If you were looking for the bad guy at night , at sea , What would you look for ?

ughm no, if you hadn't told me what to look for i don't think i would have seen it.

ok, now i understand what you said when we were talking about it... that's my comment, so there :)

Tracy ;

   My Dad ( God rest his soul ) served in the Merchant Navy in the Atlantic .He said that many times when the ship got left behind if you were careful and the wind was right , you could smell the specific acrid scent of burned coal or oil from the rest of the vessels .

   Being that this was a result of chemical particulates in the air it could be smelled better at waterline level . Read ; On the deck of a almost surfaced U-Boat . Remember many ran with decks awash till they found targets .

 Trabi ;

Never have yet seen a forested shore with it's own fighting top !

BlackSheep214:

Look to the lower left in the picture . Right where the water meets the shore , by a triangular cave ?

Tracy :

You will find that book to be especially fascinating .There was a copy in the ships Library when I took the command of the " Shell Orion ". Seems that the former commander was an Ex- Navy academy type .

      I figured he probably left it behind in the captains cabin . There were many books on Navigation and even a W.W.2 publication printed for the Royal Navy on submarine detection without As-Dic and watch standing training .

      All interesting books I gotta say . I especially liked the publication on port maneuvers . I guess they didn't think that at 1,250- feet I would not have to maneuver in a tight harbor without a tug team !

US ships would sometimes steam slow on moonless nights to avoid bioluminescence, but it was obviously a trade off. You traded cruising range for safety.

Professor - it would be more accurate to say that you can't hide a ship from an ecosphere of threats. A nice dark paint and slow cruising speed (lack of wake) will hide a ship fairly effectively from airplanes, but will silhouette it for surface attacksers (other ships and submarines) against a light sky. Paint a ship in a light color to make it blend in better with the sky for surface enemies and you have a beacon for aerial attackers. What's a captain to do?

I ran across a 1960s US Navy manual on maneuvering ships to minimize detection at the archives but didn't have the time to scan or even flip through it. Hopefully some day.

Jean Bart

I think it's pretty universally accepted that a moving ship can't be hidden from an airplane. There's just no way to get rid of the wake, which is several times as long as the ship. I'll be interested too see underway photos of that new destroyer, the Zumwalt, which has a "wave-piercing" hull form.

As those photos in this thread establish, it is possible to hide a stationary warship pretty effectively from eyes on the ground or water. It's also worth remembering, though, that many camouflage schemes are designed not to hide the ship but to confuse its outline, or make the enemy misjudge its course. Those dazzle schemes actually made the ships more conspicuous, but played havoc with the split-image rangefinders in periscopes.

A few years back I had to review an outstanding book on the history of French battleships. I can't lay hands on it at the moment, but I remember a colored drawing of one of them that spent a substantial part of WWII tied up on the waterfront of a city in North Africa. She was painted a pale yellow overall, to blend in with the buildings behind her. A model in that scheme would raise some eyebrows.

BlackSheepTwoOneFour

Try finding this one. Better yet, can you see it?

thumbpress.com/a-camouflaged-swedish-navy-ship-can-you-see-it

And here´s Finnish version from war time. Battleship "Väinämöinen":

Pretty easy to see a 6" diameter vertical steel pipe moving through the seas at 5 knots, too.

Try finding this one. Better yet, can you see it?

thumbpress.com/a-camouflaged-swedish-navy-ship-can-you-see-it