I just thought I'd put up a box into which I can put some thoughts and ideas I'm happy to have someone elses input on. From time to time, there might even appear the odd glimpse from the work bench or so. But mostly offsprings from a styrene poisonend mind, I'm afraid.
So here goes - the First Thought:
In the late 80:ies/early 90:ies, it was quite clear that the soviet empire was collapsing rapidly, and that they couldn't in fact keep their quite ambitious conventional ground forces at par with western technical evolution. And at this time, not even their large overweight in numbers could fully compensate.
As this became increasingly clear to western leaders, the western military focus rapidly shifted from the european battlefield towards different proxy areas, mainly in the middle east as we have seen during the last two decades, this refocus not only necessitating reequipment of the armed forces in different ways (f.i "fenced tanks" etc) but also meant that camouflage colours changed to better match the new fighting environment.
Now - what if the Soviet Empire some way (oil, gold or f-ing unobtanium findings) didn't break financially as in the real history? That would have allowed them to keep the pressure on the european front and thus the "home" focus on western european armed forces. Would we still have seen green/grey wraparound camouflage on strike aircraft, darker grey maritime aircraft etc or would we still have seen the unbelieveble boring development towards an even greyer military aircraft future? I'd like to think not. I'd really would have loved the Atlas C.1 in dark green/dark sea grey wraparaound in RAF service, not to mention the very very nice three tone grey maritime camouflage we could have seen on Marineflieger Atlantics and Orions.
Or am I too far from reality?
Thoughts and reflections, please?