British Army tests 'invisible' tank, ala James Bond style

invisible_tank.jpg Quite reminding you of Q or David Copperfield, the Ministry of Defense has unveiled a new technology that can make tanks invisible. They carried out secret trials recently and have stated that the invisible tank would be ready for service by 2012. The technology involves using cameras and projectors to beam images of the surrounding landscape onto a tank. As a result, anyone looking in the direction of the vehicle only sees what is beyond it and not the tank itself. According to a soldier present at the trial, "This technology is incredible. If I hadn't been present I wouldn't have believed it. I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees - but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun." The Ministry is also working on a military jacket that works on the same principle. MoD's Professor Sir John Pendry, of Imperial College London, has developed this latest technology.

How the 'invisible' tanks perform in actual conditions is quite speculative. The only drawback seems to be the reliability of the cameras and projectors. According to Sir John Pendry "The next stage is to make the tank invisible without them - which is intricate and complicated, but possible."

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by editor, posted October 31, 2007 - 6:52 AM in Other Stuff | Comments ()


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Reader Comments

  1. Pete on "

    That image, taken from the source article, only represents an "artist's impression" of how the tank would look. You should make that clear.

  1. jason on "

    wow !!! now all they need do is work out how to stop tem making 150 decibels to move a few yards and and they could literally park them on your lawn and you wouldn't even notice

  1. munky on "

    Invisible tank, eh..?

    Given that these beasts generate enough dust, muck, mud and assorted environmental filth to make a platoon of Pig Pens happy, one wonders about the efficacy of this 'invisibility'

    Might work nice in the lab, but in the field..?

  1. ken on "

    i knew they had to become invisible at some period in time after the philadelphia experinment was too dangerous and unreliable for this purpose. that project has been relagated to time travel i suppose.

  1. Andrew on "

    munky - the system will clearly recreate the dust behind an object, so though this technology may not keep the existence of tanks undetectable it will still make pinpointing the location, direction of motion, etc. of a given tank difficult to establish with precision, especially while use of the technology is new. After all, you know the tanks are there if they are shooting at you anyway. What users of the technology are mostly interested in is making counterattack as difficult and costly as possible. This technology will do that. Maybe not today, but sooner than you think, and as the man says, someday it will be done without any cameras or projectors. There is nothing to rule that out at a basic physical law level.

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