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British Army Testing Tech That Makes Tanks and Troops Invisible

by Tim Stevens on October 31, 2007 at 02:51 PM



So you may be able to earn college credit learning to speak Klingon, and you can order yourself replicas of many bits of Klingon weaponry. But even though you may wish it otherwise, you have to face facts: Klingons are not real. That other bane of the Starfleet's existence, the cloaking shield, isn't real either.

That said, it seems we may be getting closer to invisibility becoming a reality, at least if results from a recent British test are to believed. According the Daily Mail, British forces recently demo'd technology that can "make a vehicle seem to completely disappear."

Unlike the Klingon technology, which is said to form a field that bends light around the ship, the British cloaking technology relies on cameras and projectors to actually project a picture of what's behind the vehicle onto the vehicle itself. The tanks, such as the ones pictured above, are said to have been painted in a highly reflective paint that effectively turns them into big, rumbling movie screens.

In true science-project style, the technology is loosely demonstrated with what looks like a small volleyball in this random video from Japan.

The system is being developed by QnetiQ, which has worked on other random cool tech projects that range from a long-distance solar powered aircraft to a machine that can measure your feet in 3-D. Cloaking apparently is just the company's latest experiment ... at least the latest one that we've been allowed to hear about.

From Daily Mail (via Engadget)

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Tags: Cloaking, invisibility, Klingon, military, military tech, MilitaryTech, Star Trek, StarTrek

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