On Fri, Sep 05, 2014 at 10:10:06AM -0400, Kurt Feltenberger wrote:
> Engineer 2:  "You realize he was an Eliyo and can't discern colors..."
> Engineer 1:  "Shit."

It could easily happen even with sophonts who see colours just fine,
or even better than baseline humans.  Just not in the same way.  There
could be different weightings of wavelengths they can see, different
ranges visible, and so on.

For example, a member of some species (or even subtype of modified
human) sees some way into near-infrared as well as what we call
visible.  On an Imperial standard display screen reflecting/emitting
almost no infrared, they learned the standard words for "red", "blue",
etc.  Maybe with some confusion occasionally, but nothing obviously
wrong.

In the more broad spectrum light from the conduit illumination, the
yellow pigment happens to reflect quite a lot of near-IR, while the
red one doesn't.  So the yellow one looks to them rather redder.
*SNIP*

- Tim