Texture buffer

Texture buffers are a kind of active camouflage system employed by the UNSC on their Prowler stealth ships.

Overview
They are designed to hide the craft from plain sight through the use of photoreactive coating or "active camouflage skin", integrated to the ship's stealth ablative coating that also masks the ship's radar signatures.

When in use, texture buffers allow a ship to imitate the colours of objects behind it via the use of a programmable optical camouflage coating. However, they are limited in these capabilities; if the surface behind the ship is rapidly changing (such as the upper atmosphere of a gas giant), the texture buffers are not able to update with enough frequency to match the surface. As such, they can appear visually distorted. When activating this form of camouflage, a texture buffer is stated to be at "full", with a further indicator of only a few minutes of usage. It is unclear if this implies that the texture buffer is a limited-use resource.

By 2558, all prowlers in ONI service had integrated some form of hull camouflage coating into their construction.

List of appearances

 * Halo: Ghosts of Onyx
 * Halo: Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe
 * The Impossible Life and the Possible Death of Preston J. Cole