PS. And for discussions sake, the B/W paint scheme is for optical camera targeting from the ground and air tracking systems. It's very practical when you really want to stay on target. Thanks to modern digital tracking systems the cross hairs will stay at the focal point where B/W colors are hard-lined instead of just center of mass on an unpainted object where the cross hairs tend to float all over any part of the unpainted mass. With the B/W scheme you can keep the entire vehicle in frame using an accurate target a-midship.
So you see it's not just for PR.
PSS. Yes I know, paint adds to the dry weight of any spacecraft. I'm sure NASA took that into account for both STS and Apollo.
You don't need to imitate the Saturn V to paint tracking stripes on your vehicle. Take parts of it- like the aft body, the fairing perhaps, interstages, stuff like that. Paint your tracking stripes over those areas.
This is how DIRECT was portrayed:
(There is also a pretty nice photoshop of a DIRECT rocket at one of the LC-39 pads that shows these tracking stripes, but I can't seem to find an acceptably low resolution version of it.)
Renderings of the Ares V portrayed it with a checkered EDS, and I'm sure at some point I came across a rendering of the Ares rockets with tracking stripes on the Ares I interstage and Ares V aft structure/interstage/both.
Also, most modern vehicles (that I know of), like the EELVs, don't have any Saturn-esque tracking stripes (they may have fairing logos though). Mission assurance is still highly important to these vehicles, and if tracking stripes are that helpful, why don't these vehicles have them?
And it really becomes odd when you consider that all (or at least the grand majority) of the tank surface- the bits covered by SOFI- is not covered in tracking stripes, only in (suspiciously Saturn-like
) "USA" and "United States" markings. These parts don't even have anything to do with tracking stripes, so why paint them at all? Hydrolox using vehicles have been flying (both in reality and depictions) with unpainted SOFI for some 30 years now. What changed with SLS?
I agree about being open-minded, but the only open door for my mind here is that it is for PR only. Weighing up all the options- the advantages some suppose it could have, versus comparisons with other vehicles, factoring in the physics that affects the design of the vehicle, versus the disadvantages that such an action would have... I guess you could call it "occam's razor", leads to the PR explanation, and the PR explanation alone.
, but it is fairly easy to learn and I've found it works quite well for modelling launch vehicles.
