User:The All-knowing Sith'ari/Stealth sail

The stealth sail is a vital component of all UNSC stealth spacecraft, allowing a ship to remain undetected in an environment where stealth would otherwise be impossible.

Rationale
True stealth spacecraft were for a long period in the 21st and 22nd Centuries considered impossible, for the simple and apparently insurmountable problem of waste heat. While a submarine (which Prowlers are often simplistically compared to) can conceal its heat signature in the comparatively warm surrounding water, the temperature of outer space is approximately three degrees above absolute zero, and the fusion reactors used to power all UNSC spacecraft obviously run at far hotter temperatures going into the hundreds of thousands of degrees. If the designers of a spacecraft do not wish for the crew to be cooked within minutes of operation, they will design the spacecraft with radiators to remove waste heat. This is fine in the case of large capital ships, since given the right construction, radiators can be armoured, but unacceptable in the case of Prowlers, as the radiated heat will cause the Prowler to stand out like a beacon during an infra-red scan. This can theoretically be curtailed if the Prowler's reactor is switched off, engines are shut down, and life support is deactivated, but this obviously comes at the cost of shutting down all electronic instruments aboard, rendering the Prowler's role of a stealth reconnaissance craft useless. The only real practical solution is to conceal the Prowler behind another object, such as an asteroid or a statite such as the stealth sail.

Design
The steath sail is a large circular plate totally covering the bow of the Prowler, coated with metamaterials to prevent detection by radar or any other sensor, and shot through with coolant conduits to mask the heat signature. To avoid heat from the Prowler's reactor being conducted into the sail and giving away its position, the sail is never in contact with the ship once deployed but rather held in position magnetically. As far as any infra-red sensor in concerned, a stealth sail is simply a slightly hotter patch of space, which can be passed off as a patch of ionised gas.

There are disadvantages to this system: The sail must be able to collapse and be stored within the Prowler, lest it interfere with the slipspace field during FTL transit, and so it cannot be very heavily armoured, which renders it vulnerable to damage from space dust particles. Furthermore, the sail can only cover the bow aspect, and so the Prowler risks detection if a spacecraft comes up from its flanks or rear. The sail is also completely opaque, both to sensors and light, and so external cameras and sensors must be mounted on the outside of the sail when it is deployed, and if one of these is damaged, it opens a hole in the sail's area of coverage which may well be detected.