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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."
Go ahead and do that as the enemy - then please post results.
"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?
Remember, the classic military mistake is to plan on fighting the previous war. Of course, the current US military seems hell bent on not making that particular error by trying to fight every possible combination of conflict simultaneously. The weaknesses of that policy are left as an exercise to the reader.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Using a searchlight is far more likely to tell the enemy your position than to tell you the enemy's position because any searchlight will leak some light off-axis and it takes far less light to spot a light source than to use a light source to spot a target.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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.
Look, I'm sure this seems logical to you. Take it from a former Armored Cav officer, what you are describing makes about as much sense as running under a Saturn 5 and lighting the fuse with a Bic to send it to the Moon. The army did threat analysis based on video footage of enemies that actually tried to use visible search lights in various battles from just post Vietnam to Desert Storm, and the number they came up with is that once night vision came in, it deceased the average life span of the enemy to about 0.3 seconds (yes, 3/10ths of a second, and no, I'm not exaggerating). It's actually been doctrine for most modern militarys since WW2, long before light amplification gear became standard, never, ever do this stupid thing in armor vrs. armor combat, and Night Vision didn't make it more feasible but much, much less.
US Main Battle Tanks have a working range of around four miles. Fire up a searchlight that can even reach that far and it will take several seconds to warm up, then you need time to search with it. The user, and every other armored vehicle it is in a group with, will all die before they see what is killing them.
Who is John Cabal?
Out of curiosity, if turning on your own light is so overtly suicidal, has there been any work on some sort of disposable system(a balloon, a compressed-gas launched parachute-projectile, etc) that would quietly move a moderate and unpredictable distance from the user, and then unleash the actinic glare of whatever chemical light source is currently in vogue in the correct direction?
yes, there are launched flares on parachute that make it look like the sun just went to high noon. But you'd have to be suspicious of something to launch one, and then everyone loses cover of night advantage.
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.
You'll still have a lot of residual heat energy, as it can take a long time for energy acquired from sunlight to be dissipated at night. And metal would generally have a different heat signature at night than surrounds unless they were also metal - but the shape would be easy to make out even then.
I don't think a tank's exhaust works like that. I think it kind of spews all over the place.
Look at your car. Does it "spew exhaust all over the place"? No, it is directed...
Which gets back to the original point. What to do with the heat?
If the panels are actively cooled as well as heated, you could have the cooler panels masking the outgassing source to let it dissipate in the air before leaving the blanket.
But basically the main point is that you can no longer see a giant tank shaped thing clearly using night vision, as most a few odd sources of heat that could be small mammals...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He means you're going to die.
The enemy can shoot at the light all they want. They won't hit anything.
Except, perhaps... the light? Rendering your expensive remote-control light useless.
I was thinking something a bit more directional: ie. same principle as the parachute flare; but with some mechanism for the operator to designate a target or area to be illuminated before launch, so that the blindingly-light-of-a-false-noon would only apply to your opponents(and their now thoroughly freaked-out night sight gear)...
Parachute flares, if memory serves, substantially predate armored vehicles, possibly even internal combustion vehicles of any sort; so I was curious about anything developed in the contemporary 'highly sensitive optical instruments on expensive but extremely dangerous armor' period... With modern vehicles in the multiple millions a pop, I imagine that selective-illumination systems in the hundreds or thousands per shot might be seen as viable, and that kind of budget might give you room for things more interesting than magnesium-on-a-string.
Yeah, you just shot my precious light bulb! What, did you think I would be right next to it?
I suspect that remote-control lights are cheaper than tanks.
I actually used to be an electronics countermeasure tech in the Marine Corps. Our main job? Stop heat and radar seeking missiles from hitting our birds. Something like dangling a toaster from a pole isn't going to confuse a missile. They (the missiles) are frequently programmed in the field (via presets of course) for various kinds of targets, sometimes down to the engine IR signature frequency (think setting a missile to "AH-1" or "CH-53). Most common was to use a pair of different frequency coding disks to generate false engine signatures which would give a missile a 1:13 chance of hitting the "real" engine. Effectively, we gave the missile 12 engine signatures along with the real engine. That, combined with chaff, flares, and radar jammers, gave your average helicopter pilot a pretty good margin of safety against missiles. The countermeasures are handled automatically with manual overrides provided so things like flares can be manually launched. Basically, in every fighter movie where you hear that "beep beep beep BEEEEEEEP!" upon missile lock? That is what I worked on. Fun stuff :) Remember, you can't really dodge a missile in a helicopter...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Yes. Parachute flares are very common. They can be fired from a 40mm grenade launcher, mortars, artillery, naval guns, or even dropped from aircraft. But they are still risky. If your enemy has counter battery radar, they can see the trajectory and return fire on your mortars/artillery within seconds. Another problem with these flares is they tend to swing back-and-forth as they hang from the parachute, causing the shadows on the ground to move back and forth as well, which makes it hard to pick out many details.
