Fractal Armour

Fractal armour is an engineered material built to absorb large amounts of entropic radiation, preventing it from harming people or property. It is an obsidian-like black crystalline with an adamantine lustre. Its basic principle of operation is a crystalline structure that has many minute fractal variations, i.e. it is very information-dense. As e-rad enters, it is trapped ("labyrinthed") inside the material, which dissipates it as heat. It is used anywhere where e-rad exposure is a risk, such as in anomaly defense and containment systems, in shielding near hyporine thrusters, and in exosuits. Reflecting the fact that manufacturing fractal armour requires nanotechnology only a select few corporations, including Voima Tech Industries, have access to, fractal armour is exceedingly expensive.

Fractal armour is useless for defending against conventional attacks, and for this reason must be placed behind existing conventional armour systems. Failure to do so exposes the armour to trivial destruction and completely defeats its integrity guarantees. Additionally, fractal armour is not a be-all, end-all solution to entropic radiation attacks; exposing fractal armour to entropic radiation past its capacity to dissipate results in overloading, where the crystal matrix begins to develop micro fractures, and continuing exposure may at any time result in explosive spalling, where the matrix detonates into hypersonic shrapnel. Some advanced exosuits mitigate this hazard by sandwiching fractal armour between two forcefields, but this doubles power consumption and so the second field is usually only switched after the system detects extensive fracturing.