Limits of Pewter Compounding

[+ILuvHats]

What's the limit of Pewter compounding, because I couldn't think of one, really.  Basically, your body is expanding due to increased muscle mass.  My original thought was that eventually your heart couldn't keep pumping blood to such a huge body, but your hearts a muscle too, so it could become larger to compensate.  You're skeletal structure stays intact, I assume, so is the limit the point at which your bones start fracturing from the sheer pressure of thousands of pounds of muscle exerting pressure on it, or is there a more obvious limit I'm missing?

[ForcesOfNoodles]

Yup.

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Strength! Sazed thought, tapping his pewtermind for more power. His body became so massive that he feared splitting his own skin. Fortunately, his metalminds had been built to expand, braces and rings that didn't connect on one side so that they could bend. Still, his bulk was daunting. He probably wouldn't have been able to walk or maneuver with such size—but it didn't matter, for the koloss had already knocked him to the ground.

 

[King Cole]

Maybe once your muscles grow so much that they impede your movement? This is the first thing that comes to mind for me

[Yata]

7 hours ago, King Cole said:

Maybe once your muscles grow so much that they impede your movement? This is the first thing that comes to mind for me

This.

The structure below isn't affected so your bones remain the same size. Therefore there will be a point where the muscles become an obstacle to the movements and beyond that the muscle itself will stop you from moving at all

[King Cole]

1 hour ago, Yata said:

This.

The structure below isn't affected so your bones remain the same size. Therefore there will be a point where the muscles become an obstacle to the movements and beyond that the muscle itself will stop you from moving at all

That would look terrifying

[The One Who Connects]

On 9/19/2017 at 7:32 PM, ILuvHats said:

or is there a more obvious limit I'm missing?

Me and Hwiles have had this conversation before.

On 6/5/2017 at 2:34 PM, The One Who Connects said:

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@The One Who Connects, Pretty sure I can't outright prove you wrong, but we have some indications that tapping pewter wouldn't be bound by skin-stretchyness IMO: Sazed's skin doesn't hang off him when he stores strength and he grows many times larger while tapping without ripping his skin, or even reporting discomfort.  If there's a limit to how much pewter someone can tap at once I would assume that it would be defined by the simple practicality that they can only be so massive/muscley and still be able to move.

@Hwiles, I could make the case that the nature of Feruchemy protecting you from the effect of your own power prevents the skin from ripping, and that since it only protects up to a certain extent, you would start to snap once you go any further, but there's no basis either way without further examples of F-Pewter.

Both of your suggestions make sense though, hrmm...  Agree to disagree that our 3 potential scenarios would only happen if someone tapped far more than would be physically practical?

After all, the practical limit doesn't necessarily have to be the same as the hard limit.

There are two types of "limits" to Feruchemical Powers:

• The Practical Limit: Where you are physically too large to actually move around with any speed or skill. Your size impedes your range of motion and walking becomes a rather clunky exercise. (Think of a big buff dude walking around like C-3PO)
• The Physical Limit: There are like 3 of these beyond your bone crushing idea.
  • You get so big that your skin starts to rip/tear like the Koloss.
  • Muscle constriction and friction between blood&veins prevents blood from actually flowing.
  • Super Pewter-enhanced heart pumps blood with enough force to rupture blood vessels.

[+hwiles]

I love when this question comes up because it really highlights the fact that feruchemy does ultimately have limits, which is often overlooked by readers in my in my opinion.

In terms of maximizing physical strength, duralumin enhanced pewter has probably demonstrated the greatest potential on-screen. My back of the envelope calculations put Vin at roughly 10x the strength and durability of a typical adult human, which is enough to deadlift a small car. Of course, she was only able to sustain it for a few milliseconds, but she had also only swallowed a few milligrams of pewter. If she are 10,000x more, ie: a handful of beads, it stands to reason that she could keep going at hulk-level strength for several minutes.

[dashardie]

Also, if the heart becomes too big, it looses efficiency, so it isn't pumping as much blood with each beat, but is pumping with more pressure. This results in a more rapid heart beat and increased blood pressure, which can result in a heart attack

 

[AndrolGenhald]

On 9/21/2017 at 1:49 PM, hwiles said:

Of course, she was only able to sustain it for a few milliseconds, but she had also only swallowed a few milligrams of pewter. If she are 10,000x more, ie: a handful of beads, it stands to reason that she could keep going at hulk-level strength for several minutes.

Duralumin burns metals almost instantaneously, I don't think the pewter could last more than a second or two. She'd just be that much stronger for about the same amount of time.

[Calderis]

14 minutes ago, AndrolGenhald said:

Duralumin burns metals almost instantaneously, I don't think the pewter could last more than a second or two. She'd just be that much stronger for about the same amount of time.

