Do you by any chance have a Wavien Collar? It makes all the differance (it doubles the luminance of small LEDs in combination with aspheric lenses).
No, rhodium is used precisley for this reason - it's very robust. Optically it's not as good as other coatings (only 75% reflectance in the visible spectrum).
Aluminium is the most fragile coating (it will degrade under UV), but the cheapest one with high reflectance (90% reflectance in the visible spectrum).
There are coatings like "enhanced rhodium" which are the best of both worlds. There are more expensive though (as are large mirrors in general).
If you want to use a cable to power your light - go ahead. Nobody will stop you. I wouldn't worry so much about that.
1) yeah I have a collar, that's what boosted me from 900k lux to 1.46m lux
2) cool, now I know, rhodium it is
3) For a handheld one like my throw LED one probably not, but for this HID one I definitely will, I just build a nice tiny battery supply inside a pelican 1120 with a really nice cable and connector.
Battery case in one hand (or backpack) and flashlight in the other will help relieve weight from one arm for long carrying sessions
4) I just got an email back from Schiederwerk, apparently they only mass produce their ballasts when they get an order for many of them from a company, and it isn't cost efficient for them to build only one.
I guess I could have asked them to add 1 unit for me to the next company that orders a bulk order, but I doubt it would end up below $500 anyway so it's easier to stick with the HBX76 which Ra already confirmed works great.
5) I just realized I've been calculating lux and cd wrong this whole time, and my numbers don't really mean anything because the farther I take my measurement, the more cd I get.
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb...ula-for-calculating-throw-using-aspheric-lens
I should be using this instead:
http://nightsword.com/uniformbeamcalc/
I tested this with a small aspheric flashlight, I got 12000 lux at 1m which is 12000cd, but 4500 lux at 2m which is 18000cd.
A point source of light should be 3000 lux at 2m because of the 1/r^2 equation.
Maybe if I took my measurements at 100m I would get 10 million cd? xD
I will take some longer distance measurements soon and measure the diameter of the spot so I can calculate the TRUE candela / candlepower/ lux at 1m / whatever you want to call it