"Battleship Grey" Topic

What Vallejo paint is closest to battleship grey?

It varies by nation and period/time. Do you have a particular time and set of combatants in mind?

From my time in the USN I seem to remember:

Haze Grey
Exterior Deck Grey
Interior Deck Grey
Equipment Grey

I think "Battleship Gray" refers to prewar #5 Standard Navy Gray. White Ensign does It.

link

I should have mentioned that I am a pulp gamer. I want battleship grey for the Hollywood navy in the cinemascope era. Early postWW 2 sounds right.

Try 5H Haze Gray. If that seems not light enough, try 5L Light Gray

Vallejo has a light gray that ought to be what you are looking for. Their medium and London grays will likely a bit too dark.

70905 Blue Grey Pale is what I use for 5H, or
70907 Pale Grey Blue if you want lighter (and without the bluish tint :/ )

Hth

Thank you for answering my question, mattatknsn.

Battleship grey seems to have been what ever shade of grey someone writing for the press wanted to describe as 'Battleship grey'.

However in WW1 the British version was darn near charcoal early on, then later lightened to what we might call dark to mid grey. The original had a semi shine to it and the later type was flat.

US Navy Battleship grey was a medium shade of very flat type.

Naval paint that did not come ready mixed, was always subject to the terror of the petty officer in charge of the painting party and the well known term 'that looks about right'. Ship crews that were war wear did not find repainting their ship one of the favourite things to do while in harbour. It was rarely carried out with the care to detail intended.

When paint schemes were applied in a dockyard, they were inevitably correct to shade.

Well USN spec Paint "Haze Gray" SKU#2256 was the standard when I was a sailor. It was a semi satin finish that weathered to a matt at sea.

But to be honest and medium cool grey will work as once ships have been to sea there is a lot of variation due to weathering….

"Naval paint that did not come ready mixed…."

Not so. The USN's interwar Standard Navy Gray #5, as well as the immediate pre-war 5-D Dark Gray and 5-L Light Gray came pre-mixed from the naval paint factories at Norfolk and Mare Island.

Beginning in late 1944 when the USN switched over to neutral grays from the earlier purple-blue grays, the new colors were supplied ready-mixed from the naval paint factories.

Similarly, the experimental color "Sapphire Blue" used in pre-war experiments was supplied ready-mixed, though in this case from a commercial paint manufacturer.

"Naval paint that did not come ready mixed…."

Not so. The USN's interwar Standard Navy Gray #5, as well as the immediate pre-war 5-D Dark Gray and 5-L Light Gray came pre-mixed from the naval paint factories at Norfolk and Mare Island.

Perhaps, but I seriously doubt that this accounts for the USN's entire inventory of paint.

Many years ago I was a curator on a WWII submarine on display as a museum. We would try to chase down correct paint shades for items on display. The WWII veterans were adamant that this was a waste of time.

"The chief would give us a bucket of black paint and a bucket of white paint, and yell 'get to work, there's a war on.'"

That was true of the purple-blue paints that preceded the late war neutral grays, and that came after the prewar paints I mentioned above. The purple-blues were mixed aboard using varying ratios (depending on which color was being mixed) of 5-U White and 5-TM blue-black tinting paste.