"Colors For Your SF Spaceships, Vehicles, Machines, etc.?" Topic

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I found this 2011 BBC News Magazine article and it made me wonder.

When painting your spaceships and your SF vehicles, machinery, facilities and installations …

A) Do you go for plain NASA white and other off-whites, with the occasional black checkers and such?

B) Do you prefer for everything to blend in with the background and surroundings?

C) Do you prefer bright contrasting color choices inspired by the works of 70s and 80s illustrators like …

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Chris Foss
Bob Layzell
Colin Hay
Angus Mckie
Alan Daniels
Peter Elson
Fred Gambino
Colin Hay
Robin Hiddon
Tony Roberts

If so, which one and why?

D) Do you favor colors inspired by other, more recent illustrators that the rest of us have yet to discover?

E) Do you paint in colors you see used in tv shows and movies?

F) Or does something else entirely guide your choice of colors for your SF vehicles, machines, facilities, etc.?

Thanks,

Dan

Most are some neutral shade, like gray, tan, or black, with some areas painted bright colors. Generally I stick with gray, green and black, although I've broken that trend and gone with brightly colored spaceships with lots of blue and red.

My sci-fi vehicles are in two distinct schools

- camo "ambush" colours for most of my Imperial Guard vehicles and desert sand for my Tau

- bright blue with brass trim for my Praetorians and bright red for anything Orky

Never thought about using the colors of the illustrators you mention. For spaceships I was influenced early on by the colors shown for the Babylon 5 and the Noble Armada lines of miniatures. I now have so many fleets that they are painted just about any base color I can think of. I use a lot of automobile metallic spray paints.

SF vehicles were never influenced by the colors on the web. They tend to be earth tones, black, white, or primary colors with a few camouflage paint schemes. I am not very good at camo. I do not care for the colors used on much Epic 40k stuff.

I have occasionally taken a Fossian approach:

Yes. For ships, that is…

Doug

Okay, have all of the above, love all of the above, all painted by somebody else besides my ESU ships which are basically WWII Russian tank green, with a few red and gold insignia.

Doug

All my sci-fi vehicles are generally in camo/tac colors … NO circus colors. Why you may ask … after serving in the Infantry for over 10 years in my youth … I just can't imagine anyone painting a tank, APC, etc. orange, lime green, etc. … Colors that GW has an annoying predilection for …

Devil's advocate: Some of the older, weirder color schemes were actually camo for other worlds.

Now they're just 'shoot me' signs… ;->=

Doug

TheBeast: "Now they're just 'shoot me' signs"

LOL. That's how I feel about troops painted in bright colors!

Dan

If I'm doing my own universe, I tend towards tactical colors for ground vehicles and aircraft, and usually a dark 'battleship gray' for my spacecraft.

However, I'm starting to think that dazzle schemes will be more likely for combat spacecraft. After all, the primary sensor getting used is a telescope, so camo to make it harder to identify which way the ship is pointing makes sense.

That said, if the ship model has radiators on it, I'm going to paint those fluorescent red (and stick a black light fluorescent bulb into the overhead lights)

I have different schemes planned for different settings. Since I figure most settings there will be active camouflage available for ground vehicles, and since the colours of the "ground" could be very variable (the purple planet, the orange planet etc.), for a bunch of projects I plan on painting the vehicles in their parade colours rather than limit them to one camouflage scheme.

My parade colours are based on different themes, bird colours, butterfly colours, etc.

For spaceships, I don't think camo really matters, so I go with what I feel best fits the setting – BSG, Star Wars and Star Trek are generally mono colours, retro sci-fi and Traveller are more colourful, Fossian I guess you'd say.

I fit them into the appropriate story genre, so lots of different styles.

I am kinda proud of how this 70's pulp scifi set came out …

I got my painting scheme from the Babylon 5 spin-off "Legend of the Rangers." The Minbari first officer commented that ever since Earth began supplying Alliance starships, the entire spectrum has disappeared except for gray, green, and black.

To me that sounds like a good combination. I will use varying shades of gray and green for variation. I use other colors in place of green (usually red) for an enemy force.

I don't like painting a miniature, even a vehicle, a single color; I find it dull. On the other hand, having too many colors isn't desirable either. I find using 2-3 colors is a good balance.

Camo should reflect the environment … but bright and pastel colors are only useful at a beach party in Jamaica … Maan …

@Lion in the Stars – I figure that the distances and speeds at which large spaceships engage will preclude the use of telescopes and rely more on radar, tracking lasers, and other sorts of hand-wavey technology. So camouflage to fool unaided eyes is useless. That being the case, militaries would be free to use any colors they wanted – the only time visuals will be important will be in dry dock and maybe some dog fighting.

