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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.
"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.
Or is this more for some imagined future conflict with tanks rolling around China or Russia?
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...
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.
If you had bothered to read the fine article, you'd have seen this tidbit:
"Earlier attempts at similar cloaking devices have hit problems because ... they were insufficiently robust," said Adaptiv project manager Pader Sjolund at BAE Systems in a statement. By contrast, he explained, Adaptiv panels add to the armour on a fighting vehicle.
In other words, they have made similar panels before, but these are the first to be durable enough to actually double as part of the tank's armor. I'm sure they'd break if hit by an RPG, but the point is not to get hit by the RPG in the first place. By that point, they already know you're there, and the RPG would have wrecked your reactive armor anyway.
... 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.
Given the amount of explosives required to blow up a tank, I am going to make an educated guess that the same amount of explosives used on a cow would not leave much behind. Most of the meat would be blown high in the air and scattered. So maybe you could make sliders out of it, not "real" hamburgers.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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?
Tender stake
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Stop putting the "coward" in "anonymous coward".
All you have to do is purchase your system with BAE 4-hour gold support(additional charges may apply). Whenever you are hit by small arms fire, explosions, rocks kicked up by the vehicle in front of you, or any of your camoflauge hexagons is exposed to temp>100 degrees C for too long(which causes TECs to start to break down), just whip out your satellite phone and put in a support call! Your rep should be out there in no time, with a supply of replacement panels.
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.
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!
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.
Depends on what you drive. Tanks use simple kinetic penetrators against other tanks so the cow would just have a rather large hole (possibly toxic if you use DU rounds).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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?
Or you could use just enough firepower to kill a cow, and if it's still standing, it's a tank
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.
so you, a computer nerd posting as AC on slashdot, know more about thermodynamics and engineering than Lockheed and Northrop engineers, right? I mean, the heat dispersal systems on the B-2 stealth bomber are all for nothing, because you've heard about conservation of energy and obviously you know more than anyone.
Wait, no, I think it's the other way around... the people with Ph.D's in physics and engineering and decades of experience as defense contractors know more about shit like this than some computer game-playing nerd eating ramen his mother's basement.
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?
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.
An M1 has 1500hp, that's a thousand cooking plates when going full throttle. The head has to go somewhere and you can't hide it by generating more heat. Infrared panels are not going to hide a heatsource better than any other panel. So far I agree. On the other hand, the infrared panels are able to sow confusion, to make it harder to aim right. Just imagine that your panels are showing a moving pattern, whether the tank is moving or not. That could upset many heatseeking missiles enough that they end up right next to the tank.
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
Really, they do want to make it harder to hit the tank, although that doesn't mean they want the tank to just sit there for half an hour without being noticed. It can be a matter of gaining seconds. Whether cold war era armies make sense in Afghanistan is indeed a completely different question. More important, and obviously less fun.
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.
I still think that is is a problem to disguise weapons in active combat as civilian vehicles.
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.
I don't think there's any intent to do such a thing.
"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."
You are looking at todays asymmetrical conflicts where western powers fight 3rd world armies and guerilla armies. These armies have no real capacity to take on western armies in conventional warfare. And they are not really a military threat against western armies and societies in terms of their capacities for destruction. Let me illustrate this: In Iraq the coalition has had a total of 4800 military fatalities including accidents while there have been 2700 coalition military fatalities in Afghanistan so far. These two wars thus add up to 7500 coalition military fatalities so far.
Compared to major conventional wars the casualty rates in these conflicts are therefore simply insignificant. Your suggestion is to use (most of) the limited military development resources on saving a few hundred or thousand extra soldiers in such conflicts. My view is that the main weight must be on preparing for major conventional (and nuclear) conflicts in the relative near future (~15-40 years). The likelihood of such conflicts is of course much lower than Iraq/Afghanistan type conflicts. But the expected casualties can be many orders of magnitude higher. For example a future conflict between western powers and a modernized Chinese military might only be won (or lost!) at a cost of several or maybe tens (or in worst case hundreds) of millions of fatalities in the west.
Now, I am not a warmonger but I do believe that peace is best kept by a strong military alliance of democracies. Or as an old Roman saying goes: If you wish for peace, prepare for war (Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus in De Re Militari).
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.
Excuse me. If there is no intent to sell a specific functionality to customers, then why demonstrate it?
After all, the main gun on an M1 is licensed from the Germans.
Well have I ever, you're right! I hadn't read the article. In that case your argument is valid.
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).
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.
> 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.
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 ?