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Is it a bird... is it a plane... NO its a Bren Carrier...


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Hello one and all...

Shame so few saw service and not to sure what area of ops...

tank_attack.jpg

"This not quite complete but extremely rare unit was and Australian innovation and was built to carry the two Pounder Anti Tank Gun.

There were only 200 of these machines built and ours is one of the last remaining. It was made from the Bren Gun Carrier by extending the tracks by 6 links and moving the engine from the rear to the front."

all info taken from this site...

http://hwy.com.au/~milmuse/main_Exhibits.html

happy hunting...

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The Ontos, at least, carried 106mm recoiless rifles that were absolutely deadly to contemporary armor.

The camo job on the two photos above, however, might render the enemy incapacitated by laughter. It's hard to hit a target when you're too busy rolling on the turret floor, LYAO.

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Michael,

I suppose they are better examples of disruptive painting than camouflage. But, to answer your question:

It was sort of a personal grog joke...I was just struck by the inelegant and jarring appearance such paint schemes have when taken out of context. And, while the top one might actually blend in somewhere in the Outback, the bottom one just hit my funny bone, can't quite say why...perhaps its reminiscent to me of the way I "camo'ed" my Dinkey Toy tanks as a little boy, using housepaint and mud.

I suppose there is something that is endearingly humorous to me now about amateur paint jobs on military hardware (and I mean the authentic, historical ones, not postwar amateur botch jobs like some of the terrible imaginary schemes I saw splattered on some German tanks on display at APG many years ago). The real paint jobs say a lot about the times and the men who painted/rode/fought them. These little 2-pdr guns were all that they had and a lot of good men died because of them (on both sides, in both roles) but in the luxury of hindsight, they just look sort of quaint, dolled up in their warpaint du jour.

Its all relative, though. In a 100 years or a 1000, future grognards will be laughing their socks off at our pathetic efforts to hide our martial, mobile tin cans using optically reflective, variegated chemical coatings that were applied by means of animal hair bristles affixed to the end of cut tree branches.

[ April 11, 2004, 08:29 PM: Message edited by: gunnergoz ]

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Originally posted by gunnergoz:

Michael,

I suppose they are better examples of disruptive painting than camouflage.

That's what I was thinking. Camouflage is intended not to make the object invisible but to delay spotting and identification. It does this primarily through two means, blending in with its background and by disrupting the outlines of the object. Of the two items shown here, the first struck me immediately as probably very successful at disruption. The second might be a bit better at blending, but doesn't score so well at disruption.

But then, all of this would depend more or less on environmental conditions, including range of colors, how contrasty those colors naturally are in the environment and how all this is effected by lighting. A complex and sometimes unpredictable subject indeed.

Michael

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There are several pics of both versions of the carrier mounted two pounder gun at the AWM site. Trying to do a link..............

http://cas.awm.gov.au/pls/PictionPRD1/cst.acct_master?surl=204073556ZZZTHFFVSDQYK62572&stype=2&simplesearch=&v_umo=&v_product_id=&screen_name=&screen_parms=&screen_type=RIGHT&bvers =4&bplatform=Microsoft%20Internet%20Explorer&bos=Win32

Naah. Well just search WW2, all words, two pounder carrier, for a start.

[ April 14, 2004, 03:24 AM: Message edited by: sand digger ]

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