So all of my big ships use pretty colors and nice designs.

For dogfighters, the opposite is true – those that rely on the Mark I Eyeball for recognition will typically be engaging in numbers large enough that everybody will want to be easily identified as friend or foe. So again, bright matching paint jobs for each fleet.

It varies for me. If it is something that is from film or telly i tend to stick with what has been shown unless i get an idea stuck in my head. But if painting my own work i tend to stick with the colours that just seem to fit a race or culture.

Troops, Vehicles: Some kind of camo scheme, generally something I've actually seen used before, even if I "sci-fi" it up just a bit, unless it's for something alien, then the weirder the better.

Buildings: Something neutral and muted that looks like an actual building, but again "sci-fi'd" a bit, if applicable.

I would say my influences are pretty Real Robot.

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Vallejo Model Color, generally muted colors, though not always.

For Starships, I don't have set color scheme, though I focus on no more than two primary complementary colors (very subjective). i.e. Black, Purple, Green, or Blue with Yellow. The last being Blue Angels color scheme. My alternative is a single color with highlights. I also favor metallic paints to emphasize the metal/alloy hulls. For ground units, camo or tactical color schemes, but that can be subjective as well.

On BTW, the gaudy color scheme doesn't matter for starships. I figure if your close enough to see the starship's color scheme in space, then you are about to receive an alpha strike/full broadside in your face. Just sayin'

When I got started, I only played Silent Death. My colors at the time were black or red base coats, something for details and a third color for cockpits. As I built up my forces, I began to use other colors and patterns. A number of ships I painted for the store owner, used a flame pattern. Others I did for both myself and the store owner featured what could be considered lightning bolt jagged lines cover the base coat. I have also used camo.

Why camo in space? The answer is a bit sinister. If you were the actual pilot, your radar/scanning would tell you what was out there, but using your eyes, ships would blend in very easily when massed. Guess what? Same effect when you are the opponent playing the game, my ships are massed and battle begins. A little Clauswitz "fog of war" from a fellow Pole.

Some samples:
Hell Benders
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Night Brood:
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I found metallics for bio-ships has a rather nice effect. With the exception of the Hell Benders, all paints used came from craft stores.

My space ships have to have color. What's the fun in having a bunch of boring black, white, and gray ships?

I just go with whatever I feel like at the time I seem to get anything done. I think I have a black spaceship with flecks of white on it, somewhere. My BFG ships have mostly paint jobs straight off the pages of the magazines and rulebook, my attempts to paint my Hydra rockets aren't really progressing right now, and some ships will turn out naval grey schemes. I was going to paint my Aquan Prime ships in tropical fish colours but the colours wouldn't match the names, the ship classes are named after some of the more boring-coloured (in one case completely transparent) marine organisms, or sea legends/cryptids. It would look silly painting something named after a silver pelagic fish as a blue tang.

Some aliens may adopt wierd colour choices for their cam patterns, similar to many real life creatures which have colour schemes we wouldn't recognise as camouflage, because anything hunting or being hunted by them doesn't see the thame bandwith of colour spectrum as we do, if they see colours at all; this results in creatures that appear to disappear into the landscape to their natural enemies, but to us makes them unmissable. There is a book out there somewhere where aliens invade and don't get why their invisible stealth armour, painted in a colour their eyes can't see, isn't very invisible to humans – how can they see a colour that doesn't exist? The colour, in fact, is a vivid red; the aliens cannot see any frequency in the red spectrum any more than we can see infrared.
Some cultures' sensor systems may make colour vision redundant, anyway; why paint it to blend in when it will make no difference to target acquisition whatsoever?
Also, some cultures' beliefs may prohibit the use of cams.
Consequently, I would paint a variety of cams on human and some more ISO-standard racers' military vehicles (any, really – I'm not buying 4000 of the same armoured platoon just so I can have an army the right colour for any battlefield!), and whatever looks right for the stranger aliens. Candy green, metallic purple? If it suits the mini, why not? They're aliens, they do things that are alien to us!

I recently picked up some cheap metalics, looking forward to similar bio ship, though I think they'd be better a bit more broken up.

More of the 'gold tail' effects you've going there.

Slightly mottled dark grey can have a nice menacing brick effect, to be fair. The old manufacture NSL I got off a bud really say 'No, I don't want to be your friend.'

Bright, flashy colors only seem to make real sense 'in dock' when you're showing the colors. Especially if you're a 'little guy'.

Major power fleets would tend to have a dull conformity, i.e. my green ESU. Smaller players might tend to variety and brashness.

I think of it as compensation anxiety.

