Painting a false canopy on the bottom of the aircraft can confuse enemy about what way you’re pulling/rolling, especially in intense dogfight.
This practise traces back to 1970s and can be seen in numerous aircraft, mostly F/A-18 and A10. It’s not popular in modern aircraft though, mainly because most fights rely on long range missiles.
Recently i thought of making one in game using decals, and the best i came up with is two nose art mouths (mirror) and an 8ball. At first i thought that the white spot on the 8ball might ruin the effect but it turned out that when placed right, it perfectly resembles pilot’s helmet. I’m overall surprised with how good it looks.
I wonder what are your thoughts on it, would you consider this meta-gaming?
Indeed! Very cool idea to implement this in WT like that! And especially the second screenshot demonstrates how well this can work - and give just that second of confusion that can cause your opponent to make the wrong decision…
Btw, little biology fun fact: animals use that camouflage technique too, e.g. fish with fake eyes on tail and the actual eyes hidden by a stripe:
An attacking predator usually goes for the head, as the fish has to escape forward, toward the attacker. With those fake eyes however the predator will attack from the rear, so the fish can more easily escape to the front.
Even crazier I find some butterfly / moth species which have fake caterpilars on their wings, so birds will peck the tip of the wings instead of the much more vulnerable body:
Once you’ve seen that, you’ll never unsee…
Want another crazy bio fact that’s connected to our hobby?
Bats detect their pray using ultrasound echo -we all know that since probably kindergarden.
But did you know that some species of lacewings start to fly evasive maneuvers when detecting the bats echolocation? And some species even are jamming the bat by twirping similar sounds back to them to confuse them.
And some species of desert mice are assumed to heat up their tails by circulating more blood through them, here to confuse rattlesnakes that hunt using prey’s body heat, again to lure them to attack the small tail instead of the large, vulnerable body…
RWR and ECM in the animal kingdom. And they say biology is boring…
