Re: Book Review "Nano" No spoilers

From: Deth (dethb0y@dethb0y.com)
Date: Fri Sep 03 2004 - 17:41:07 MDT


Mike wrote:

> <>Did you view the .mpg in the 2nd link? That was no photograph, the guy
> is standing on a street and you can see the cars moving behind him.
> It's far from perfect invisibility, but given the rough, nonuniform
> surface of his clothing, it's pretty good. Using the flat surfaces of a
> plane, and the uniform color of the sky on a clear day, it doesn't look
> impossible. But then, just fly at night if you don't want to be seen.
> Radar poses a bigger danger to aircraft than visibility, and that's why
> we have stealth aircraft.
> Mike W.

I myself am undecided on if this is a good idea for camoflage or not. On
the first hand, you would never have to worry about going from say, a
forest into a house and having on forest camo instead of urban, or such.
On the other hand, movement is a dead give away with something like
this, and i'm not sure how it'd look from many different angles.

That being said, though, there are applications where radar is not the
primary threat to an aircraft - for example, the helicopters shot down
in iraq. And while night-time operations are good for stealth, thier not
always viable. Suprisingly, perhaps, i see an easy application for this
that hasn't been mentioned: much better camoflage netting, to cover over
installations, vehicles, and troops in the field from aerial surveillence.

Still though, even with all that, i don't forsee invisibility being all
that important except in a few unique cases where other technology may
work better. And we should be moving - increasingly - towards having
fewer and fewer actual humans on the battle field anyway, and having
more UAV's, and even remote-controlled tanks and other vehicles.

Just a thought,
jerry



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:48 MDT