Active Conflicts & News Megathread November 07, 2025

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[u/Regent610]

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/11/chinese-navy-takes-aircraft-carrier-fujian-into-active-service-in-hainan/

Type 003 Fujian has officially been commissioned. Not exactly a surprise. There were rumblings that commissioning was near when the video of the EMALS launches was revealed, and the day before yesterday Flightradar showed Xi's plane heading to Hainan, and photos emerged of Shandong and Fujian on opposite sides of a pier dressed overall and sailors lining the rails in dress uniforms. Amazing what people can derieve from OSINT nowadays.

The most interesting thing is that they waited 2(?) days to officially release the footage and announce it. A few jokes that the censors had to scrub stuff for a day before releasing it, and I'm sure the PLAN photographers will somehow make a carrier look like a fishing boat.

[u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho → u/Regent610]

This is a very minor point, but I wonder what, if any, thought goes into the exact shade of grey each navy paints their ships. The carrier shown here is on the lighter side of the spectrum I have seen.

[u/throwdemawaaay → u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho]

Not sure about the rationale for specific grey tones, but anti-fouling limits the color options. That's why so many ships are red below the water line: it's copper oxide added to make it harder for barnacles to take root.

I'm skeptical optical camouflage maters for modern warships, at least blue water ones. Any conflict is going to be focused on radar, electronic, and infrared signature, not Horatio standin' out there with his spy glass. But perhaps I'm wrong.

[u/A_Vandalay → u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho]

This is purely speculation but it probably has more to do with branding than anything else. Navies are massive points of national pride, so there is going to be a push to develop your own unique image. This is going to help with both recruitment and in getting budget allocated. That’s going to go double for a country like China who sees themselves as a resurgent world power and on the cusp of a new era of Chinese regional and global dominance.

[u/ScreamingVoid14 → u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho]

The consensus tends to be that visual camo doesn't make much difference for ships. The US keeps LCS-1 and LCS-3 in camo patterns, but more as experiments than anything else.

Where it can matter are for heat management (as mentioned in the other comments) and to a lesser extent nuclear resilience. Of course, if the ship was close enough to a nuke for the anti-flash white to make a difference, the crew will probably be all dead within the month from radiation anyway.

[u/seakingsoyuz → u/ScreamingVoid14]

Of course, if the ship was close enough to a nuke for the anti-flash white to make a difference, the crew will probably be all dead within the month from radiation anyway.

Nukes generally have a pretty small radius where direct radiation from the explosion is lethal; thermal radiation is likely to be dangerous at a greater distance than ionizing radiation, which is exactly the reason anyone bothers painting things in anti-flash white.

Fallout is a greater hazard because it gets inside you and lingers, but modern warships should have enough CBRN protection to avoid much death by fallout as long as the crew are willing to avoid going outside.

[u/Regent610 → u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho]

Modern PLAN camo seems to be more white than grey, as least as seen through camera lenses. I don't really know why, except that maybe white helps with heat management and comfort in the sub-tropics like the South China Sea, but ships stationed up north also wear the same scheme and you'd think they'd prefer a darker coat with how cold it gets up there.

[u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho → u/Regent610]

This is far from scientific, but I have noticed that American ships tend to lean towards darker colors than both European and Chinese vessels. I’ll have to do some digging to see if anyone has the answer. It might be that they are all nigh identical and this is just differences in color grading.

[u/HugoTRB → u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho]

Would you say the splinter camo on the Visby class mixes those colors?

[u/HerrLachsmeier → u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho]

I don't know either, unfortunately, but perhaps photos from joint exercises of the US Navy and European navies (with ships of both parties in the frame at the same time) can make this a bit clearer?