Visual Purple (Department of Living Technologies)
  • Posted On: Dec 2 2001 3:02am
* * * * James McKell had been reading reports, dissecting eyes and eye nerves for the past three weeks. It was about time for the Chief of Sienar Fleet Systems Department of Living Technology (DLT) to make a breakthrough.
* * * * The past Corellian noble, crime lord, and Peace Brigadier had been trying to recreate the eye in a form of a living ship sensor package. The work was much more complex than just extracting a being’s eye. Rather, McKell and his assistants had to figure out how to first recreate the eye, connect the eye to a central brain, get blood to the eye and brain, and transfer the sights to a conventional, or unconventional, view screen.
* * * * Reconstructing the eye was the easy part. Getting it to work was the hard part. McKell had started from the inner most layer of the eye and worked his way out.
* * * * The retina was constructed first. The rod cells were arranged in an ‘X’, stretching across all ends of the retina. These cells were important, because without them, the sensor package would hardly be able to see. Only a few tens of billions of these were established within the sensor package; but inside the macula of the sensor package’s retina, hundreds of billions of cone cells were organized. These cone cells would be able to show images in color, and in very high detail.
* * * * Second, the uveal tract was shaped. Series of veins and arteries intertwined all over this section, providing blood to all parts of the sensor package. The ciliary body of the eye was also fine-tuned for focusing.
* * * * Since it would be hard for one eye to be able to see both extremely far (millions of clicks), multiple sensor eye packages would have to be installed on ships, some with small ciliaries and others with large ciliaries for extreme distance and close distance respectively.
* * * * A red iris wrapped around the black pupil. In human eyes, light allowance could change up to 30 times, but in the sensor package the iris was sculpted to change the amount of allowable light up to three million times. This was necessary since intense explosions were frequent in space battles.
* * * * The sclera was applied lastly, a film layer including the cornea. Muscles also attached to this, allowing the sensor package to rotate a full 360 degrees in all directions.
* * * * Through many optic nerves, the eye connected to a central brain that could operate at 3.83 Trillion operations per second, to the power of fifteen. But all of this alone was worth nothing except a third place award at County Science Fair. The eye was missing one important item: Visual Purple.
* * * * Through the countless days, McKell and his lab had been unable to reproduce the enzymes necessary to send the proper electrical impulses to the brain, which in turn would relay into a visual display for flight crews. Formally named Rhodopsin, the chemical broke down light into electrical impulses.
* * * * Vitamin A!
* * * * That Vitamin was necessary for proper vision. Finally, Rhodopsin could be formed! McKell, using a chemical reaction computer program, shone light images of different colors over Vitamin-A and scotopsin—another part of Visual Purple.
A purple haze emitted off of the two objects and then routed through a nerve tube and produced an identical image. As the real image moved, so did the copy of the image.
Breakthrough accomplished.
McKell filed a report, his department getting to work immediately on constructing the necessary films to recreate Visual Purple and then applying it to the retina.

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The Department of Living Technologies, a subsidiary of Sienar Fleet Systems, would like to announce that the first organic technology, The Red Eye, has been prototyped and is beginning further development until the eventual creation of an organic starship is accomplished. The Red Eye, chaired by Chief of DLT James McKell, is a living ship sensor package. The recreation of the enzyme Visual Purple is expected to lead to even greater bio-technology gains.

The Red Eye sensor package is expected to be ready for ship addons in fifteen OOC days, though that time is bound to change.

The Department of Living Technologies appreciates your continued interest in scientific advancements in the field of biotechnology.

--James McKell, Chief Scientist--