I just discovered this thread!
as i mentioned in the LT1 topic, the intention of designing & building this lantern is to create what is very lacking on the market for a good, portable, 360-degree lantern-light that has a run time high enough to last a 3 ~ 4 day weekend of use camping & off-grid/emergency use without the need of changing batteries or need recharging.
As i spent weeks traveling in areas with no electricity, camping, expeditions, wilderness explorations, back-woods search & rescue operations at base camps needing reliable portable area lighting from dusk to dawn non-stop, i got frustrated in the lack of a good off-grid/light lanterns available on the market that didn’t have any good run times on higher light outputs, any good modes, lack of good CRI tints, all are made out of plastic, used heavy,leaky, alkaline batteries that were always dead after storage and ruined many lanterns, the list goes on with the lacking of features for a good 360 degree light source.
I live in an area where the electricity fails quite often in the winter months, and sometimes for 3 or 4 days at a time. The current offering slew of 60 to 100 dollar big, bulky, plastic LED lanterns on the market today just don’t cut it. Believe me i have tested & bought more than most people ever have. As a 10 year SAR tech coordinator for ground search & rescue we have spend long full nights at base camps in the wilderness swearing at cheap lanterns that are dead after 4 or 5 hours on the batteries, and destroying our eyes with the nuclear-blue tint LEDs of most of them at the same time. I am a collector & user of Gas lanterns too, but they have limitations in so many ways i can explain in a novel. After the years of cursing on the market’s “best” LED lanterns for having low run times, horrible tint, horrible modes. bulky size, cheap looking plastic bodies, lack of rechargeable ability, getting stuck with dead, leaking Alkaline batteries, bad overheating problems or lack of good features from the manufacturers who tried to build a good lantern, the list goes on. I wanted to design & build a lantern (as opposed to a good LED flashlight using a diffuser as i tested all that too and has other limitations & drawbacks) to fill that “void” in the area light/lantern/illumination source segment that i could not find to fill the needs for campers, cabins, remote-living, power-outages, off-grid home-steaders, emergencies for long term, the list goes on. In the flashlight world we literally have thousands of great lights out there for every purpose of making darkness into light in one direction either it be a flood or throw beam application, but there is NOT a single good all around 360, small, portable, good quality, sturdy, area light designed to have long run times, good color rendering, great tint, rechargeability, renewable reliable light source that can do all that at the same time. This is where i spent long days working on, testing and refining a lantern to fill that void.