Commanders!
We’ve prepared another set of historical camouflages, this time from the United States of America.
In the 1970s, the U.S. Mobility Equipment Research & Design Command (MERDC) developed a system for camouflaging armored vehicles. Not only did it standardize the camouflage patterns used at that time, it was designed so that it would be very easy to repaint any vehicle for different conditions. The whole idea worked thus:
Each vehicle would be camouflaged with four differently colored stripes with each stripe sporting one of twelve approved colors (four shades of green, three shades of brown, three shades of sand color, black and white) in one of eight approved combinations for every environment envisaged as a battlefield.
These combinations included:
- Winter battlefields without snow
- Winter battlefields with snow (with or without trees)
- Arctic (pure white)
- Two types of desert camouflage (grey and reddish)
- Summer camouflage
- Tropical camouflage (this one was used very rarely)
The trick to these patterns was that they were easily adaptable because the patterns that could have appeared on the same battlefield usually required one color change only. As an example:
- The temperate winter camouflage for open terrain consisted of colors brown (45% of surface), white (45% of surface), black (5% of surface) and sand (5% of surface)
- The temperate winter camouflage for an environment with trees consisted of colors forest green (45% of surface), white (45% of surface), black (5% of surface) and sand (5% of surface)
So, if an armored unit commander expected to fight in an environment with trees instead of open terrain, he merely had to have a portion of the camouflage repainted – in this case, the brown stripes to green. Spray-painting was also an approved technique, which meant that the process was very fast and practical.
It’s also worth noting that most of these patterns featured the color forest green – that was because it was the default color of newly issued American vehicles at the time. For most European environments, the deployed units therefore only had to apply three colors.
Below, you can find the camouflage screenshots – we are introducing seven of them to the game (NATO white is available already as a base paint).
The MERDC camouflage patterns were intended for all U.S. vehicles and were mostly used during the Cold War. They stopped appearing after the mid-1980s because, in 1984, the MERDC system was replaced by a unified NATO pattern that is currently in use (it’s worth noting that the NATO pattern also exists in Armored Warfare as the French Leclerc camouflage). However, the MERDC color patterns do sporadically appear on various armored vehicles to this day.
Like before, these camouflages will be available for all vehicles and environments and will soon be available in Armored Warfare. We hope you will enjoy them and are hard at work on the next set.
Stay tuned and see you on the battlefield!
