Staaken Night Lozenge and Naval Hex

[Derry]

Hello all!

Here are samples of lozenge fabric we are working on at the moment.

5 Color Night Scheme - Painted

5 Color Night Scheme - Printed

3 Color Naval Hex 1918

All are patented Methuen Colors and all are accurate to 1.8/10,000.

4 Color Repeating pattern on Gotha aircraft are almost complete. I'll be updating my website in the next day or two to reflect that.

Cheers

Derry

[Dan_San_Abbott]

Derry:
I would be interested in your data source for the Gotha five color painted, and the night printed fabric, and the 3 color Kreigsmarine printed fabric?
Blue skies,
Dan-San

[Derry]

Hello Mr Abbott,

We will be posting our compilation of all aircraft sources, with our Color Charts when these are back from the printers. Some pertinent to the actual sheets will be displayed on the decal headers.

Primarily, we used info from the Gotha and Staaken Datafiles, Naval Air Service Monographs and Modelling Periodicals from the last 25-30 years.
For instance, Over the Front, Cross and Cockade and and various Windsock Issues.

Some information was also gleaned from this site but proved to be somewhat erronneous. Other info such as the Kreigsmarine colors appears in the famous VKD memo published elsewhere on this site. We also have it in the Hansa-Brandenberg Datafile.

Cheers,

Derry

[Dan_San_Abbott]

Derry:
I am somewhat dubious about your printed five color night pattern and the Kreigsmarine three color elongated hexagon patterns.
Blue skies,
Dan-San

[Derry]

Hello Mr Abbott,

I am sure there are many people who will be somewhat dubious of the colors.
Can you please be more specific about your reasons for being 'dubious'?

Our Night colors are taken from the best sources extant; and have mixed and copied from Methuen chips (at great expense, I may add) in order to pacify "armchair critics" with regard to the actual colors. We know what the colors are and have matched them accordingly. Your own threads on this forum confirm the hexagon pattern colors, as well as the 1918 VSK memorandum in Windsock Datafiles, so where is the problem? Our data also compared favorably with yours in some cases where night pattern colors were concerned, hence, we must be using similar sources.

Our Night Pattern was gleaned from the Gotha Books and earlier issues of windsock as well as photographing the AEG in it's entirety at the Canadian Aviation Museum in Ottawa, with Ian, the Library assistant there in the archives also assisting with their reference library.

As far as we know, and we've studied this professionally for a long time now, that our decals are the most accurate extant. A quick look at the samples should suffice for this. Please compare our offerings to what is available for modelers elsewhere.

Cheers

Derry

[Sreiko]

Best ever description of the night lozenge is given by Ian Huntley. Hope you have consider that data.

Cheers

[Dan_San_Abbott]

Derry:
You have copied the shape of the Kreigsmarine irregular hexagon properly, however, the colors are not correct. The correct colors are: Bluish grey,
20E3; greyish magenta, 13E3 and greyish brown, 6E4.
The three colors that Ray rimells has listed in the Datafiles are not correct. There was only one set of colors described in the in the German SVK specifications, those are the color listed above.
The three colors you have, stem from Peter Gray, forty to fifty years ago. Until Peter Grosz published the ABB article, the exact colors were not known, this general specification spells out all the colors and where they go, this specification, Allgemeine Baubestimmungen für Seeflugzeuge der Kaiserlichen Marine (ABB), General Construction Requirements for Seaplanes of the Imperial Navy, by, Seeflugzeug Versuchs Komando (SVK) Seaplane Testing Command. To oversee that the manufacturers adhered to ABB requirements, the Seeflugzeug Abnahme Kommission, SAK inspected all aircraft prior to acceptance for service, which also included the correct colors in the correct places.
The exact colors were not known by me until Peter Grosz sent me a piece of the three color hexagon fabric. after studying the fabric sample, WW1 Aero published my article on the three color Kreigs Marine fabric.
In my Hansa Brandenburg W 29 article published in Over The Front, Vol.9 No.2, summer 1994, page 168 and I think it is also in the Article Section, here in the Forum, The article covers in detail the SVK requirements. While the colors you have are far more pleasing to the eye, there are not correct.
Blue skies,
Dan-San

[Dan_San_Abbott]

Derry:
The Dark Night Pattern of 1918 which replace the day dark pattern of 1917 was same five color geometric pattern as the 1917 pattern. The colors were changed, My five color polygon designators, they are: Polygon A, greyish Blue, 22D7; polygon B, greyish violet, 17E5; polygon C, dark blue, 23E8; polygon D, prussian blue, 21F7 and Blackish blue, 21F4. While all these colors are dark, they are discernable, one frm the other. In fairness to you, it could be our computers. However I could not make out any distinction of individual polygons in your night pattern after I enlarged the thumbnail.
Charles Gosse has on the Forum his fabric display, which has the 1918 night five color fabric sample.
Blue skies,
Dan-San

[jumpinjan]

Originally Posted by Derry

all are accurate to 1.8/10,000.

What does this mean?

[Derry]

Hello Mr Abbott,

You are right about the Naval Hex colors. I am not at the shop at present and will not be able to get you a proper scan of the chips as it seems I just blew my video card! Perhaps in the next couple of days.

I'll send you in an e-mail what chips we are using. I am using the exact same shades as you quote; it seems that they haven't rendered to either of our satisfaction.

Our 5 Color swatch may not agree with your templates as I only provided a small swatch. This in fact was taken from the 5 Color Night Lozenge from the AEG machine in the Canadian Aviation Museum from actual photographs we took and scanned last year. We photographed the entire beast. Where the swatch I provided came from was the empennage corner of our sheet and falls within the original pattern sheet and is is authentic.

The colors for the night patterns are also identical. It seems to be a rendering issue. I'll .tiff these for you and post them up again. It's not so important how they seem on any particular monitor though, it's how they print and for the Staaken Sheets, we used what is generally accepted as E, F anf G values. The 1.8/10,000 factor applies to critical value decay under spectroscopy. This simply means that, either print upon capture or at the most, if you wait, conditional factors will impact the process to this degree.

We think this is well within the actual realm of actual printing processes / errors within the 1910-1920 period.

Hope this clears up some of the fog.

Cheers

Derry