Texture buffers are a kind of active camouflage system employed by the UNSC on their Prowler stealth ships.[1]

OverviewEdit

They are designed to hide the craft from plain sight through the use of photoreactive coating or "active camouflage skin",[2] integrated to the ship's stealth ablative coating that also masks the ship's radar signatures.[1]

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.[3] 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.[2] 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.[1] 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.[4]

List of appearancesEdit

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