| If things go all Minority Report, you’ll need a jacket that keeps you incredibly warm while simultaneously reducing your thermal signature from the drone swarms. The good news is our friends at Vollebak have made a jacket that does exactly that. The bad news is that they’re down to the last few. The THE THERMAL CLOAKING JACKET is actually two jackets in one. The first layer of the jacket is the outer layer, and it’s the one that does the thermal and electromagnetic cloaking.It’s built with an advanced version of the metallic insulation originally developed by NASA to stop their spacecraft freezing in space… which means it does some really unusual things. They only metallise the surface of the jacket – by submerging it in a bath of metal salts with current running through it, so metal ions plate themselves onto every fibre atom by atom….And this means that the jacket still moves and breathes like cloth – not metal – so it’s perfect for evasion. The metallised surface also has very low emissivity, bounces back the IR radiation from your body, emits very little heat, acts like a Faraday cage, and makes you appear cold or even invisible to infrared cameras. The second layer of the jacket is the inner layer. And this is the ‘keeping you warm’ bit.It’s a precision-cut and detachable winter liner inspired by the modular cold-weather systems first engineered for U.S. Army fishtail parkas. The M-48, M-51 and M-65 were all built around the same idea – a lightweight shell and a highly insulated inner jacket that could be buttoned in, removed, repaired, or worn on its own. The Thermal Cloaking Jacket – pictured here at the launch of the Vollebak Spaceshop – updates that idea with a far more engineered, elegant and flexible system. It’s a modular attachment system designed to lock the two layers together so they behave like a single cold-weather machine.A string of loop tabs along the front of the liner fasten over internal buttons on the shell. Two dedicated buttons at the back of the neck anchor the top of the liner, and snap tabs at the cuffs connect the two sleeves. Once docked, the shell and liner move as one piece.Undock it, and the liner operates as a fully independent jacket. So when Minority Report becomes reality – which clearly it’s going to – you can telepathically send them your thank you messages. The jacket comes in two colours: Metal and Rust. |
