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Tanks Test Infrared Camouflage Cloak
LibRT writes with this excerpt from the BBC:
"Tanks could soon get night-time invisibility thanks to a cloaking device that masks their infrared signature. Developed by BAE Systems, the Adaptiv technology allows vehicles to mimic the temperature of their surroundings. It can also make a tank look like other objects, such as a cow or car, when seen through heat-sensitive 'scopes. The hi-tech camouflage uses hexagonal panels, or pixels, made of a material that can change temperature very quickly. About 1,000 pixel panels, each of which is 14cm across, are needed to cover a small tank. The panels are driven by on-board thermal cameras that constantly image the ambient temperature of the tank's surroundings. This is projected on to the panels to make it harder to spot. The cameras can also work when the tank is moving."
...shining a light on them?
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Tanks could soon get night-time invisibility
They should totally give this to healers, too.
CmdrTaco forgot to fire soulskill. Get enough votes together to get him off slashdot!
"Uh sir, I can see through my night vision a line of cows coming towards us at 40mph..."
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Treat every cow you see through your infrared security system as a tank. If you're right, you're saved, if you're wrong... hamburgers?
Or is this more for some imagined future conflict with tanks rolling around China or Russia?
... that will obviously be broken at the first sign of a combat environment. Small arms fire and smaller explosive charges (RPG's, frag grenades, etc) would more than likely break large swathes of those nifty and expensive panels. Suddenly that small cow has several large patches of bright heat signature.
I'm all for fighting the technological enemy that doesn't exist anymore, but let's at least be practical about it, please DOD?
make a tank look like other objects, such as a cow
("Many bothans died to bring us these plans." Yes, it's an attempt at humour.)
You know, the problem with all this cloaking stuff is... we're not fighting wars where it matters. Most of the people we're chasing around aren't in tanks, don't care much about tanks, and don't worry about it's infrared signature because their neighbors are like "holy f*ck! Do you hear the GIANT DIESEL-POWERED TANK coming?"
Tanks are a WWII holdover. We don't use them much anymore. We use fast armored personnel carriers that can survive an IED strike. We need tech that can spot snipers and control large sections of urban landscape where hostiles and non-combatants co-mingle and sometimes even co-habitate as well. The only way to spot them right now is either to wait for the bang (and we sure love those bangs), or drive around in a semi-truck with some backscatter x-ray equipment stuffed in the back that's busy giving the operators and innocent passerbys on the street cancer looking for hidden weapons. And yes, I think driving up and down streets filled with camels and rusted out cars in a state of the art armor-protected semi-truck is going to get noticed "Ah, they're looking for our guns again."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Or is this system only effective when the engine's off?
TFA uses the phrase "thermo-electric devices". I'm assuming that means some flavor of Peltier(can't be purely resistive; because some of the pixels need to be cooled and some heated). If that is the case, I would be very interested(and probably not cleared) to know how they handle the heat output of the camouflage, along with the engine and other core systems.
Peltiers are really fun devices; because they are all solid state, respond quickly, and can be driven with a simple DC current; but they aren't what you'd call efficient heat pumps. The fact that they work at all feels like magic; but the heat coming out of the hot side is considerably more than the heat being pumped from the cold side... In IC cooling scenarios, a couple square inches of Peltier can easily consume 100watts. I'd assume that this system, with its much greater surface area, and lower deltaTs on average, wouldn't be that bad; but unless BAE has made some real strides with TECs, nontrivial power is going to be involved(amounts varying depending on what is being emulated and how much the trick differs from the vehicle).
How do you dump all the waste heat from such a system? "looks like a cow" is stealthy. "Looks like a cow, with a thermal exhaust plume that suggests it contains a running AGT1500 and a collection of main battle tank support systems" is less stealthy...
The best way to make something invisible is to look in the same direction your observer is looking, and draw a picture of what you see on the side of yourself that faces the observer.