"US Government Contracting: Selling useless crap at highly inflated prices to uniformed people for over 200 years."
Fixed it for you
da da da dum indeed.
Air has near zero emissivity, so while the exhaust pipe will light up on an IR scope like a christmas tree, the exhuast itself does not. For example the F117 stealth fighter uses exhuast redirection to dramatically reduce its thermal profile even though it is producing tons of heat. The trick is to keep an visible part of the vehicle from showing heat. I imagine that from some angle (above) that the actual exhuast port on this thing will be quite hot, and therefor not hidden, but only from that POV.
If we assume both sides are sporting the same detection gear, with just the 1 side using this thermal invisible tech, and the opponent using portable controllable lights on poles, the problem then becomes that such a pole has to be deployed. That takes at minimum time, and quite likely someone (who has quite an obvious heat signature themselves) to get out in the open and go through all the deployment of such, or some mechanism on your vehicle to do such, increase the weight of said vehicle, reducing the weight you can allocated to armor or weapons (although it may just off set the weight of the thermal invisibility tech). Also, since you'd have to do this constantly, you'd either need a lot of lights, or would have to constantly back track to retrieve the lights you deployed that did not reveal anything. With mobility being so important now, I can't see this deployment overhead actually working out in practice, especially if you're the one attacking.
Not to mention that firing up a phosphor flare will light up plenty of ground and is a heck of a lot cheaper than any remote control searchlight. No expensive power source to get blown up either. The thing is you have to know the enemy is coming or lying in ambush.
That whole "remote control searchlight where you're not" thing is only any good at all if you're the one with a stationary position. Even then it's still acting as a beacon saying "I am around here" because it has to be on all the time or the stealthed enemy will sneak up on you when it isn't on.
It also isn't going to do you much good if you're travelling through enemy territory and the stealthed enemy tanks are lying doggo waiting for you. Some red shirt ensign expendable is going to need to be driving the searchlight along. I think Ensigns __Paul__ and camperdave just volunteered.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Spoken like a true warrior, hiding behind a civilian so the enemy doesn't shoot you.
Civilians working to further military efforts are fair game in a war. You certainly wouldn't fault a country's military for blowing up a tank factory or munitions plant staffed by civilians would you? And if that causes more people to enlist into the military of that country, does it really matter?
As for your Supposed satellites being hacked, I doubt it would happen for the control of the UAV, The satellite could be destroyed maybe, but then control would be switched to another source and life would go on. You do not seriously think any war machine would put all it's eggs in one basket do you. I mean it's common sense to not have only one way to control or communicate with troops or devices in active operations. The US military puts something like two satellites every 3 or 4 months into space and has more rocket launches then NASA To give an idea of what this means, in 2009, there were the US military put 21 publicly known satellites into orbit. In 2010, that number was 13, and so far in 2011, it has placed 10 publicly known satellites into space. This is just what we admit to.
And you are crazy of you think we would send tanks into an area that we do not control the airspace of except in some extreme and rare situation in which case you are not going to put a remote controlled spotlight up in the first place. The biggest military threat to a tank is air power. I
mean a jet or even some planes can come on at over 600 MPH, launch a missile target the next tank, launch, and clear out before it ever gets into the range of anything the tank could muster to destroy it. You cannot really do that from the ground. At least not covering the same amount of area as effectively.
I also do not think you understand just what these UAVs are capable of if you think a foreign airforce would just shoot them down like an Rc plane. We have weapons systems that are better then fire and forget with them. The remote operator can decide to change or even wait to set the target of a missile mid flight to intercept a more threatening enemy if the computer recognizes it's possible to do so), and this can be done regardless of the UAV's survival. So in your scenario, what would likely happen is 2 or 4 jets would acquire and target the UAV. It would transmit a friend or foe beacon and if not replied to, wait until it detects a weapons launch or an intercept course, then fire enough missiles to cover the threat, do a U-turn to flee to safety. and even if it is shot down, the 2 or 4 jets would be shot down too. So we lose a UAV, they lose a couple jets and the trained pilots operating them. We put another UAV in the air for a fraction of the cost and use the same experienced pilots and weapons crew.