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Tropical Multicam


Dentonboy

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So, I was emailed this by the good people over at Flecktarn...

 

http://www.flecktarn.co.uk/mtccs1na.html

 

Tropical Multicam is now 'a thing.'

 

And there was me thinking that normal Multicam was designed for all environments.

 

Is it just me, or is it more catwalk than warzone out there these days?!

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And there was me thinking that normal Multicam was designed for all environments.

 

It was designed as a compromise between the dry and green areas found in the likes of Afghanistan.

 

Some places it works spot on, but it'll never be as good as a specifically tailored pattern.

 

 

Am looking at these new multicams with some interest, though I fail to see whats "multi" about them.

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It was probably commissioned for *cough* those fact-finding DEA missions to the likes of Colombia...Ecuador and such...

 

In all seriousness, I can see why it has been made, the potential benefits et al.

 

But perhaps Crye's Multicam should be called AlmostMulticam.

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Already been spotted in the wild,  I quite like it.

 

A member of the Special Operations team from the United States, prepares to zero his weapon system during the beginning phases of the Fuerzas Comando 2014 competition. Teams from 17 nations from across the Americas will compete in Fuerzas Comando 2014 in Colombia July 23-31.Members from each nation practiced firing their weapons during a familiarization event for Fuerzas Comando at the Colombian National Training Center, July 21, 2014. Fuerzas Comando, established in 2004, is a U.S. Southern Command-sponsored Special Forces skills competition and fellowship program. Special Operations Command South serves as the U.S. execution agent for the exercise.

7915800_orig.jpg

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My personal mantra is "multicam is not a camouflage, it's a compromise" it sucks, but is appealing to military forces because it allows them to save money by purchasing less individual camouflage types.

 

Trust me, I trialled it over a period of years, standard coyote brown works better than multicam in every environment multicam was designed for. Didn't stop the frickin army from buying it though...

 

Darkchild

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They announced all these patterns yonks ago, kind of surprising this is still news.

 

UR-Tac have been doing Tropic and the Black for a little while already now, but I was pleased to see Tru Spec getting in on the game fairly quickly.  I ordered a pair of G3 Combat trousers in the Arid as soon as they popped up on the Crye site, the only other pair I've got in a desert-type pattern that were compatible with the external knee pads (which I prefer to use for most skirmishes) just happened to have ceased to be serviceable so I was looking for something new anyway.  Bit of a pricey impulse buy to say the least, but then airsoft spending was never sensible anyway.  I'd quite like a set of Tropic and Black just to throw in to some loadouts, most of the time I'm skirmishing indoors and no camo is really going to hide you from someone 5m away inside a lit building if you're not properly hidden from view anyway, so might as well just go for the looks.  I much prefer to always run a combat cut shirt/trousers for the comfort but they'll always be at the pricier end of the scale whereas a standard ACU style shirt and trouser can be had for comparatively less and Tru make high quality stuff without having to pay extra just for the brand name.

 

There's a good photo comparison floating around somewhere showing MC Tropic against Kryptek Mandrake, PenCott Greenzone and.. something else woodland.  The Tropic did very well, about level pegging with PenCott.  Crye advertise it as a specific jungle camo and it does look a bit of an extreme palette when you first see it, but for a site with darker shades of plant life it's surprisingly good.  I've always found original MC and MTP to be one of the best options going at woodland sites with a conventional grass covering and lighter foliage (especially in summer) but it's all dependant where you're playing.  At sites with no plant layer on the ground/bare earth (which seems to be quite a few) almost anything that isn't majority brown sticks out pretty badly, especially some of the better known specific woodland patterns.

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Playing at CSW - I always thought DCU was a pretty decent camouflage to wear amongst the bracken and dark earth, especially in autumn. Multicam is pretty good all year round there.

 

But I think in terms of a green-ish woodland camouflage, CADPAT, Flecktarn and Danish (M84?), were, IMHO, the most effective I've seen utilised.

 

The new Crye Multicam shades were new to me...but having been out of the game for a bit and focusing on TAD Gear when I got back into it, my current airsoft affairs knowledge has slipped somewhat!

 

Still yet to see a big take up of either A-TACS pattern at CSW when I've been...but suspect either shade would work well there.

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End of the day, it all depends on your site and woodlands are not woodlands are not woodlands (colours wise).  Though for some reason so many airsofters out there seem to play at 1-2 outdoor sites, see a certain camo in one spot and base all future statements on that one tiny, insignificant and frankly pointless piece of data.  I think the number of times I've heard modern gear haters proclaim "multicam does not work in 'the woods'" (I can only presume 'the woods' is near 'the club' that I always hear about in pop music) is only closely matched by the number of times I've seen that statement to be false.

 

ATACS never gained much foothold anywhere I don't think.  The FG is a nice mottled pattern with good colours for very green environments, the AU is niche for the UK but ideal if you happened to play at one of those disused quarry sites.  The LE, as with MC Black and Kryptek Typhon, is too black for anything much IMHO. Kryptek Raid and low-vis grey are probably better if you really want to try and make some attempt at camo for CQB/Indoor, unless you want to stick entirely to those pitch black basements below the Mall I guess.  Not to say that Typhon etc don't look really cool in a loadout, I'd still wager they make a fair bit more sense than just plain old black ever did.

 

However ATACS was (I think?) the first of the recent slew of new commercial camo releases to hit the market so it had a big take up initially but was rather over shadowed when Kryptek stuff started hitting the market, or at least that's the impression I get.  There was talk about ATACS literally all over the place at the start, but now you barely see a mention.  But as I say I recall it being the first big new commercially available pattern to come out of the US in a long time that wasn't something like Real Tree.  Also it was aimed at the military but not created by the military and apart from the original multicam that was a very rare thing at the time, at least as far as mass produced tacticool gear from the west was concerned.

