Talk:Searchlight

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[edit] General

This about as uninformative a page of Wiki that you can get stating the obvious with enormous authority. Questions: how do search lights work? What is the lens system? How powerful are they? How many were built? Who operated them? What different technologies are (were) employed in them? At what voltage did/do they work? What effect did they have?

[edit] World War II

I did a little updating to the WWII section of the article. I thought the whole sentence about radar was a non sequitur, so I removed it. My understanding is that the main purpose of searchlights during the war was less to determine the position of bombers per se (except by just making them easier for the gunners to see), than to determine their altitude. A pair of searchlights spaced a certain distance apart -- say a mile -- could be used to estimate the altitude of an aircraft if both lights were aimed at it, and their azimuth and elevation recorded. Basically, they are used like big theodolites. It's important to know the elevation when using early-war AA artillery, because the shells have time-delay fuses which need to be set so that they explode above or near the aircraft, hopefully filling them with shrapnel. Here are some links (I didn't think they necessarily needed to be included in the article, though): [1] [2] I'm pretty sure that searchlights were made obsolete fairly quickly after the introduction of radar fire-control and the VT fuse. --Kadin2048 05:08, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Batman

Batman has the "batman signal" search light too!