Search the Community

So, I just watched(listened to?) the SP4 shardcast, and the discussion has me thinking about cosmere space travel, and how it will work. first off, its hard for me to imagine that any merchant, military, or travel in general, would opt for the danger of the voids of space, lightyears of travel, over what takes a few months to walk in shadesmar. but then that got me thinking about what shadesmar really is. As far as I understand it, shadesmar is a reflection of the collective cognitive view of the world, sort of inverted or abstracted in some ways. right now, the common knowledge of the regular people of the cosmere, not our min charcters but the normal citzens, doesn't entirely understand space and planets as a concepts yet. and, I think notably, we haven't seen shadesmar in any of the storys where they do. the general concept is that if you walk far enough in a direction, you'll get to a location. oceans are also a concept, a barrier to that physical travel, and their raw concept is also included in pretty much every place in shadesmar we have seen. so, I guess what I'm asking, is do we think it's possible, that once the majority of the cosmere understands space travel, that shadesmar will start to reflect that in its physical reflection of the world? and while i think, even if this did occur, the "space" in shadesmar wouldn't reflect the same distance as the physical world, it would explain why they would need to start using space travel instead of some elsecalling connection perpindicularty shenanigens. and i know that its hard to get between realms, but its also really hard to travel between solar systems. even with any kind of time dilation bullcrap they could pull, shadesmar, in the way it is right now, would be to convenient a avenue to not explore, and attempt to find easy ways to travel to and from the physical plane in any location. my second question is, propulsion. we have seen a few spaceships now, but we really don't know how they work, because the pov's we see them from are for the most part from a distance. do we expect several types of space travel, for each culture, or one type of fuel, some sort of pure raw investiture? I could see some sort of engine based of steel pushing or iron pulling labor to generate energy, or them doing some electromagnet propulision, and on the rosharan side, I'm sure there re some conection or elsecalling, maybe even fabrial stuff that they base everything off of, because i can't imagine lashings work efficiently when there's no gravity to redirect. elantris side (can't remember the planet name) will almost certainly go the raw investiture route, and awakening can really do some crazy things so i can imagine them being self sufficient. I kinda wanna steer clear of space fight discussion because... that is just a whole other beast entirely, but im really curious to hear other poeples thoughts on this cus i don't hear it talked about often