"Painting for ice world scifi campaign...thoughts?" Topic

(I tried posting this earlier today but the lock file msg ate it twice)

So you are preparing for a lengthy wargame campaign set on a frozen planet. Do you paint your figs generically or start on snow camo…knowing they will look silly if they ever visit a jungle?

Also…in an age with FTL…does uniform camo matter anymore? Right now Thermal and Low Light TV (Like the AC-130) are fairly accessible to first world nations. In 200-500 years, they will be moreso…more likely replacement by something better.

The race will be on the other end now. With all the high visibility optics, the race is now for clothing to conceal whatever emitter you are trying to block, ie heat etc.

Also, you want to assume that while they may have optics, they also might not. And if they didn't, I would hate to be the guy on an ice world in a blaze orange, FLIR invisible jump suit. =)

I think camouflage will always have a place at some level.

I have always assumed the magic armour of Sci Fantasy is like the predators, and has a basic Chameleon circuit… and commanders are using a holographic rendering painting friendly figures in whatever bright colour they want, and enemies showing up in another colour…

I can remember seeing a squad skirmish game at a show that was painted up to be a holographic rendering of the battle with high contrast colours (fluorescent..) which kind of supports my idea..

I'd go for generic.

And maybe a "frozen" planet doesn't have to be a "snowball" planet in its entirety. Maybe there are some glacierless cold deserts as well, like in Antarctica. Maybe those deserts are only 4% of the planet's surface but home to over 60% of the settlements and installations. Maybe for that reason, nearly 20% of the fighting takes place there. That could easily be enough to justify a more generic earthy camo.

I agree with Maddaz. It is a SciFi world, just assume that troopers have chameleon armor or fabric that blends with the environment. Paint them any color that you like.

You also can assume, like the ubiquitous game company, that you are fighting in a "dark" or "lost tech" age and go with whatever you want to paint up.

If you games include battles with indigenous peoples, these may span a wide scope of tech levels, with differing capabilities and weaknesses, including visual acuity / color blindness.

I always figure that for backups if the gadgets go haywire, you'd have something like chameleon uniforms that adapt to the surroundings.

Or maybe advanced scanners are so effective that camouflage is worthless.

Military bureaucracy being what it is, maybe they got shipped the wrong uniforms :-)

Excellent ideas all around…thanks for the input! I don't relish the idea of having troops being only useful for one setting so will likely stay with generic paintjobs. Still, the work shown here by Mateus is really evocative:

TMP link

He's basically stuck with those bases. You can almost feel the cold looking at them though.

Justin…funny you should mention that. My father and I hunt small game. I am bad at distinguishing quite a few shades so I have learned to watch for motion and odd shapes more than color. It makes it easy for me to follow quick movement in a woodland setting. Hence I am not fooled by conventional camo often. Real-tree is harder to see than marpat, digital, even tiger for me. It's a texture thing. I never gave any thought to that being a wide spread situation. A quick Googling says it is pretty common. Good food for thought.

Probably depends upon the scale of figs, and cost too.

If using inexpensive 15mm troops, I'd definitely just buy some extras to dedicate to snow camo.

I like varying the look:

[URL]http://aleadodyssey.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/on-snowy-ice-bound-planet.html[/URL]
link

One way to allow you to add additional color in a Sci-Fi campaign is to build the 'threat' to be made of aliens who see either in different wavelengths or through ecolocation or something other then what we see as 'visual' light. As a result of the enemy seeing in a 'microwave' spectrum, the units have their soldiers outfitted in a high visibility 'blaze orange' or other such color.

Slick work on the Dark Realm stuff there.

Orange, you say?

[URL=http://media.photobucket.com/user/Top_Gun_Ace/media/15mm%20Grav%20Tanks%20and%20Armor/Type15HeavyGravTank.jpg.html]

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Multi-spectral, infra-red resistant, alien planet camo:

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I'm working on a few models that are going to be on cold-weather bases.

What I'm doing is painting the insides of their coats with a temperate camo (actually German Ambush, though I might go nuts and re-do them in Multicam) and the outside of the coats in Pine Bough.

On a practical front, I also do WW2/modern wargaming so most of my terrain board is going to be green, with trees and stuff. One of these days I'm going to put together an LV-426 type set of terrain so my spacesuit dudes look less silly, but that's much later.

Also people expect military stuff to look military. Camo patterns and uniform colors are a great way to give that look, conversely doing the exact opposite is a great way to emphasize the non-military nature of a miniature.

However here's my "in universe" camo reasoning:

I have the following threeish forces for my "good" guys: US Army, Colonial Marines, and Rangers.

Army is committed chiefly to long term deployments or major conflicts. Their camo will fit the place they're deploying to. Their strategic movement is such that there's time to burn off a few thousand "woodland camo M2" fatigue sets on the supply ships, and make troopers paint up their hard armor in the proper colors. As a result my "Army" guys have sort of BDU shaded cloth parts, and something that's a poor version of MERDC for the hard armor (it doesn't clash too much, but I did the different colors mostly to make the armor stand out). Same deal with tanks, while ship is en route to deployment I rather imagine the crews are down in the holds painting up the tanks as prescribed for where ever they're going. (Models used are Khurasan's Federal Army)

Colonial Marines are the shipboard company for a fleet, ranging from a Platoon on smaller local fleets, to a Battalion's worth on larger battlegroups. They're often the first ones sent to investigate troubles, provide security, or conduct limited attacks (taking out pirate bases, boarding actions, etc). As a result their battledress is just a "shipboard gray" field drab, while their armor has the MERDC lite pattern I use for the Army. In-universe I imagine the armor would come with sort of a series of camo-sticks that the marine would smear on his armor to make it slightly better camouflaged that could be removed at the end of an operation. Either way, a more elaborate camo pattern would be a waste of time because they could be fighting on anywhere from space station to forest moon over the course of a week. What Marine vehicles I have are simply painted in a medium green, more for uniformity than utility.

Rangers are the Army's "heavy" special forces, they're not intended so much to hold terrain nearly as much as conduct rapid raids. They're going to drop from orbit, break anything that needs breaking, and then boost back to orbit once the mission is complete. Their camo is just a bunch of low-vis grays, simply because they measure their time planetside in minutes.

Camo, cover and concealment will always matter … And yes, very nice job on those DRM ! And I agree panzersaurkrautwerfer ! My Universe is similar ! Of course you & I have similar backgrounds. Mako those camo jobs would only work in terrain that is those colors (!). Or the aliens were color blind ! Since I've never been on an alien planet, I don't know ! That second "pretty" colored MBT would work if combating some of my 'nids from the Calypso Galaxy …