The PLAN tryiing out new pennant number painting style?

Basically the requirement says its purpose is to show power and vigor (i.e. to look good) while satisfying low visibility requirements. They went through quite an extensive process to design the font and getting feedback from Navy personnel. The whole process took 2 years, as disclosed by the font design company contracted for this job.

Here are some of the design drafts (click for larger pictures):



Use of the golden ratio and slightly curved transition.




Lack of 45 degree edges in 4 and 7, as well as special spacing for number 1, 4, and 7.




Design draft for the number 2, sailors responded that draft Z-4A "lacked strength at the waist" so draft Z-4E was eventually used. Z-4G resembles the font used by the US Navy (See pictures of USS San Diego).




All the finalized numbers




Some of the 38 finalized Chinese characters. Regular script Chinese (楷书) that resembles hand writing was initially considered, but the final standard used the more squarish "Black type" font to match the style of the numbers and to make it easier to identify.



Source:



Font change is just a minor thing to a Navy but I'm impressed by the effort they put into optimizing and standardizing these little details. I only hope that the PLAAF can adopt a similar attitude in painting their planes.

The "to make it look good" is something that's way overdue when consider how ass-ugly the old system is, and not inline with international standard. The popular story goes that the order came from way high in the food chain.

As for the air force...let's see if something similar would happen, though that's highly doubtful - as you might know by now, that they purposely painted the numbers on the planes in those orange/yellow colors have a primary purpose to make it come out "mushed" when reproduced digitally, so to make it difficult to tell which plane is from what outfit.

If you want to see a change in font in this sector, first pray for the PLA in general to ditch the whole "certain unit from certain outfit" culture, unclassified outfit name and numbers first. But we're talking about PLA here, and they're addicted to secrecy...the only one who outdo them is N.Korea.

The story goes as during a visit by a foreign naval vessel Adm. Wu saw it parked next to a PLAN vessel and mentioned how backward looking the PLAN pennant number looked like, thus the change.

MwRYum said:

If you want to see a change in font in this sector, first pray for the PLA in general to ditch the whole "certain unit from certain outfit" culture, unclassified outfit name and numbers first. But we're talking about PLA here, and they're addicted to secrecy...the only one who outdo them is N.Korea.

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If it is some consolation, Krasnaya Zvezda still uses the "certain unit", even as diligent Russian bloggers lay bare the entire detailed order of battle of the Russian Armed Forces...

I don't know why country's keep doing this Turkey has actually removed its numbers from its submarines

asif iqbal said:

I don't know why country's keep doing this Turkey has actually removed its numbers from its submarines

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Doing what? Changing their numbering style?

Very few navies display the numbers of submarines, they being so very secretive, PLAN stopped doing that at least 10 years ago (except in port, of course).