ProMods

Why do these Bulgarian license plates have different shades of blue?
https://imgur.com/TAayMpW
https://imgur.com/yqd6PjE

mgsakatataee

I looked up licence plates of Bulgaria and found a good bit of info there (Wikipedia). I think that maybe it's because one belongs to a car and one belongs to a trailer, or that one has the X NNNN YY format and the other the XX NNNN YY format. (I had thought that maybe there are two different licence plate formats for a car and a trailer, but they both follow the same format (X(X) NNNN YY) according to Wikipedia.) I could be wrong though - I'm not familiar with Bulgarian licence plates...

I am a bit familiar with Bulgarian license plates (at least the plates used by Romanians in Romania in order to evade high taxes made by the Romanian government) and I also looked for these plates, but I haven't found anything about the different shades of blue. I can see both plates use the same format. I want to know why are the trailer plates a bit different than cars' plates and if it's realistic.

mgsakatataee

I'm guessing (which I always do) that maybe, for the format X NNNN YY, the strip has one shade of blue and for the format XX NNNN YY, it has another. It might be a mistake though, because in Germany's case, the strip is the same colour for each format (L(LL) L(L) NN(NN), where L is equal to letter and N to number [made up by me].) I really don't know though .

Apparently, in the game trucks use the lighter blue. I have been searching and the shades are the same. Here's some proof
http://www.licenseplatemania.com/landen ... je_A_e.jpg
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikealaska/14967341851/
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4834/442 ... af28c2.jpg
https://emerging-europe.com/wp-content/ ... 90x556.jpg
I am not sure about trailers. I haven't found anything on them.

They should both have the same shade of blue.

I bet the trailers, too!

Hm, in principle the license plate assets should be the same between trucks and cars

I think the licence plate shade of blue has a more simplified explanation than people would believe. Simply put: some older ones could've used a darker shade and the newer ones a more light blue version of it. It's just a small inconsistency like, for example, some licence plates would have the Bulgarian flag over the BG sign and others would have the EU flag over the BG sign.

In regards to the X and XX licence plates format, both are identical in terms of meaning - regional registration. The reason you see so many XX plates is because, at the time when they were standardized, a decision was made to avoid letters that are not in the Cyrillic alphabet. For some cities this works just fine: Sofia - C (S), Ruse - P (R), Varna - B (V); but then you get into some awkward ones like Plovdiv - PB, Lovech - OB and, the best of them all - Dobrich - TX (TH, as in the old name of Tolbukhin).