphibious light tanks will come out of some giant amphibious assault ships, which are typically parked far away from the beachhead so enemy on land cannot see them. So the effect will be that a swarm of floating tanks suddenly appears and quickly approaches the land. This concept is obviously designed for an island invasion scenario.

I guess blue could be a good color for a hull-down vehicle.

Gizmodo had a pretty good write up on the history digicam. It's interesting that the US Army abandoned it after they tried a one-camp-to-rule-them-all. Instead of helping soldiers hide in Afghanistan, it helped them be visible.

http://gizmodo.com/the-history-of-invisibility-and-the-futur...

If "digital" camouflage with patterns of squares works so well, why don't animals use it?

The point isn't that it's digital but that it's small units that blend into bigger units.

Animals do https://www.google.com/search?q=bird+camouflage

Most animals test things in a manner that relies on stumbling upon answers, but humans have evolved the ability to systematically discover things like this.

Because a zebra is hiding from a tiger, since long before humans with ranged weapons were on the scene.

If internal combustion engines work so well, why don't animals use it?

Engines (or wheels) need independent moving parts, high temperatures, which is hardly compatible with what's allowed by anatomy and biochemistry. But there's nothing obviously stopping animals from evolving any particular pattern of skin markings.

Skin markings are pretty complicated for an animal. Each cell somehow needs to "know" what color it should be, potentially different from its neighbors, without carrying any information unique to that cell.

Imagine billions of LEDs, and you want to make them display a picture, but you separately program them, you can't address them individually, and you can't even really have them talk to each other. You can sort of flood them with broadcasts of different strengths to influence how they turn on. The sorts of patterns you could form would be fairly limited.

It seems like something is in fact stopping animals from evolving a pattern such as digital camo. I would think that entropy would lend more to the splotchy skin colorings we see on virtually all animals (with hair) versus square "digital" style blocks.

I have to wonder why they all have the same digital pattern. This seems like a terrible idea. It would be almost trivial to make a computer vision algorithm to pick these out against any background, as long as you know what digital pattern you're looking for.

An entire article about digital camouflage and they offer one measly 245 px wide photo 3/4 down the article. The linked article about the Chinese military parade only featured 1 decent image. sigh

There are 3 images in the article, with a banner header image too.

Satellite / drone camouflage.

I'm certainly not a military expert, but it seems fairly obvious that China's military would benefit from being able to hide from high altitude surveillance. They're not doing a whole lot with these vehicles in combat at the moment, but masking their position and numbers seems like a pretty important objective for someone trying to build up an arsenal without escalating tension.

I bet these tanks looks low-res from satellites.

I'm not sure why blocky camo seems so revolutionary. It was proven highly effective in WWI by both the American and British. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage

One, it's not clear that you can compare dazzle camouflage to digital camouflage. The design, as well as the visual attributes, are very different.

Two, the effectiveness of Dazzle was debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage#Effectivenes...

Next somebody is going to be telling me their camera has 20 mega minecrafts.

The use of Minecraft in the title is pretty obnoxious.

so you can take beautiful selfies of the landscape.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com