Doug

@Lion in the Stars – I figure that the distances and speeds at which large spaceships engage will preclude the use of telescopes and rely more on radar, tracking lasers, and other sorts of hand-wavey technology. So camouflage to fool unaided eyes is useless. That being the case, militaries would be free to use any colors they wanted – the only time visuals will be important will be in dry dock and maybe some dog fighting.

Actually, Radar has a shorter range than passive optical, thermal, or XRay. Seems kinda counter-intuitive, but it's true. It's called the inverse-square rule.

For a simple example, your transmitter sends a signal out, and if the target is far enough away to receive 1/2 the energy of the beam, the reflected energy from the target will be 1/4 the beam energy from the transmitter. It's because of this that you can detect a radar signal at ~4x the distance it can detect you. So radars aren't a reasonable sensor for long-range work.

LIDAR works a bit differently, so it's potentially longer ranged. Individual laser beams don't lose power as fast as non-coherent signals, so the critical measure is how fast the reflected laser expands. I haven't done the number crunching to figure that out yet, need to find some formulas first.

Modern astronomers detect asteroids via reflected sunlight, though they may not use the visible spectrum. Based on current practices, any combat starship is going to have an array of telescopes that would make Mauna Loa jealous. Some optimized for thermal imaging, some for optical, probably some radio telescopes, too.

A Nuclear-thermal rocket (whether fission or fusion heated) won't have much visible drive plume. Instead, it's going to radiating up in the X-ray frequencies or maybe as low as UV. At least with hydrogen as the reaction mass. Not sure what would happen if someone used carbon, for example. But you'd be using an Xray telescope for nuke-thermal drives or a radio telescope to detect ion drive plumes. By checking drive plume radiation you will be able to determine the ship's mass, courtesy of F=M*A. The drive's radiation frequency will tell you total energy, and the acceleration will be measurable from the optical angle traversed. The two of those combined with a decent range estimate will give you the other ship's mass. (That is also why strategic-level decoys will not work unless they are the same mass and have the same acceleration as the ship they are supposed to be decoying for)

Nuclear fusion and Low-energy Nuclear Reactions (aka "cold fusion," even though there isn't a deuterium fusion reaction) spit out neutrinos, so a combat spaceship would also likely have a large neutrino-detector, which is basically a giant water tank surrounded by photomultiplier (aka starlight scope) tubes. Remember, I'm not fond of the idea of bomber-crew or smaller spaceships, even in planetary orbits, but a craft under a thousand tons wouldn't be able to mount a neutrino detector in the first place.

Because of the sensor-fusion type displays I would expect a combat spaceship to use, any effective camo is going to need to address both visible-light and thermal effects at a bare minimum. So a 'dazzle' scheme to confuse which end of the ship is closer will need to work in both visible light and thermal frequencies. You can't get a real cloaking device, even if you murder the laws of thermodynamics to get it. But you can use oddly-shaped radiators in several different energy levels to mislead the eye (the shapes, not necessarily the energy levels) looking at a thermal image. As a bare minimum, a spaceship will have two different energy radiators: reactor heat (probably 1600K) and life-section heat (~300k). There might also be a third level of radiators for energy weapons.

The 'splinter' and dazzle camos work by confusing the eye as to where the camo'd object is pointing. On wet-naval ships, those camo patterns can also confuse range estimation and speed estimation. Speed will be harder to confuse in space, as will range, but not being able to rapidly ID the target ship's aspect will lead to confusion over where the turret weapon arcs are. However, even a slight uncertainty of ship's aspect will confuse the ship's course while it thrusts, but that will affect your prediction of vessel's acceleration.

Since I expect a combat starship to have a large number of smaller telescopes instead of one big monster 'eye', it will be possible to use some very well-known optical math to determine range to target, and using the large number of smaller scopes to act like a single giant scope will give phenomenal optical resolution.

Any hull coating is going to need to do weird things to radar and lasers, but that's more of a point-defense issue than a long-range detection issue. So different parts of the hull may have different light-reflective properties, and the various structures on the hull will probably be made to minimize radar 'glints'.

Yes, to all the above and more. I have no shame to my game, as I draw from every sort of source from sci fi to ancient warrior attire for colors and pattern ideas:

and Larry, what is that fetching space battleship in the center of your Fossian task group? Do tell.

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

Larry, what is that fetching space battleship in the center of your Fossian task group?

Scratchbuilt, some 32 years ago when I was first getting into space gaming and shortly after getting my hands on "21st Century Foss". It was inspired by a ship seen only as a silhouette in one of the paintings in the book. I'd cite the page but the book is not jumping into my arms at the moment. The little guys in the lower left actually attach to the big one via magnets.

