Ablative armor
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Ablative armor is armor designed to negate damage by itself being damaged or destroyed. In contemporary spacecraft, ablative plating is most frequently seen as heat shielding for a vehicle that must enter atmosphere from orbit, such as on nuclear warheads, or space vehicles like the Mars Pathfinder probe. It is also sometimes used as a protective material for the inside of rockets. The idea is also commonly encountered in science fiction due to the analogy with laser ablation.
In a hypothetical military application, ablative armor would undergo a state change on weapon impact, perhaps vaporising, or disintegrating to a fine powder. This state change would carry energy away from the armored vehicle and into the vaporized armor material. In addition, the expanding layer of ablated vapor would physically push additional hot gas away from the shield in a process known as blowing.
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.
