Stealth Paint From German Inventor Werner Nickel 193
Gerhardius writes "Werner Nickel sounds like a Disney-style wacky inventor. He moved to the UAE to develop his previous invention: he had bred a worm whose excrement made it possible to grow radishes in the dry desert sand. That project failed so he moved on to the next item on his agenda, naturally a radar absorbing paint. While it certainly is not unique, there is some interesting history behind the development, and a proposed civilian use."
Re:Civilian use? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Civilian use? (Score:5, Informative)
The transponders are in the airplanes, not on the airports. They help the airport's radar to see airplanes.
A transponder is a combination of a receiver and a transmitter that receives the pulses from a radar; generates a train of pulses that encode the identification and altitude of the airplane; and transmits them back to the radar. That way the guy sitting at the radar not only sees the airplane more easily, but knows which airplane it is and how high.
rj
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There should be many applications for this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:There should be many applications for this (Score:1, Informative)
There is no other mention of this in the article to indicate how the paint works.
Re:Civilian use? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Still a long way to go (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Still a long way to go (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Civilian use? (Score:3, Informative)
They are totally seperate and unrelated systems operating on radically different frequencies. The only things they have in common is that the base station antenna is typically mounted somewhere on the rotating radar antenna so that they are ensured to both be pointing in the same direction, and they generally share a single display, with the information received from the airborne transponders superimposed over the radar video. You can break either system, and the other one will still work perfectly, just so long as the antenna is still turning and the display still works.
Re:Civilian use? (Score:3, Informative)
rj
Re:Or maybe the author is On LSD (Score:3, Informative)
What are you talking about? Matt Black paint, applied to a mirror, does not result in a surface that reflects visible light.
Paint can certainly absorb photons, and translate the energy to a wavelength no longer recognizable as related to the source.
How did the parent post get rated so highly? Has the Slashdot community fallen so far that it's blinded by the mere mention of "scientific" concepts like index of refraction?