Prohibitive on a lightweight low-power aircraft with the materials and computational power available in 1989, but the gap between technothriller and public availability is holding consistent at about 20 years.
Tanks produce a LOT of heat.
That excess heat has to go somewhere. Otherwise you'll see very HOT cows moving towards you at 40 mph.
Yet checking TFA produces:
I'm thinking that this will later be shown to be extremely limited by the amount of freon carried by the tank.
Surely next, the FBI will want something dangerous as hell which can pose as a little child. "Oh no! That's not a little boy, it's a 10 ton armored vehicle with guns and a cage!!!"
... is to stay home. Simple as that.
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
Nope. That's what drones are for.
It used to be helicopters that were the "tank killers".
Then it was the A-10.
Now (and into the foreseeable future) it is unmanned drones.
Tanks are expensive and drones are cheap.
Cars don't have the land-speeder force-field (pre-remastered) effect IRL.
Forget cows. If the enemy already knows the tanks are there and have nothing to hit them with make the tank sides look like bull's eyes just to tick the enemy off.
Better yet, have a line of tanks, assign a letter to each, and have 'USA RULEZ' visible only in infrared.
But if you turn off the engine, you don't have a heat signature anyway. No need for infrared camouflage. Regular camouflage netting will do.
I don't think a tank's exhaust works like that. I think it kind of spews all over the place.
Which gets back to the original point. What to do with the heat?
Anyone could glue a cow-shaped heating pad onto the side of a cold tank.
Soldier: Sir, I am seeing tank tread marks and a elevated heat in-between them on the infrared scope, but I don't see the tank.
Commander: Look to where the treads are forming and shoot your TOW missile there.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Target that belch and fire!
Better wait for the 2 kilopixel model.
That part of the discussion is about after the tank has cooled. When it is "dug in". And from TFA, this works best in the 300-400m range. Otherwise the enemy would have to miss the tanks driving up less than half a klick away.
The exhaust goes out the exhaust pipe. And then it rises and spreads out because of the air currents. In other words, it spews exhaust all over the place.
Putting the magical invisibility armour on the FRONT of the tank is NOT going to do anything hide the massive amounts of heat pouring out the BACK of the tank. It's physics.
Yeah. That's why I said that it is probably limited by the amount of freon the tank carries. Any electrical system trying to do that would need some place to dump its own heat.
Only if it is already cold (and then anyone can glue a cow shaped heating pad to it).
Any other situation and you run into the laws of thermodynamics.
You cannot destroy heat.
You need something colder to absorb it
or
You need some way of moving it away.
Well atleast its nice to know that america isnt the only country guilty of wasting millions of dollars on useless military tech
For the cost of a remote control light, you just showed that those "cows" out there need some further investigation with high explosives.
I can just see how an enemy will hack the pixel array to marquee "ALL YOUR BASE BELONG TO US!" or some animated target and the poor tankies won't know it because they can't see their own thermo picture!
The article talks about the system being a camouflage system. I believe the invisibility cloak idea is wishful thinking by the writer of the article. Or not... I like the idea of an updated Peltier Panel that can move hot and cold around to different panels. It may have limited "heat storage" and/or massive heat dumping ability to reduce/reset the panels/vehicle heat signature/profile. So with a hybrid powerplant, turn off the "gas", dump most of the heat, turn on electrics, and set the "camo" panel to desired "camo" temp profile. That is very doable.
Good to know these engineers flunked physics.
Conservation of energy means all that heat has to go somewhere.
In their effort to disguise, they incrementally increased the amount of heat that radiates out making the system 'light up' even more glaringly in any observer's thermal imaging equipment.
Electricity. These panels are obviously peltier coolers.
To quote HTTYD: "Blind spot, yes! Deaf spot, not so much!"
All the fancy anti-IR plating ain't gonna do much when the sound of yer diesel engine is more than enough to let the enemy know you're coming.
Presumably something like a tank generates a lot heat if it has its engine running. Where does that go without giving off tell tale signs?
