Gentlemen,
I am building the above mentioned model. What confuses me is the colour. The instructions simply say “light green”. On Wikipedia I saw katyusha in gray and someting like greenish-gray. Somebody on this forum mentioned oliv drab. Or did it matter to Russians as long as it is some sort of green?
Thanks…
When i did mine i used Tamiya Dark Green. But i think any darker green color is fine, OD sounds fine too !
Many many times on many many forums this simple question has sparked enormous controversy.
The bottom line is, green, a medium olive green. [:D]
G
Just eyeball it with a “close enough” color. Here’s a similar vehicle walk around with color photos. While I know display vehicles are often not painted in proper colors, it may be close enough.
4BO dark green. The chassis would be black.
Olive, not olive drab. Protective Green 4BO (4БО) was “a mixture of 40-60% yellow ochre, 15-20% zinc chromate, 10% ultramarine and 10-20% white.” These 4 components were mixed and applied under less than ideal conditions, in the field, making it a minor miracle that any 2 soviet tanks, trucks, or what-have-you came out the same color. Worse, the paints that were used then were radically different chemically from what’s available now. Still worse, you can’t even count on what you see in a museum: 4BO bleaches in sunlight, chemically darkens over time when left to itself, and probably has been repainted by the staff anyway.
Once, to amuse myself, I constructed this FS chart:
Every one of these colors has a proponent on some model or history fora (and each will get Molotov cocktails launched in your general direction by some “expert”). If you can wait until the September FSM (available 2 August), I understand that one of the lead features is supposed to cover this topic; elsewise, pick a color you like in the green/gray/blue spectrum (Testors Soviet armor green, Floquil’s Pullman green, whatever) and have at.
For some reason I have yet to learn, soviet trucks (I have color pictures from after the war) tended toward sap green. Post war Russian tanks seen in May Day parades seemed to have a definite blue cast; oddly, mobile missile launchers in the same parades photographed as Russian Green (call it olive).
Yeah just pick a medium/dark green you like, and you more or less can’t go wrong.