pulsarbird

Dazzel Camo

Added 2019-10-20 01:35:10 +0000 UTC

This is an idea I had for my cyberpunk setting. It's a take on the old WWII dazzel camo for ships, which wasn't really designed to camouflage them as much as it was intended to break up their outline so they were hard to target visually at a distance.

The idea behind this pic is that riders and their bikes were these light panels which can switch on and off with dazzling patterns and colors. There are several uses for this. It messes with the automatic gain control of cameras, wiping out the picture. It screws up video compression and/or peaks the video signal which also disrupts the picture. And it messes up an observer's night vision. If someone is chasing, they'd be momentarily blinded from the flash. (Additionally, if they're susceptible to epilepsy, it could trigger a seizure.)

It might seem counter-intuitive to light yourself up like an exploding star at night. But the usefulness of the dazzle camo is to use it in conjunction with a maneuver. If you're coming to a fork in the road, you'd flash the camo right before taking a branch and going dark again. If you're lucky, anyone following would be unable to tell which way you went, or by the time they spotted you, it'd be too late to keep up. It can also be triggered in a high surveillance area, blinding cameras or making it difficult for AI to calculate speed and direction because of the distortion in the video signal.