Modern German Army AFV paint set

The Bundeswehr: what is permanent and what is only temporary

The contents of the box fall into two halves with completely different purposes. One is applied to the vehicle in the factory or the workshop and stays there for years; the other is applied in the field and is expected to disappear soon.

The permanent part opens with Yellow Olive (RAL6014). It was the overall color of German ground equipment from the founding of the army in 1955 until the 1980s, that is, for the whole time when the vehicles wore no camouflage at all. It was replaced by the three-color scheme of NATO Green (RAL6031 F9), NATO Brown (RAL8027 F9) and NATO Black (RAL9021 F9), which is still used as the basic pattern today.

The second half is made up of the so-called repainting colors. They are light tones meant to let the three-color pattern be adapted in a hurry to different ground - sand, a dusty plain or dry steppe. They are Sand Beige (RAL1039 F9), Grey Beige (RAL1040 F9), Sand Brown (RAL8031 F9) and Light Olive (RAL6040 F9). They went over the finished coat and were never intended as a final finish.

The F9 suffix on the RAL numbers signals a matte finish with reduced reflectance in the infrared band, not the ordinary industrial shade of the same number. For the modeler that is a practical pointer: two paints carrying the same RAL number need not look the same.

In the build it works well to lay down the whole permanent coat first, let it dry and add the light tones over it in irregular patches. That is how it came about on the real vehicles too, where the pattern underneath showed through here and there.