Dude, within a couple of meters or so most of the impulse of the exhaust leaving the tailpipe is spent, and it starts to diffuse generally into the surrounding atmosphere. If the vehicle is moving, there is even more turbulent mixing. In short, yes, in the big picture it does "spew exhaust all over the place." After a short jet of really hot exhaust, you have a much larger, more diffuse region where the air is generally heated. It would be pretty easy to conclude that this heat is not natural.
Just look at the smoke boiling up out of the stack on an older diesel truck. Does it just jet straight up indefinitely? Nope.
I doubt there are many NATO tanks in Afghanistan. Actually the U.S. sent its first tanks into Afghanistan only late in 2010, after nine years of war. It sounds like an attempt to shock the Taliban. Certainly the Taliban has no tanks for our tanks to fight. And there is very little "tank country" in Afghanistan.
And as you imply, how much infrared imaging equipment do you suppose the Taliban has?
I can't wait until they turn into tree's. The makers of Red Alert already knew this in 1995 !
If you know precisely the direction the observer is looking from, and there is only one observer, such that you could make something optically "invisible" by projecting an image onto it, why not just kill the observer? This is war. You are allowed to kill the other guy. Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best.
"It can also make a tank look like other objects, such as a cow or car, when seen through heat-sensitive 'scopes."
Too bad they can't make it look like an iphone4. Then they'd be able to hide the tank from an Apple employee whilst inside a bar.
So you want to turn tanks on civilians and then mock them for being civilians. 'USA RULEZ' indeed.
The display elements could be used to finance military operations:
I wonder what this should be good for.
Tanks are not stealthy at all. If i look at recent wars the need to disguise a single tank is not there. On the contrary. Usually putting a tank somewhere has been a show of force. The typical IED rigged on the roadside will not be operated by somebody having a infrared optics, sitting 2km away in a cold-war style observation vehicle/plane, but somebody with perfect visible light view on the vehicle. Moreover it would not be "army" vs. "army" clashing somewhere in the middle where the tanks could try to hide from the enemy Helicopters/planes
More important: it is not appropriate to disguise army vehicles as civilian vehicles in the visible wavelengths, so why should it be in the infrared? Doing so would significantly increase civilian deaths on the long term. If a distant observer cant distinct between refugees fleeing a city and an army retreating resources from there this would be *bad*.
I got half way down the list of slashdot comments to find the first reference to tank exhaust. THAT looks like a road flare!
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
a rhetorical question btw.
Oh no! They've wasted all that money only to have their invention foiled by a Slashdot poster!
Or maybe, just maybe, there's been thinking about this a lot longer than you have, they know it's a risk but they've evaluated it over more than thirty seconds and obviously decided that the system still has benefits.
These things are not making cold, they are moving heat. So where is that heat going?
I would not want to be in anything with a internal combusion engine that wasn't releasing its heat somehow. It would get dangeriously hot in a very short time.
Masking the thermal image of the tank is NOT about making it stealthy. You can't make 60 tons of 120mm-cannon armed combat vehicle stealthy. It's about survival: modern antitank weapons such as the Javelin and Spike missile use thermal imagers to home in on their targets, so if you can screw up the sensors, you've just made the enemy's weapon useless. In case you haven't noticed, thermal imaging-guided weapons are replacing old-style SACLOS missiles practically everywhere, because they're so effective and do not expose the launcher to enemy counterfire. Unless CIWS are installed on tanks - the Russians are working on this - the best defence against those weapons is either heavier armor or simply fooling their guidance system. Guess what this does. But you loserboy nerds cannot fathom that. Into the feces pit you go!
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Couldn't you just get a big glass panels that blocked the IR light spectrum I'm pretty sure you can already buy glass that does this and I don't see why it wouldn't work. A bit cumbersome maybe or perhaps I'm missing something.
