re: #43 Dread Pirate Ron

I’ll be the old curmudgeon and point out that ALON is a new material working on a very old discovery. Namely, that Aluminum oxides can be transparent to visible light.

Sapphires are aluminum oxide, and clear natural ones were prized, until it was discovered how to make sapphires inexpensively.

I’m pretty sure that the Star Trek story inclusion of “transparent aluminum” was intending to present the metal as transparent, not aluminum oxide.