What'd you use to make that model, Leland?

Lion,

the main hull of that Imperial terran Navy shuttle is a shampoo or body wash bottle (I can't recall specifics beyond I built it in Texas about six years ago…). The engines are a composite of plastic Xmas tree ornaments, a plastic cap for a wedding cake icing dispenser, plastic rings (ie., party favors), and some left over model parts for the exhaust nozzles.

The canopy and observation blisters along with the gun turrets are plastic rhinestones as are the landing pads under the hull. The blaster barrels are the male half of barrel clasps for making necklaces or bracelets. Most of the raised maintenance/access panels are enamel decorative stickers from the clearance bin at Michael's. Throw in a few model parts and assorted decals from the spares boxes, and that's all she wrote outside of a blast of Testor's Dullcote.

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

Scratchbuilt, some 32 years ago when I was first getting into space gaming and shortly after getting my hands on "21st Century Foss". It was inspired by a ship seen only as a silhouette in one of the paintings in the book. I'd cite the page but the book is not jumping into my arms at the moment. The little guys in the lower left actually attach to the big one via magnets.

I don't care if it's from the Permian Epoch, the ship looks wonderfully Space Battleship Yamato-ish, just the way I likes 'em! Oh, and I recognize the origins of that smaller ship in th supper left of the photo. I just finished painting up one of my own the only modification of which is a suitably garish paint job inspired by your group shot…

Magnets you say? That *is* very 70s sci fi of you. I salute you, you mad genius you!

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

Rather than hijack this post I have started another in a similar vein.

TMP link

Leland,

Hmm. I thought that was made using my remote control! I had one that went missing a long while back and, to this day, I think it must have been a burglar with a very specific mission being that nothing else was taken.

Dan

Hmm. I thought that was made using my remote control! I had one that went missing a long while back and, to this day, I think it must have been a burglar with a very specific mission being that nothing else was taken.

Naaaw! If it'd been *me,* Dan, I would have made off with the contents of your household recycling bin as well as every last remote, plastic deodorant container, broken Star Wars toy, makeup compact, correction tape device, and cordless telephone in the house, as I don't believe in doing things by half measures! Sounds like the perp was a rank amateur to me…

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

"I didn't do it, nobody saw me, you can't prove a thing!"

- The Bart Simpson Defense

I understand the argument in that thread that camouflage could confuse optical sensors as to the direction a ship would be pointed but movement would still be detectable with an optical system to give you direction and vector. If that is the case it seems camouflage would be moot.

Unless you have a multiscopic rangefinder set up on your combat spaceship, all you're going to see on the telescope is how wide an angle the ship takes up in your own telescope (which can tell you range IF you know a specific dimension of the target) and how fast the ship is transiting an angle relative to your own ship (which can tell you the speed IF you can measure precisely how much of an angle the target took up 1 minute ago and now AND know the ranges at those two points in time).

Dazzle camo would serve to obfuscate the known dimensions of the ship which screws with single-optic range estimation and by extension course&speed/vector estimation.

Note that your dazzle camo would need to work in every frequency the opposing side uses in order to work properly.

I was referring to the Mk 1 eyeball. Think of it this way, when you see a bunch of ships/tanks/whatever with similar camo, using the Mk 1, it is a little confusing. Google optical illusions. The results are more intricate, but same concept.

Ignoring the optical illusion aspect, why camo? Because I like it.

I'm confused, Stogie, because I'm also referring to the Mk1 eyeball.

The dazzle camo schemes would work even if there was only one ship. link

Can you see the edges of the Finnish Hamina-class missile boat in this picture quickly?

Though I think you would need to mess with the colors because of the loss of the atmospheric haze.

One color is going to have to be carbon black, one of the light-thirstiest colors (or materials) in existence, which is going to have to also cover VERY cold sections of the ship's hull. The other two colors will kinda depend on each other, since the 'mid' tone needs to be the color of the lightest color in the shadows.

I think that ground combat is most likely to occur on worlds where humans can live on the surface fairly easily. Those worlds will probably look something like our own world, in particular having brown as most common color of ground. That brown is mostly carbon from long-dead organisms.

So I usually paint military vehicles that operate on or close to the ground in browns, greens, and grays. I did do some grav armored personnel carriers in black with sponged-on green, brown, yellow, and very light gray spots, and they came out pretty well. I'll post some pictures someday.

Homeworld all the way for my ships.

Ground combatants are a whole question, Frequently I subscribe to the Tactics Board theory, which is the figures on the board are representations of units on a tactical display board and bright colors are used to identify units on the board but are actually camouflaged appropriately in the field.