AndyC wrote:I got hit once with a strobing weapons-light during some building penetration/ dark room-clearance training. The strobe was used correctly ie. he lit me up with a burst of pulses and released it before he moved to another position...
If used wisely, strobes can be an awesome feature - my spatial awareness was totally destroyed for probably 4-5 seconds.

I wasn't a big fan of strobing tac lights when they first started to become popular. One reason was that many required fine-motor adjustments to switch back and forth from steady-light to strobe under stress, and another was that using the strobe mode for target identification also slightly disorients the "strober," who needs to move instantly upon switching off the light.
But I'd played around with them mainly in moderately-low-light conditions (e.g., a typical urban house with streetlights bleeding into the rooms) as opposed to very-low-light conditions. About a year ago, like you, I got lit up by a nice, bright CREE LED in practice in very-low-light conditions, and I was clueless for a few seconds, as well. This was in a dark warehouse-like structure, so there were racks up to a ceiling that was about 30 feet high. I noticed even more of a vertical disorientation than lateral: all I could see were afterburner images of these three-story tall racks seemingly moving around me all on their own.
Very effective force multiplier if used correctly. I think it does its best job under darker-the-better conditions, and with a hefty lumen rating on the light. When trying it myself as the "strober," I personally found that, while knowing what was coming certainly helped, the best way for me to do it was to decide where I was going to move afterward, hit it, absorb the scene (ID the target), close my eyes as quickly as possible, release the buttcap switch, open my eyes, and move. That kept the strobe on for a few flashes after I'd closed my eyes, and while my night vision still went slightly haywire, it seemed the fewer number of strobe flashes the better; wasn’t much worse than a steady light.
On the receiving end, even though I knew I was gonna get strobed, not knowing precisely when meant that every time we ran it, I still got a face full.
Nothing to back me up here, but I’d also suspect that trying to target the source of a light would be more difficult on a strobe than a steady on-then-off light. Even if you were at an angle to the direction of the strobe, it still seems to take a moment longer to comprehend the location of the source. At least it does for me...but I’m kinda slow anyway.