Stealth ablative coating

Stealth ablative coatings are materials found on UNSC stealth ships.

Description
Black in color, the stealth ablative coating serves to refract both UNSC radar and Covenant sensors, making the ship invisible to radar, similar to the way active camouflage cloaks something from eyesight. However, the coating also doubles as a visual cloak, enabled by the ship's texture buffers.

The coating must be maintained perfectly or it will return radar signals. This necessitates constant maintenance on the entire coating. Therefore, virtually all UNSC Prowlers have relatively small surface areas, so that less has to be maintained. An exception to this is the, which is a Prowler the size of a UNSC destroyer. Stealth ablative coating can also be found on Long Range Stealth Orbital Insertion Pods.

Trivia

 * In reality, there are stealth bombers that use this exact same technology. They achieve radar invisibility due to refractive paint, which also must be repainted every time it becomes damaged.
 * Strictly speaking, ablative armor is designed to prevent damage to a ship it covers by being damaged itself through the process of ablation. A stealth ablative coating would therefore mean that once damage has been taken, its stealth features would be useless. However, if the vessel's hull was also painted beneath the armor panels, this may help to reduce if not stop it from appearing on enemy sensors.

List of appearances

 * Halo: Ghosts of Onyx