It increases burn rate to a speed that is ridiculously fast, but it is still a burn rate. 

You'd have to swallow a LOT of pewter, but you could keep it going. 

[Foundation]

Probably the point where the muscles become so big that your head is squished between your shoulders. 

[AndrolGenhald]

3 hours ago, Calderis said:

It increases burn rate to a speed that is ridiculously fast, but it is still a burn rate. 

You'd have to swallow a LOT of pewter, but you could keep it going. 

You'd need a lot of duralumin as well. I can't remember, did we end up figuring out if it burns itself up too, or is it just really fast burning? I don't think Vin's stomach is big enough for minutes, or even one minute.

[Calderis]

17 minutes ago, AndrolGenhald said:

You'd need a lot of duralumin as well. I can't remember, did we end up figuring out if it burns itself up too, or is it just really fast burning? I don't think Vin's stomach is big enough for minutes, or even one minute.

Duralumin burns fast, but it doesn't burn itself up. Closest WoB I can find is this one. 

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Kaymyth (paraphrased)

I asked the question about chromium vs a Compounder with both invested and un-Invested metals in both their stomach and piercings.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

What it boils down to is this:

1) Yes, the piercings will get burned off.

2) The non-Invested metals go before the Invested ones. He said that because invested metals are harder to effect, it takes a little extra time and effort to get them to burn off. So a Leecher trying to clean out a Compounder would have to get a good grip and hang on for a few seconds.

3) Chromium burns about as quickly as duralumin, so if you're trying to burn off a lot of metals, it is possible to run out of chromium before your target is clean. This would probably only be an issue when dealing with larger pieces (like jewelry) rather than your standard metal-flakes-in-the-stomach deal.

 

[Steeldancer]

On 9/21/2017 at 2:49 PM, hwiles said:

I love when this question comes up because it really highlights the fact that feruchemy does ultimately have limits, which is often overlooked by readers in my in my opinion.

In terms of maximizing physical strength, duralumin enhanced pewter has probably demonstrated the greatest potential on-screen. My back of the envelope calculations put Vin at roughly 10x the strength and durability of a typical adult human, which is enough to deadlift a small car. Of course, she was only able to sustain it for a few milliseconds, but she had also only swallowed a few milligrams of pewter. If she are 10,000x more, ie: a handful of beads, it stands to reason that she could keep going at hulk-level strength for several minutes.

Limits? LIMITS? 

Not when you're Steeldancer 

[+hwiles]

Conventional wisdom is that duralumin doesn't burn itself up; the mechanics are theoretical, relatively complex, and have at least a handful of other threads that have discussed them at length.

9 hours ago, AndrolGenhald said:

Duralumin burns metals almost instantaneously, I don't think the pewter could last more than a second or two. She'd just be that much stronger for about the same amount of time.

Our currently imperfect understanding of how duralumin works implies that it accelerates the burn-rate of other metals, ie: it doesn't burn them up instantaneously.  Otherwise burning duralumin and steel would almost certainly always kill the user, as it would result in a short-lived burst of infinite g-force...which is silly.

The nature of the burn-rate acceleration factor is fair game for debate and speculation.  I've contended in the past that it is probably linear-ish through screen-analyses of Vin's use of duralumin, however, to be perfectly fair, other sharders have pointed out that we've never seen someone swallow a large quantity of duralumin or use duralumin after swallowing a large quantity of any metal.  It's totally possible the acceleration factor is quadratic or exponential.

However, I believe that this would completely break the magic system and also be inconsistent with Sanderson's descriptions of how leechers and nicrobursts work.

It would open up the possibility of a steel misting with feruchemic+allomantic iron hemalurgic spikes and an allomantic pewter hemalurgic spike to become a city-leveling weapon if they had a nicroburst friend.  IE: They swallow all of the iron they can, nicroburst-compound it to feruchemic iron, then swallow as much steel and pewter as they can, tap iron and burn steel+pewter, and once their nicroburst touches them, they topple everything in front of them.

If duralumin accelerates other metals at a nonlinear rate, then presumably, Vin could have shot coins at inquisitors hard and fast enough that they couldn't have reacted to them before being hit by just swallowing more metals.  The fact that she didn't do this leads me to believe that it wouldn't have worked.  Allomancers appear to have trouble breaking the sound barrier with steel-pushing, and Vin never creates a sonic boom as near as I can tell.  I am led to believe then that an allomancer who swallowed 10,000 times more pewter than is normally contained in a regular vial, ie: by swallowing several handfuls of powdered metal, would be able to sustain a duralumin enhanced pewter burn for roughly 10,000 times longer than normal.  I'll grant you that this is technically speculative though.