Batman Technology

So next up is Batman, I went over and over different ideas on what to do with Batman and what I have is to go over what makes Batman so damn cool and that is his toys.

We all know Bruce Wayne is richer than god and spends his money like it is going out of style so I want to explore some of his crime fighting tools and see if they were current with the times or perhaps a little bit ahead of their time.

First up is the car, the Batmobile. His Batman’s earliest adventures it was just a souped up roadster.
















Now this is back before the Batmobile had an extensive crime lab, a sweet bat-shaped battering ram and death ray. Back in the day, Batman’s ride was a normal car that he used to get from point A to point B that is just how he rolled. Most of his early cars also were had a convertible top, you know so he could have his cape waving in the breeze.




















Next up is the Batplane which back in the golden age was known as the Bat-Gyro. This site http://www.jefflewis.net/autogyros.html
Has some great info on the autogyro and how they work. I am just going to mine what I need from it.


First off, the autogyro made its first flight on January 17, 1923. The autogyro was invented by Juan de la Cierva. As you can see by the picture the autogyro was half plane, half helicopter.
Autogyros had the potential for vertical take off and landing. In August of 1933, experiments were begun on a C.30 in this new method of takeoff, which came to be known as a jump takeoff. The C.30, besides being the first autogyro to make a successful jump takeoff, was notable for another aspect as well. It was the first autogyro to use direct control. Direct control was a method where the pilot tilted the rotor instead of a rudder and ailerons. This greatly simplified the control of the aircraft, as well as the design. A pilot now had one control for yaw, pitch, and roll, and designers only needed to design that one control. In the C.30 and later autogyros of comparable size, this consisted of a bar connected directly to the rotor hub that extended into the cockpit. For larger machines, the controls of the pilot were mechanically linked to the rotor hub. The C.30 also proved to be the most popular production autogyro ever designed, with more than 180 of them being built. On June 26, 1935, the Breguet-Dorand 314 was the first successful helicopter to fly. It incorporated many of the features developed for autogyros, such as collective and cyclic pitch control. On December 8, 1941, Igor Sikorsky's V.S.300 flew, another of the first successful helicopters. The V.S.300 was only a test aircraft, but led to the VS-316, a more refined helicopter using the same principles. The U.S. Army ordered the VS-316, and 400 of these aircraft were produced along with the R-5 and R-6, two other Sikorsky helicopters of similar design. Early autogyros, although they had a higher speed envelope than airplanes, had a higher drag and so were not as efficient at higher speeds, and absolutely could not attain the maximum speeds of the faster airplanes. Although helicopters had a smaller speed envelope than autogyros, they were capable of hovering, and their envelope could fill the role that airplanes couldn't. In other words, anything an autogyro could do what could be done by another aircraft.

So the question you have to ask is why did the Batman creative team choose the autogyro for the Batplane, this is a plane that never really caught on at all so why use it? I don’t know and I am too lazy to find out so I will make up an answer. I would guess that the autogyro with its helicopter and plane capabilities served a two-in-one function for the stories. An added bonus was instead of having to draw two types of aircraft they only had to draw one. Even when Batman switch to a plane it still had the capability of sprouting helicopter rotors so it could hover which would support the theory of having an all-in-one plane that could serve whatever function the writer needed. It looks cool as hell and would be pretty intimidating.


Up next is Batman’s early use of night vision. Batman in the early 1940’s had some red night goggles he slipped on over his cowl. This is made even cooler when you find out that the first use of night vision in the military was not until the 1950’s. Now there was night glasses that were used in World War Two but they were huge with lens in diameter of 56mm and certainly did not look like this:



Now we all know what night vision does but according to this site;

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/nvg.htm

“An NVG phosphor screen is purposefully colored green because the human eye can differentiate more shades of green than other phosphor colors.”

So Batman was off on the color of his night vision but was about ten years ahead of the military, another reason Batman is the balls.