Agreed, that’s a great trick, except sometimes emitting less isn’t really an option if you need the afterburner to keep running. And in fact, being able to radiate that heat away quickly can be important to avoid parts melting. You can dump heat into the exhaust, but that isn’t always helpful. Leaving the only real alternative to just make something else emit more (a flare).

That’s what I think it looks like

I guess it depends on the context, initially I was making comparisons to heat seeking missiles. In that context, one might use the radar absorbent materials to defeat radar guided missiles, but that trick just doesn’t work with heat, as you can’t “permanently” absorb heat the way you can other kinds of energy. If your vehicle is also generating heat, hiding that is quite difficult.

So with that last part, I get that in theory, but practically, you can only really absorb IR temporarily, right? Because it all gets released again as heat eventually. Like, say you have a mostly inert object, that isn’t creating any meaningful amount of heat. If you hit that object with 10 joules of thermal IR, over time, wouldn’t nearly all of that energy be either reflected or emitted off it as IR radiation?

Yeah, this has actually been a known thing for a while. The government has been sneakily getting their hand into NIST standards and trying to ensure they have back doors in the commonly used “best practices”.

So as a result for instance, encryption based on pseudo random numbers generated with hashing algorithms are actually safer that these theoretically “actually random” numbers generated in dedicated security modules in hardware.

I’ve been wrong before, this wouldn’t be the first time. But what part of it was wrong? Genuinely, can you clear it up?

As far as absorbing IR light, I’m not even sure how that would work, wouldn’t it just be emitted again as heat?

Not really. We don’t have materials that absorb or reflect infrared light. It’s one of the reasons it’s hard to beat inferred-guided (heat seeking) missiles, the only real solution is to drop something hotter than your plane, aka a flare.

So… get ready for a new era of commercial automotive flares I guess?

I mean, comparatively.