Invisible tanks

I've seen somewhere a photo of the BAE Hawk whose skin had been lit up, rendering it hardly visible against greyish sky. In 'Popular Science' many years ago there was an article on invisibility, illustrated with a drawing of an F-35 displaying the sky and clouds on its skin. Looks like we're only steps away from the Predator's invisibility cloak. Again science-fiction is becoming reality; sci-fi writers will soon lose their jobs.
 
from "Stealth Warplanes":

Some effort has been expended on active optical
camouflage - the use of lights and sensors to adjust
the luminance of the airframe to match the background.
Work on what were nicknamed "Yehudi lights"
started in the USA after the Second World War. Various
models of piston-engined aircraft including the B-24
Liberator and SBD Dauntless naval bomber were fitted with
an experimental arrangement of lamps built into the wing
leading edge. "Yehudi lights" are also reported to have been
tested in the engine inlets of some F-4 Phantoms during the
Vietnam War. Studies have shown that at longer ranges it
is more important to match the luminance than the actual
shade of colour.
Click to expand...
 
Won't expect too much of it, at least not more, than an adaptive camouflage, although
of course this would be quite a thing. But it seems not to be based on metamaterials,
which, due to a negative refraction index could be able to guide eletromagnetic waves
around an object, so theoretically achieving real invisility.
A camouflage as depicted in the Telegraph article probably wouldn't be useful, as it would
be really effective only for a fixed viewing angle, I think. Changing overall colour and scheme
appropriate to the environment, may be possible, a kind of variable camouflage netting.
 
Foxglove said:
I've seen somewhere a photo of the BAE Hawk whose skin had been lit up, rendering it hardly visible against greyish sky.
Click to expand...

My CGI? It was the illustration for the BAE Chameleon program.
 

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From New Scientist

New cloaking technologies could make a tank "disappear", "sweat" or even look like a cow

EVEN at a distance, a tank is hard to miss. Yet if it is a tank with adaptive camouflage you might barely realise you are looking straight at it. At least that's the aim of the "chameleon" system being developed by BAE Systems in Sweden.

The system, which will be tested later this month, is part of a broad push to find ways of making tanks less conspicuous in the battlefield, says Hisham Awad at BAE Systems in Bristol, UK.

Given their large size and relatively slow speed, tanks are often sitting ducks for enemy fire. BAE Systems believes its system can not only make tanks harder to see, but also disguise them thermally, by making the vehicles "sweat", or even look like cows.

At the moment, the visual camouflage system is the technology that is at the most advanced stage and is being developed to conceal the tank's sides, Awad says. A pair of "bug-eyed" compound video cameras on each side capture the tank's surroundings. Each one contains nine small cameras, giving a wide field of vision. The images from these cameras are then fed to displays built into the outer surface of the armour on the tank's opposite side. The displays use arrays of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) to project the image onto a screen contained within the armour, much like a rear-projection TV, says Awad. The screen will be built in to a layer of a transparent composite armour on the tank's side. How to hide the tank's tracks and roof are challenges that the researchers have yet to overcome.

"There may be discontinuities at the edges," says Alan Johnston, head of the vision lab at University College London. But even so, provided the display refreshes fast enough it should work, he says, adding that just matching the colours to the background could be enough.

BAE Systems would not reveal many of the details but claims that a working version of the system could be available within five years.

While this should make a tank more difficult to see, hiding its thermal appearance is much more challenging. "A lot of heat comes out of the vehicle at any one time," says Awad. This produces a characteristic thermal signature, making tanks easy targets for heat-seeking missiles.

BAE researchers are modelling ways to capture the water component of the engine exhaust and channel it to composite armoured tiles along the tank's sides. The water could then evaporate off, cooling the tank's surface just like sweating.

Rather than just hiding the vehicle's heat signature, though, the researchers want to be able to move water over the tank's body very quickly and create specific shapes. Individual composite tiles could be switched on and off and used like pixels to depict simple shapes, the company claims. "You can make it look like a Ford Focus, or you can have the shape of a cow," says Awad.
 
Matej said:
Foxglove said:
I've seen somewhere a photo of the BAE Hawk whose skin had been lit up, rendering it hardly visible against greyish sky.
Click to expand...

My CGI? It was the illustration for the BAE Chameleon program.
Click to expand...
Yep, a great CGI job, Matej, I thought it was real.
 
Hmm, with ther availability of low cost, low power consumption LEDs, including those flat ones, it would seem quite straightforward to come up with a system to match luminance with the background. A trio of colored LEDs might help with color as well, certainly enough to help camouflage at a distance. Hmm.
 
Tankers and former tankers that have been talking about this don't seem too optimistic. Mud, sand, small arms fire and shrapnel could cause plenty of problems.

Either way I think it is a development worth continuing, but I doubt we will see tanks with such technology on the battlefield in five years time.

The talk of such thermal signature reduction seems a more achievable near-term goal.
 
Colonial-Marine said:
Tankers and former tankers that have been talking about this don't seem too optimistic. Mud, sand, small arms fire and shrapnel could cause plenty of problems.
Click to expand...

A good coating of mud and dust and some ‘scratching’ from whatever is not going to automatically invalidate the camouflage effect of a ‘chameleon’ system. In the same way that such effects don’t reduce the ability of conventional camouflage (unless they cover most if not all of the vehicle). Even with a good dose of mud there is going to be a large degree of the vehicle uncovered and still ‘cloaked’ by the system and most importantly the overall shape of the tank is going to be significantly disrupted.

The real downfall of such a system is tanks with large amounts of self-shading with things like wedge armour profiles and uncovered suspension and tracks. The chameleon coatings on the undersides of this shading are not going to be very effective and the distinctive shadows will provide visual identification of the tank. The solution is to mount such coatings away from the vehicle’s outer mould line in these areas so as to avoid shadow.
 
There would seem to be opportunity to combine various anti-HEAT stand-off armour solutions (sheet, slat, screen, etc.) with this kind of active camouflage to reduce the self-shading, etc. issues that Abraham mentions. An armored vehicle designed from the start as a shell-within-a-shell comes to mind, like a turtle hiding under a bowl. It's not hard to imagine something like the Finnish Patria with a permanent stand-off-and-camouflage shell, with the sensors on the outer hull but the crew and vital systems inside the inner hull. Combined with one or more "pop up" remote weapons stations, normally stowed under the outer shell but deployed when ready to engage, it could be a nasty surprise.
 
The History Channel has the series "Greatest Tank Battles" and even the more modern battles in Iraq War I show that tank vs tank where they are "buttoned" up for combat it is tough to "see" the enemy or more accurately who ever gets seen first dies.

IMHO and not to put too fine a point on it or comment about the incompetence of Iraqi tank crews it would seem from watching these shows that any additional visual stealth or camouflage advantage giving one side extra seconds of engagement time would spell the difference in any future tank on tank engagement.
 

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