The huge following that Crye has built up over the years combined with their market presence has certainly catapulted their new patterns directly in to the limelight without delay and being able to put that 'Multicam' name to a product is a big motivator for third parties to start building the uniforms and other gear, something you don't see nearly as much with the newer kids on the block.  It'll really need to get good take up at a wide number of gear stores before any of it starts becoming at all common place on the airsoft field, the adoption of MTP has fully replaced DPM as 'the' cheap, commonly available camo apparel for airsofters at this point from what I've seen.

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IMO, the best part of DPM was the good old CS95 (and some kit from before that); certainly more comfortable, higher quality and better designed than PCS is anyway.  DPM has a fair bit of black and quite a bit of tan (actual tan, not coyote); I think the pattern's good but I never felt the palette made it particularly effective personally.  If you stuffed your gear/helmet full of grass, creamed up and hid in a bush then yeah but even that Belgian jigsaw stuff works then.  Not saying it's terrible by any means but I don't think it's as amazing as some people like to make out as a camouflage, especially in a bear earth woodland.

 

Can't beat a smock though.  Well.. maybe not for your average sunday skirmish unless it's really cold and you're not wearing a rig, but for pretty much anything else outdoors'y.

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LOL, looks like they dyed a Dylon Forest Green color onto multicam.  I did that when my first set of multicam didn't work in bush.

 

The modified MC works in forest greens, but is too dark.  To be honest, multicam can be made "more effective" by dying to Dylon Olive green, making it useful in both arid and forest green.

 

 

But then again, its just easier going IDF Olive Greens, so much simpler.

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Multicam stands out in anything which isn't predominantly brown. that is about it really. MC trousers and fleck top would work quite well in the autumn onwards I expect but most of the time in my own eyes or through glancing through picture threads.... nah. If you think its cool then great - as for this at damn near £60 for each half there are better 'n cheaper alternatives. 

 

Its not about hating modern gear - to the contrary it is about choosing the right thing for the right environment. As Darkchild notes the UK/USA has gone for a one size fits all whereas modern Russian kit accepts that there are many different environments and color pallets.  That and baggy oversuits break up the body better. Two different schools of thought - I know which one I prefer ;)

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I mostly go airsofting in fairly green woodland with quite a lot of ferns, we generally run a greens vs deserts for team camo, I've always found multicam fairly easy to spot. Obviously airsoft takes place at closer ranges than most real warfare but by comparison to even just olive green it's pretty easy to spot because of the simple fact that most woodland is green rather than tan and brown. Also assuming that battlefields will continue to look like the current ones is often a mistake, take M81 woodland, developed from ERDL patterns, mostly purposed for Central Europe because that's what the USA expected and still fairly useful in tropical environments, come the early 1990s it suddenly became apparent that wars were more likely to take place in the Middle East so you had a rush to patterns like choc chip and 3 colour desert out. Times change and not always in predictable fashion. Multicam is better than ACU but then almost anything is better than ACU since even most cities aren't predominately grey. To my mind MARPAT was always a better concept than multicam.

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CADPAT and MARPAT are pretty effective, I agree. Unusual to see it where I play (in both senses) - the camo' du jour is MTP/Multicam these days, where as DPM, Flecktarn and Temperate BDU where the most common when I first started.

 

All about surplus, availability and cost, I guess.

 

ATACs was on show last weekend at Ace Combat and certainly seemed effective. The foliage ATACs struck me as a camo that would benefit from a wee bit of fading in the wash.

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I think with MTP it's the surplus factor for sure, with actual crye multicam it's been basically just airsoft fashion, which I'm not knocking, M81 woodland used to be the "cool" camo and it's the one I still use (I still think it's the best looking but that's my opinion). As for what actually works in say the UK, mostly green camos, things like DPM, M81 woodland, flectarn, etc because they're designed to work in temperate woodland. Newer stuff like multicam and AOR2 stand out because they're just too bright, they're also generally designed to work at fairly long range, a lot of the lighter camo patterns as well as being intended for use in arid regions are also designed to avoid sky lining at range, since the kind if distance that actually works at is much greater than airsoft guns can shoot it's not that useful to airsofters. Obviously people airsofting in arid parts of the world will find arid patterns better and woodland patterns too dark. I also strongly think that more important than camo pattern in airsoft is concealment and movement, most camo patterns don't really work properly at 20 meters unless you're talking a gillie suit that's been adapted to the surroundings.

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Plain OD is much underrated in my opinion. Provided you don't move it's actually great concealment, my team did a Nam game a few months ago, all wore OD playing the PAVN and judging by the US sides complete inability to locate us at times it seemed to work incredibly well, we were firing on them from ambush positions within ten meters, probably within five meters at times. They could tell what direction we were because they would fire over our heads but actually locating us didn't seem to happen. Obviously part of that was simply the concealment and as you say, knowing the terrain is really important. I also find a lot of airsofters don't want to go prone, they'll take a knee or hide behind a tree but apparently lying down in their AOR 2s or ATAKs is just too much. Also stuff like hiding your face makes a huge difference, the human brain is primed to look for faces, it's why we "see" faces in clouds, toast, tea leaves, muffins and other essentially arbitrary and random patterns. What that does mean is that doing something like covering your face with your hand or looking away from someone can mean they just don't see you. Camoflage is about more than just what pattern you're waring.

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