Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-2165692-20140425203121/@comment-24590102-20140824060358

Datadragon Odahviing wrote: I like that argument, Chimp with ciggies. Only quantifiable and qualifiable fact must be taken into account, not blind words.

Yeah, guess we all missed out on the fact that Falmer helms and falmer heavy helms do have some form of visibility. Something you picked up.

But that opens up another can of worms. The helms look opaque, so what allows us to see?

I've long wondered that about mirror coatings   :^)

I think the enchantable nature of these helms rules out an enchantment being the cause.

It could be the incorporation of a semi-transparent material with one side reflective and the other side non-reflective. Effectively, a device like this would make the eyes much more difficult to target - especially with magical light flashes which would interfere badly with night vision (and those Falmer do love their magic). Most of the light (above a given threshold if the right treatment is picked) would be reflected and a proportion absorbed. That absorbed proportion could, with the right combination of potentials, adjust the degree of absorption/reflection according to intensity - depending on the material and very hypothetically. Such a material would be more grey than mirror owing to the necessary amount of absorption which is needed to alter key potentials in the lattice. A happy coincidence is the fact that the inside colour of the Falmer helm just happens to correspond to the colour of the non-reflective side of a typical mirror-coating.

That this may be a natural characteristic of chaurus chitin raises the question of whether it is a mechanism for the regulation of internal temperature of the chaurus. It would also explain why the chaurus, being a subterranean organism, is not pasty white in colour but dark grey. I think these explanations of mine are stretching things, however. There are possibly more relevant and more parsimonious explanations which do not resort to second-guessing the game designers. For example, small aperture + lenses would do the trick - something about the size of those tiny green beads mounted on the Falmer helms about where the eye openings would be.