Talk:Searchlight/Archives/2012

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)

Further edition: I deleted the alleged incident with searchlights during April 1945. It was nothing but black PR, apart from the point that there were no references. —Preceding unsigned comment added by ABCD135 (talk • contribs) 13:04, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

I've changed the WWII section back to something approximating its state in 2006. The linked source on searchlight use (skylighters.org) is pretty explicit on how searchlights worked as part of antiaircraft defenses, and height-finding is not one of those ways. Neither of the sources that Kadin2048 provided actually mentions the word "searchlight." Chelt (talk) 19:12, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Batman

Batman has the "batman signal" search light too!

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Lighthouses?

Shouldn't there be some mention of the most important civilian application? Mat Teja (talk) 22:20, 30 August 2012 (UTC)