What’s under the Ablative Armor’s tiles?
There’s still a fair amount we don’t know about Iron Man’s Ablative Armor. For instance, what’s underneath all those tiles? To tell the truth, we don’t even how many layers of tiles there are. We know there have to be at least two, because when one tile is chipped off the next one below it snaps into place.
But the word “next” is key here. Yes, it’s possible that the ablative tiles may only be two tiles deep, but “next” implies (to me, at least) that the stack is greater than just two. I’d guess there are four; after that the suit would be too bulky. (Of course, in all honesty we don’t know if the tiles are 0.5mm thick or 6mm thick, which would have an effect on the number of possible layers.)
The ever-fading tiles of the Ablative Armor Iron Man
One thing you’ll notice is that there’s no structure for holding the tiles in place. There are no springs that push the next layer up, or a 3-D lattice that the tiles can move through. If this structure exists, we can assume the in-universe explanation is that it got knocked away during the battle. In our universe, I think we can agree that it would have been highly impractical for the artist to draw them, in much the same way that the tiles fade.
No matter how many tiles deep the Model 23 goes, there still has to be some sort of Iron Man suit underneath it all. This suit contains all of the electronics that are associated with most of Tony’s suits. So what does it look like under all those tiles? Whatever it is, it’s gray.
Those are details of the last two panels of Iron Man #416, showing a place on the armor that has had every layer of polymer tiles knocked away. An alien nanobot climbs up the Ablative Suit and infects the armor in the only place it can; it can’t inject the tiles since each is coded to destroy it. Because the alien scorpion thing is techno-organic, it infects the suit and Tony underneath.
The hit that takes out the Ablative Suit’s kiln
In those panels, the tiles appear so thin that Tony must be down to a single layer all over the suit. Perhaps the forcefield rearranges the tiles so that every part of the suit has at least one layer, taking parts that are four layers thick and giving them to areas that have zero tiles. It seems that all the top-layer tiles are gone and the entire suit (minus that shoulder) has only one layer left. (The kiln was offline by this point in the story, meaning no more tiles could be made.)
The gray shoulder is only seen in a few other panels, including these two where the forcefield seems to be defending that area in particular. It makes sense, since that’s the only part not covered in tiles at that time.
Does the forcefield only protect the gray Iron Man undersuit, leaving the tiles to fend for themselves? This panel says no.
At first I thought that the forcefield was low on energy and had to concentrate on the one part of the suit that was completely unguarded. Then I realized that Tony would want the parasite to bite into the tiles and infect itself. The only thing he wanted to protect was the gray underskin.
Anyway, the Ablative Suit’s flexible core gray. There’s your answer.
