Ablative Armor
The concepts of ablative armor are both real and fictional, this deals with them both.
Ablative armor is a material that is designed to protect a ship when the shields are down. It is designed to be destroyed when hit, basically vaporizes to protect the ship.
Tanks use something similar, called reactive armor (uses layers of explosives to stop armor-piercing ammo). There is also something called regenerative ablative armor, which is able to regenerate and thus take more hits. The regenerate ablative armor does use power though, so it is similar to regular shields in that regard.
The mass of ablative armor plays a big part in how much damage it is able to absorb, even a 10% difference in mass once you reach a certain point can add about 100% more damage protection (in fiction, we’ll see how this work in real life when ablative armor becomes a reality).
Weapons fire isn’t the only thing that ablative armor can accomplish. It is commonly seen in space crafts, nuclear warheads, inside rockets. The process of blowing could allow the ablated vapor to push away gases from the missile or ship, after the armor is state changed into a vapor.
In the last episodes of Voyager, Admiral Janeway runs from a Klingon ship to bring Voyager info, new torpedoes and ablative armor. Hopefully we will have workable ablative armor before the year 2371 (when it was first introduced in the Star Trek world).
It is suggested that Fullerene would be a good choice for real creation of ablative armor in the future, although it is still early on and not easy to create yet. When futuristic type weapons like beam, particle and energy weapons become more prominent, we’ll start to see a huge need for ablative armor. Space colonies and ships will have demand for it because of it’s heat and radiation.
