Ablative armor is armor designed to negate damage by itself being damaged or destroyed through the process of ablation. In contemporary spacecraft, ablative plating is most frequently seen as an ablative heat shield for a vehicle that must enter atmosphere from orbit, such as on nuclear warheads, or space vehicles like the Mars Pathfinder probe. The idea is also commonly encountered in science fiction.
Ablative armor is distinct from the concept of reactive armor, which uses a sandwich layer of explosives to disrupt the thrust of armor piercing ammunition, and is actually in common use in modern armored vehicles. For the non-fictional uses, see: Reactive armor.
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Uses in fiction
Star Trek
Ablative armor frequently appears in the Star Trek universe. The USS Defiant was equipped with ablative armor in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual explains that it works in two stages, when the shields are hit by an energy or particle weapon, phaser or thermal energy from the ship is dissipated across the hull, creating a boil-off rate that carries away most of the incoming beam's energy. Most of the time the boil-off creates a particle cloud that is dense enough to disperse the incoming beam. The USS Prometheus from Star Trek: Voyager was also equipped with ablative hull armor.
Ablative armor is used in the series finale episode of Star Trek: Voyager[1] in which a future Admiral Janeway travels back in time and brings ablative armor along with a new armament of torpedoes to help Voyager bypass the Borg threat and allow the crew to get home sooner than her past self Captain Janeway did.
Iron Man
In the comic book series Iron Man, one of the title characters' specialized outfits possesses regenerating ablative armor "for use in impact-rich environments" (Vol.3, # 71).It also is used by War Machine.
DarkSpace
In the MMO DarkSpace, ablative armor is utilized to counter missile damage while making the ship more vulnerable to lasers and energy weapons.
Mobile Suit Gundam
In the Universal Century time line of the Gundam series, ablative coatings are used to minimize the effect of beam weapons, called beam resistive coating and a later improved version, Anti-beam coating.
Gundam SEED
In the spinoff series Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, the ablative armor concept is applied in similar capacity to the anti-beam coating and laminated armor technologies utilised by mobile suits as a form of protection against beam and laser weaponry.
EVE Online
In the MMO EVE-Online, ablative armor plating is a relatively cheap variety of armor coating to prevent damage to a ship from weapons. To achieve this, it raises the resistances of the armor by a notable amount when used alone, and is given diminishing returns upon employing multiple platings.
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References
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