Anything about nuclear war just scares the shit out of me. It is fascinating but extremely scary. It is the first time I have seen this and even the helmets looks scary.
Yep deeply scary. Reading the bit about the eye patch really sent a chill down my spine - "Oh in case you are permanently blinded in one eye, take the eye patch off and you can continue to fly your plane until you have to crash land it somewhere since all the airports have been totally destroyed and everyone you know was incinerated. Sir yes sir."
I don't understand how these can work. How can the shade darken faster than the speed of light? Or is it that it darkens faster than enough energy can strike the eyeball -- you'd see a flash, but it would be super short and not long enough to totally cook your eye, perhaps only partially?
The article mentions that it's mainly about the speed of transition, though also the amount of darkness -- the nuclear blast is a lot brighter than a weld!
TLDR: the military goggles switch much faster, are more transparent in the "open" state, and fail to a safe state if they lose power.
Auto-darkening welding helmets just use an LCD panel + polarizing filter in their window, versus the PLZT + polarizer in the bomber eye-protection. As gumby mentioned in their reply, the speed of transition is very different - 1/20,000 second for the LCD panel versus "a ten-millionth of a second" for the military helmets.
The welding helmets that I've looked at sandwich it with a pane of what looks like Schott BG38 or BG39 glass in order to also filter out UV and NIR, because most polarizing filters are transparent in those wavelengths.[1] The military equivalent seems to use something similar ("sandwiched with a near infrared blocking material"), but the article doesn't describe it in detail.
The military goggles fail to a safe state.[2] I believe that welding helmets fail to an unsafe state (they are transparent if they lose power), but it would be nice to have someone else confirm that.
The military goggles also have 20% transmittance in the "open" state, according to the article. The Harbor Freight helmet has a "resting" state equivalent to a #4 welding shade, which is about 6.25% transmittance.[3]
[1] This is part of the ANSI Z87.1 spec that good auto-darkening helmets meet.
[2] "When linked to an electric current, the lenses are clear. But any dangerous flash of light, such as lightning or a nuclear blast, instantaneously breaks the circuit. This causes the lenses to go black, protecting the vision of anyone wearing the helmet."
I doubt it's "couldn't be bothered" and more "it's not worth it". Besides the development costs, there is probably a hit to revenue without ad personalisation and analytics.
Personally a find it much better than pretending to comply as many large sites do.
No geoblocking here from Sweden, possibly related to me blocking all third-party content by default. I had to enable a single domain to see the images, the site was unstyled but with text and images I get everything I want and nothing more.
