Trope-a-Day: Invisibility Cloak

Invisibility Cloak: Well, true invisibility cloaks don’t exist for essentially the same reasons that you can’t have Stealth In Space for fear of roasting yourself, plus the double-blind effect.  But the ambioptic transceiver, a rather nifty piece of quantum nanotech for simultaneously transmitting and receiving photons across a respectably large bandwidth – coupled with a lot of expensive nanocomputer mesh – does let you build a pretty decent stealth suit (fast movement may cause some distortion while the mesh catches up with new information) for visible light and many radar bands, and even brief bursts of infrared stealth if you can carry the required heat sinks around with you.

Actual invisibility cloaks (as opposed to full-body-form-fitting with-helmet-and-mask stealth suits) do exist, but they’re – due to the difficulty of managing them in such a way as to keep yourself entirely covered all the time – a fashion item, not anything used by people who need stealth professionally.  As such, most of those just cover visible light with the usual brief extensions into the ultra/infra bands.