Ablative armor

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Ablative armor is armor designed to negate damage by itself being damaged or destroyed through the process of ablation. In contemporary spacecraft, ablative plating is most frequently seen as an ablative heat shield for a vehicle that must enter atmosphere from orbit, such as on nuclear warheads, or space vehicles like the Mars Pathfinder probe. The idea is also commonly encountered in science fiction.

[edit] Military ablative armor

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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.

[edit] Uses in Media

Ablative armor frequently appears in the Star Trek universe. The USS Defiant was equipped with ablative armor in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Ablative armor is used in the series finale episode of Star Trek: Voyager^[1] in which a futuristic Admiral Janeway travels back in time and brings ablative armor along with a new armament of torpedoes to help Voyager bypass the Borg threat and allow the crew to get home sooner than her past self Captain Janeway did. The armor proved to be vastly more effective against the Borg than standard deflector shields.