Historical Camouflages – Polish Ryś

Commanders!

In addition to the Berberys skin, we’ve prepared a special camouflage for this year’s Independence Day of Poland celebrations – one we call Ryś after the vehicle it was photographed on.

The camouflage itself is fairly basic as it consists of vertical green, black, brown and light beige stripes. The vehicle, however, is an interesting one. Since the 1960s until the late 1980s, the Polish army had been using the OT-64 SKOT as its principal APC. The vehicle had been really good for its era but two decades later, it was simply obsolete, which is why it why it was almost completely phased out by 1995.

This left Poland not only without a proper APC (this was remedied by the adoption of KTO Rosomak in 2002), but also with a large number of mothballed OT-64s. In 2002, a prototype of a modernized OT-64 appeared at the MSPO expo in Kielce under the name Ryś (Lynx). The vehicle got a different engine by IVECO and a host of other upgrades with multiple versions envisaged by Wojskowe Zakłady Motoryzacyjne S.A., the producer.

The camouflage belonged to a variant called E8, intended for the Polish Airborne forces. It was armed with 30mm cannon installed in an E8 turret by Rheinmetall (hence the designation) and unveiled during the MSPO expo in 2003.

In the end, the project was a minor success. It stayed around for a couple of years and a few more variants were shown to the public, but the only contract closed was the one for five armored ambulance vehicles (KTO Ryś MED), which were then also deployed in Afghanistan. The platform continued being offered until roughly 2010 when it quietly disappeared from the catalogues.

In Armored Warfare, the camouflage fits everyone’s favorite AFV, the OT-64 COBRA, or the Rosomak series of vehicles. In addition to it, two more assets will become available – a red base paint based on the shade of red used on the Polish flag as well as a special player title, “Pancerniak” (a Polish slang term for armor crews).

We hope you’ll enjoy all of these and, as always:

See you on the battlefield!