It certainly looks like a joke, but at the same time, the backstory to it, that it was created merely to keep neighbors of the Meppen base from complaining about the noise, sounds quite plausible. There are also little details that seem real to me. The shading seems to be done correctly, and you’ll notice little white lines, visual artifacts, on both the silencer and the sky, which, if this were photoshopped, I would imagine would be different sources.
Unfortunately, the site that it’s on is in german, so I can’t navigate to the article from the front page, let alone even read that article if I were to find it.
Well, if you look at the little icons on the Home Page, of tanks and trucks and things, down at the bottom there’s an icon of a big gun mounted on a truck, and it says “Artillerie”. And probably “Ubersecht” means “Overview”, so click on that and up comes a list.
It has more pictures of artillery, and the top one, the AS-90 looks a lot like the one in your jpg, except that it’s missing those little container thingies on the siide.
I don’t know enough about artillery to be able to tell you whether it’s a hoax or not, and I don’t see it mentioned on the page, but Google searches aren’t turning up anything.
I didn’t find an article, it just was a photo of the month: http://www.panzerbaer.de/monat_0210.htm (This is a real full scale photo, but you know it’s on a military model building page, do you?) DDG, they all look the same to me too, but you linked to a British AS-90, the Panzerhaubitze M109 is further down. Not that the type of the tank would matter much, since the silencer is installed on the ground and the tank drives up to it.
It’s mentioned on this message board (german): http://www.whq-forum.de/cgi-bin/iB3/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=7;t=115
Someone asks for pictures of the silencers he had seen in an army magazine. Apart from some astonishment that such a thing would have to be freaking big, there’s no indication of it not being real before someone links to above picture.
Urban Ranger - the silencer wasn’t designed for operational use. A quick Google search suggests that Meppen is an army firing range in Germany and that the silencer was designed to address noise pollution for those living in the area. I imagine the shells were landing somewhere a lot further away.
I should point out that I have no idea whether it’s real or not; opinion on other message boards seems to lean towards ‘real’. Certainly, it would be a very convincing Photoshop effort.
That link helps my case a bit, I’d guess. A magazine isn’t exactly gospel truth, but it strengthens the believability if a military magazine reported on it. Thanks.
