Cloacking technology takes a step forwards...

[Deathblane]

The BBC news website has the story here.

It certainly looks practicable, though it'll undoubtably only work on certain wavelengths.

[Zoombie]

Oh great. Now we are going to get people useing cloaks will be mugging people, and scaring the crap out of people, and breaking into places.

Wait...that stuff wont hold up against spray paint.

[SinbadEV]

That technology could be used to produce 3D without glasses

[Zoombie]

Neat.

It still dosn't stand up to a paint can.

[SinbadEV]

unless you make it frictionless

[Zoombie]

Well...

shut up.

[Fanger]

no because not all paint uses friction to adhere to stuff.. certain compounds can use chemical bonding to adhere to surfaces, thus defeating frictionless stuff..

[Zoombie]

Paint can 3, stelth tech 0.

[FireCrack]

Well, if you wanted to eliminate friction, one of the things you'd likely want to do would be to limit the amount of chemical bonding that the material can preform, some diferences though, paint can still wins...


Nontheless, I call bullshit on this.

[unpossible]

i think these metamaterials only work on quite long wavelengths like microwaves. as i remember they're arrays of wire which trick the em into behaving as though the metial has a negative refractive index.

[krogothe]

So were making radar stealth things, AGAIN!
50 years after its been invented, we decide to replicate it by wrapping planes, tanks, soldiers and battleships in a ball of wires that prevent your ship from being microwave cooked by your eveil enemies!
paint can 4x0

[Rayden]

It's a different approach of cloaking .. instead of absorbing and reflecting in weird angles.

Anyway i think just trying to get radar and light rays through material to the other side will never work perfectly at best it's a light cloaking.

[AF]

Current stealth targets can eb detected by looking at noize and figuring out where there is no noise.

Also this requires that the material surround the object to be cloaked in tis entirety adn can work for any EM wavelength.

To solve the problem of onyl certain wavelengths at a time you encase the materiala dn the claoked object in another layer blockign out another wavelength.

However a cloaked object that cannot be detected by visible light cannot use visible light, as none will reach it, thus it must use another section of the spectrum...

However an aircraft using this technology to be cloaked from radar, infrared, and visible light would be very hard to detect indeed, or could simpyl be sued to hide the crafts presence from civilians and installations from spy satellites, ro at least reduce the amount of information percieved..

[krogothe]

However an aircraft using this technology to be cloaked from radar, infrared, and visible light would be very hard to detect indeed, or could simpyl be sued to hide the crafts presence from civilians and installations from spy satellites, ro at least reduce the amount of information percieved..

Burying planes ftw!
Shovels and buckets 1 - Cloaking 0

[bamb]

What about the aircraft's engine intakes or exhausts? Or does it have propellers coated with this material too? This tech probably assumes a convex 3d shape to work. So the stealth could be a wrap-around cylinder for a soldier or something that cloaks only most of the stuff. It would be weird though seeing some separate feet and a head above walking. :)

Could these radiowave smart materials work in visible light when constructed at nanoscale, is it that straightforward? :)

[SinbadEV]

If you read the article... they don't have the "metamaterial" yet... it's all still just theory. Less real then the new gui.

[unpossible]

If you read the article... they don't have the "metamaterial" yet... it's all still just theory. Less real then the new gui.

nope they successfully demonstrated them a few years ago. as i rememebr its arrays of wires in a dielectirx block or matrix of some sort. ike i said though it only works on long wavelengths due to the wires being the key part...wires are big just like the mesh on your microwave.

the idea behind it is that it causes light to refract the opposite way to a normal material with positive refractive lens...so the light bends and eventually heads off in a totally different direction (providing the refractive index decreases further in the material). nice idea but due to the fact that they're not real 'materials' in their own right it'll never work for more than a few very specific (long) wavelengths

[Soulless1]

I'm pretty sure i read something in a Physics World magazine (get it from the UK institute of physics as part of my degree course) about using nanometre-scale holes in a metal to affect the flow of EM waves over its surface (which governs reflection/refraction etc) - they were talking about possibly being able to make an actual material with a negative refractive index by this method, and I think this cloaking stuff might have been one of the possible (in the not-so-near future) applications...


Note all the "I'm pretty sure..."/"I think..."/"its possible that..."'s in that paragraph though - it was quite a while ago (6 months) that I read the article - I could be way off


still


EDIT: just noticed who made the first post - did you by any chance see the same article?