| From: | Gurth <gurth@******.NL> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Thermographic camouflage |
| Date: | Sat, 19 Oct 1996 11:01:19 +0100 |
> On another topic, has anybody seriously considered the rules governing
> thermographic vision. I mean that if the movie 'Predator' is anything to
> go upon, thermographic vision is not just a vision enhancement.
>
> It seems that the vision has not much in the way of depth perception. It
> is also difficult to distinguish cool objects from one another. Doesn't
> this mean that the person would be tripping over objects the person can't
> see and/or can't judge the distance from.
AFAIK objects of the same temperature appear in the same shade of gray
(or green, or the same color, or whatever). That makes it hard to
distinguish, if you ask me, but since I'venever really looked through a
thermal viewer I'm not sure. Anyway, night vision goggles are mostly light
amplifiers that see only partly in the infrared part of the spectrum.k
> Another point is stealth. Isn't it alot more difficult to hide with cammo
> from a guy with thermo vision? How do thieves and assassin types get
> around without being seen then? Is there some sort of cammo which
> prevents thermo from spotting anything?
I own several US Army combat jackets, and the camos on all of them are
printed in infra-red camouflages dyes. I don't exactly know how it works,
but I do know _that_ it works -- against heat-sensing light switches
anyway. In a hotel corridor a few years ago, I noticed that the lights
went on much faster for other people than for me. So I went into a
corridor where the lights were off, and did a little test. The conclusion
was that the lights stayed off until I either took off my jacket, or the
thing got my legs (I was wearing normal jeans) in its field of view.
How effective this is against military-grade thermal viewers is hard to
say, of course, but it does mean the dyes do work.
Related to this, US Army night-time desert camouflage consists of a
medium greenish-brown with a regular pattern of horizontal and vertical
stripes in a darker shade of the base color. These stripes are maybe half
a cm wide, and spaced at this same distance from each other; there are also
random spots of the darker color all over the garment. The intention of
this is that the regular pattern interferes with low-light systems (I read
somewhere it's supposed to be 20% less visible at 100 meters, and
virtually invisible at 200 m, but I can't test this claim as I don't have
access to a low-light scope).
And in case you're wondering, yes, these uniforms were used in the Gulf
War.
So much for a few collector's notes :)
--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
RUN!
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