Active Camouflage

[Admiral Valdemar]

The story doesn't end there. Although the technique wasn't effective on aircraft, it was believed that it might work on ships. The USS Eldridge was fitted with counter-lighting arrays (later, she became the Greek frigate Leon. When I visited her in 1988, most of the cabling for those arrays was still in place).

So she didn't travel through time or have anyone stuck phased through the hull? Pity.

[frogcurry]

Ignoring the whole issue of heat, any computer generated camoflage imagery would probably also be imperfect due to the time delays involved in receiving the light, processing and forming an image on the side facing the observer. By the time that we have man-portable computers capable of doing that processing I'd expect that even lower tech. enemies would have easy access to HUD's and computers that could detect and warn of the presence of any such system by looking for visual artifacts due to the processing delay. Detecting it would seem logically to be easier and lower processor intensive than generating it. You'd be no better off for the cost and effort unless you were looking to ambush civilians.

[Connor MacLeod]

I should note that its going to be rather difficult to completely "mask" a person foir any long periods of time, because a human body has to get rid of the heat it generates somehow - unless you like cooking yourself in your stealth suit.