Basic concept
I would love to see kill counts on vehicle in the game (and not as a premium feature…), it would make for a great way to customise your vehicle while staying in line with historical accuracy.
In the way I imagine it, kill count markings would :
- Represent the maximum number of kills achieve in one life.
- Be as close as possible to how each country represented kill counts during the War.
- Only represent vehicle kills.
This are the broad lines, and kills could be represented in much more details depending of the context (the type of target was often indicated on the ones painted on planes for exemple).
Tanks
I’m just going to focus a bit on tanks because kill counts were far from being as prevalent as they were on aircrafts :
You can easily found pictures of German tanks with kill counts, usually white rings / stripes around the barrel, in the game it could be represented by each white ring represent one vehicle destroy.
However some issues are still present.
- Tanks with a really short barrel.
Tank like the Pz III Ausf N would have this issue, a solution could be that the ring is white for one kill and when at five instead of 5 white rings you get one yellow one (maybe not extremely historically accurate but it’s not like yellow paint for making were not a thing in German regulations so I don’t think it’s much of a stretch).
- Not every nation did things that way.
To be more precise, nobody did it that much and in such a way. I’m sure I saw a US vehicle with few kill markings some times ago but the closest I could find after some quick research is this :
And for the Red Army :
I haven’t found anything for the British but the fact that photographic evidences on the subject are so scarce pretty much proves that in wasn’t a widespread practice for anyone except the Germans.
I see a few alternatives to this issue :
-
Using something close to what each nation used regarding kill markings on planes (which is what the crew of the Merciless, the KV-1 represented above, seems to have partially done).
-
Using “scratch marks”, like how early rounds are depicted in CoD Zombie mode. They would be painted either on the gun, hull sides or turret sides.
