castelnuovo
Gentlemen,
I am building the above mentioned model. What confuses me is the colour. The instructions simply say "light green". On Wikipedia I saw katyusha in gray and someting like greenish-gray. Somebody on this forum mentioned oliv drab. Or did it matter to Russians as long as it is some sort of green?
Thanks...
Olive, not olive drab. Protective
Green 4BO (4БО) was “a mixture of 40-60% yellow ochre, 15-20% zinc chromate,
10% ultramarine and 10-20% white.” These 4 components were mixed and
applied under less than ideal conditions, in the field, making it a
minor miracle that any 2 soviet tanks, trucks, or what-have-you came out the same color. Worse,
the paints that were used then were radically different chemically from
what’s available now. Still worse, you can’t even count on what you see
in a museum: 4BO bleaches in sunlight, chemically darkens over time
when left to itself, and probably has been repainted by the staff
anyway.
Once, to amuse myself, I constructed this FS chart:
Every one of these colors has a proponent on some model or history fora (and each will get Molotov cocktails launched in your general direction by some “expert”). If you can wait until the September FSM (available 2 August), I understand that one of the lead features is supposed to cover this topic; elsewise, pick a color you like in the green/gray/blue spectrum (Testors Soviet armor green, Floquil’s Pullman green, whatever) and have at.
For some reason I have yet to learn, soviet trucks (I have color pictures from after the war) tended toward sap green. Post war Russian tanks seen in May Day parades seemed to have a definite blue cast; oddly, mobile missile launchers in the same parades photographed as Russian Green (call it olive).
Occasional factual, grammatical, or spelling variations are inherent to this thesis and should not be considered as defects, as they enhance the individuality and character of this document.