How large of a role nd would it take to damage the "pixels" enough that the cloaking is no.longer effective due to damage? Could small arms fire break the pixels? Grenades? A tank taking out trees, buildings, pushing cars etc out of its way?
Also, how well do the panels work when they are covered with dirt and dust (especially sandy dust)?
You can still hear tanks and in dim lighing conditions see them without infrared. SHoot them a few times, damage the panels, and suddenly your tank is visible ???
If you're looking for tanks in the area, you want to be in the area to be able to shoot them. So you set a light out a few hundred meters to distance yourself from a tank shot.
Aside from the fact that all your lights would be out in no time, there is the distinct possibility we won't even use tanks. If somebody sees you, you might just get several MLRS cluster rounds on your light's position, which will likely also include your position. These days, we'll probably just use a drone or satellite to detect the heat signature, no need to even see.
Or after we realize your distancing trick (which won't take long) we'll just shoot our artillery in a circular pattern around the light, or just a semi-circular arc on the side opposite us.
There's just a basic reason that nobody does this. It's useless at best, suicidal at worst.
FYI, I am former artillery, and I served in an armored unit in wartime.
Actively cooled even. Anything above a few hundred degrees below zero shows bright and clear.
The M1 has a passive system for the driver and an active system for the commander.
You hear the clack of treads, that's about it, the slight whine gets lost in background noise.
Downright stealthy compared to a British Challenger tank.
After all, the main gun on an M1 is licensed from the Germans.
So, now you can't "see" them, great - what about the noise?!
Fuck me, I read half way through this discussion, and it was a bunch of geeks arguing about using lights to see the tanks, then other geeks arguing that lights can be remotely controlled, then other geeks arguing about how fast military weapons can blow up lights, then other geeks arguing about putting lights on top of civilian sheds, and some other geeks arguing about hacking satellites.
I'm surprised you geeks haven't started arguing about putting a light in orbit and space ships shooting them down and people hacking the lights and how many fucking lights there are (there are four lights).
In the novel it was an extremely small recon airplane, which simplified the problem somewhat. When sneaking in, make the bottom look like whatever cloud patterns were above it. Land it on top of a building, road, or field, and make the top half look exactly like whatever you landed on, so that and nobody flying overhead knows you're there.
The effect was basically the picture in the article: In this case, we've got tanks that look like cars until they starts shooting, at which point (for the people on the receiving end of the shooting) it's too late.
Sometimes you want to be invisible rather than blowing stuff up. Even when you're in a tank.
Wouldn't seeing a cow, car, or giant rock moving across the field of battle look a little suspicious? Wouldn't the enemy just shoot it anyway, especially after the first shot was fired? The worst that would happen is that they go "Nope, that one was an actual cow." (or an equivalent Arabic phrase). I guess it would be somewhat effective in a land war against India or other Buddhist nations... The tank would have to use a one-shot one-kill weapon for this to be effective.
there is no spoon. or fork. there is a butter knife, and it's dull.
LOL... and you can bet the first 'hit' or gunfire to impact one of those panels will break the whole thing. What a stupid idea.
> The cameras can also work when the tank is moving.
Did anyone else envision a 1000 heat pixel display on moving tank being made to display an image of a **moving** cow when they read this sentence? Somehow just seems funny.
The cow-moo-flage would work great in India.
This thermal invisibility cloaking device for the tank body itself is horribly inefficient at converting dollars into pointless military froo-froo. My design for a tank begins with a quarter inch of gold plating on all interior surfaces to protect against EMI attacks with embedded 1 carat diamonds on all control surfaces to improve grip. I can get the price of just one of these tanks so high that generals and congressional representatives and lobbyists and CEOs won't even need lotion.
if moving in an area known to be under observation they could run on electric only, quite and low heat sig. add this to the night time running and steah infra red. make a very cool (pun) tank.
if everyone here was as enthusiast about clean energy the world would have been saved by now ... seems like tanks and rockets still own survival of the species :p
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?