The Engineer Online - Reducing the scale of drag

I always like posting about coatings for ship hulls. Previous posts looked at more chemical methods to prevent barnicles, etc. I think I even posted about the vorticies created by dolphin skin. The method linked above uses a mechanical method. They created a coating that mimicks the placoid scales of sharks "by creating a plastic and rubber composite coating made from billions of raised diamond-shaped patterns, each measuring 15 microns. Each diamond also contains seven raised ribs."