Chapter 7 Purple World

With the matter of the planet settled and nothing more to do in system, Vlad continues on his long arduous journey, "seeding" systems after systems constantly expanding his empire.

Now a few years later Vlad now has 500 odd systems seeded and are in still in the early stages of development.

Yes, despite serval years has pass the earliest system Vlad has still hasn't entered phase 2 of the development plan that's just how long it took to develop a planet.

Of course this could be vastly accelerated but it would require constant stream of vast quantities of resources and a player to oversee development.

As Vlad doesn't have the vast resources to develop a planet nor the patient to oversee development of a barren rock, Vlad wisely choose to drop a seed module and let it develop itself.

Strictly speaking if he just had the resources and man power he can easily develop a planet to fully functioning status (stage 3) in about a year or two instead of half a century.

Now, it might seem strange to hear half a century to develop a planet especially for a game that's only 10 years old but you see the time in Final Frontier is greatly accelerated than real time.

It's about 2000 ish years in actual in-game time. It might seem a lot but in the early years of the game the most common form of FTL people used sleeper ship travelling sub-light speed.

Of course technology gradually advances as the time passes, the long 2000 year history it can be separated to 4 distinct Eras.

The sub-light Era, early teleporters Era, the jump bridges or stargates Era and finally the modern (various) Drives Era.

Player expansion was really slow during the first two Eras and it only starts to kick off during the Jump Bridge Era and things finally went over-geared in the Drives Era.

Anyway 50 years isn't that big of a deal in-game time. Naturally terraforming worlds will take much more time than that and won't be just a mere 50 years, but for a mining world or factory world to be at peak performance it's enough. This is of course "generally" speaking as planets comes in all shapes and sizes with different mineral compositions.

Anyway, it's still a long way to go before fully functional.

So as Vlad was contemplating this he arrives in the next system.

Looking at the preliminary scans one particular planet caught his eyes.

it's the 6th planet from the sun, one eye catching feature of the planet is the beautiful purple oceans and that fact that it has a breathable oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere with life signs signatures.

Suffice to say Vlad dispatched scout drones to take a look.

Unfortunately, only simple micro organisms were found, the seas are highly populated by a family of photosynthetic microbes called the Haloarchaea but beyond that there is no animal life to be recognized.

While a microbiologist might be fascinated by how the micro bacteria ecosystem works but is not much of a scientist as he is more interested in the aesthetics of the planet than anything else.

So after a more detailed scan it shows that the Haloarchaea contain the retinal protein, bacteriorhodopsin, in their purple membrane which carries out light-driven proton pumping, generating a proton-motive gradient across the cell membrane and driving ATP synthesis. The haloarchaeal purple membrane constitutes one of the simplest known bioenergetic systems for harvesting light energy. Which is why the sea is Purple.

Basically it means that photosynthetic bacteria used purple to do photosynthesis.

Remarkable isn't it? The whole sea is so infested with haloarchaeal that it makes the sea purple.

Sadly these purple organisms only habits the seas as no creature had yet to in habit the land. So the land is still the same brownish-red color.

Obviously Vlad already has an idea what to do with this world, he would be a fool to not see the writing on the walls as he plans to make this world a true purple world.

He plans to in populate the land with a wide variety of purple plants so when viewed from orbit it whole world is purple, thus he named the world Purpura Tyria.

Tyrian purple, also known as Phoenician purple, royal purple, imperial purple or imperial dye. In the ancient past there was a place called Tyria in Essos. It lies across the Smoking Sea from Oros and is connected by Valyrian road to the city of Valyria, which lies to the south of the island.

It is said that Tyria produces the finest purple dye in the ancient world and is highly sought after. It is said that the color is so expensive that only kings and Emperors could afford them.

Nice name isn't it?

Vlad pat himself in the back for his great idea before launching seed modules to the planet.