Limits of Feruchemy

[WandererNearby]

What are the limits of storing with feruchemy? I have the intuitive guess that you couldn't make yourself have negative weight using iron metalminds or negative speed using steel. What about brass? Could you survive being set on fire or being cooked alive in an oven by filling enough metalminds? A more extreme example involves landing a space ship. Could a brass feruchemist survive the heat of reentry by filling a massive metalmind with all of the heat they are experiencing? I.e. they survive just wearing a brass suit while falling or are in a Space Shuttle type ship that is made with large amounts of brass to use as a metalmind. Is this possible? It seems ridiculous but I do wonder...

[StanLemon]

The only limit we are pretty sure of with storing a trait is that you can't fully store any given trait. It seems you need to have some positive amount still even while storing. Theoretically you can store heat to avoid being burned or cooked alive. 

[TheWanderer]

Another limit of Feruchemy is that it does not give equal returns if you pull out an attribute in larger amounts than you stored it, due to the compression of investiture. So for your example, lets say I spent six months filling two different brass minds with heat, I likely could burn that all in a few min in space due to the sheer amount of heat I would continually need. If you had a full suit you may be able to stay out even longer, but still the sheer amount of time it would take to fill that metal mind would be immense. 

[NameIess]

31 minutes ago, TheWanderer said:

Another limit of Feruchemy is that it does not give equal returns if you pull out an attribute in larger amounts than you stored it, due to the compression of investiture. So for your example, lets say I spent six months filling two different brass minds with heat, I likely could burn that all in a few min in space due to the sheer amount of heat I would continually need. If you had a full suit you may be able to stay out even longer, but still the sheer amount of time it would take to fill that metal mind would be immense. 

Wouldn't space not actually take heat away from you as there are very few particles to steal heat?

[TheWanderer]

36 minutes ago, Nameless said:

Wouldn't space not actually take heat away from you as there are very few particles to steal heat?

If memory serves the vacuum of space is immensely cold and things can freeze almost instantly. But I could be wrong, as I admittedly am both terrified of and not particularly interested in space. 

[NameIess]

2 minutes ago, TheWanderer said:

If memory serves the vacuum of space is immensely cold and things can freeze almost instantly. But I could be wrong, as I admittedly am both terrified of and not particularly interested in space. 

Space is "cold" because there are no particles to carry energy. heat cannot be transferred to other particles if there are no other particles, so although space might have a low temperature, it won't actually freeze you. 

[TheWanderer]

17 minutes ago, Nameless said:

Space is "cold" because there are no particles to carry energy. heat cannot be transferred to other particles if there are no other particles, so although space might have a low temperature, it won't actually freeze you. 

Good to know, thanks for letting me know.

[Quantus]

Known limits:

• Feruchemical effects are all Internal effects
• Feruchemy has hard limits to how much you can Store at one time (ie only the actual weight you have, etc)
• Some Feruchemy has practical if situational limits to how much you can use.  For example, too much Strength and your muscled bloat so much you cannot move anymore. 
• Feruchemy will protect you from it's own effects but not "related" things.  So you cant be crushed under your own weight yet your bones arent any more durable or capable of resisting forces, and speed will not protect you from friction heat, etc.
• Steel Feruchemy has a hard limit per WOB, but he has not done the math and set the threshold yet.
•  

[HSuperLee]

My understanding is that feruchemy stores by percents, and since you can only store a trait you actually possess (thus humans not being able to store electroreception in a tinmind) if you actually hit 100% you'd have no trait to store and thus couldn't store it anymore. With that logic, you could theoretically get infinitely close to storing 100% of a trait by storing 99.9...%, but feruchemists likely have both a physical limit of at some point they'd start damaging their bodies from storing plus most probably don't have enough precision to actually store fractions of a percent at will. 

I also believe that there is a limit (albeit a very high one) where the body has taken in as much investiture as it safely can and trying to tap any more than that results in it being lost via turning into mist, this is what I believe happened when the Bands of Mourning were first used and the users body started giving off mist. I believe that was wasted investiture caused by hitting the body's upper limit.

[WandererNearby]

Here's my question about brass rephrased. Brass stores your body's heat, right? Well, if you were put into an oven, would you be able to store the heat from the oven into the metal mind and survive? On the one hand, yes, you should be able to because it's heat your body is experiencing therefore you can put into a metalmind. On the other hand, the heat from the oven isn't really a trait your body expresses so maybe you can't. We know that there is a limit to how much weight you can put into a metalmind because you can't store enough to become weightless. Is there a similar limit where you can only put the heat your body produces into a metalmind? 

About space and reentry, when this happens, you are interacting with the atmosphere in a way that generates a lot of heat (I'll attach a picture below to give you an idea). Like, enough heat to melt metal. Could a brass feruchemist just store all of that heat away before it could melt the metal? I.e. could you make that space capsule out of brass, stick a feruchemist on the outside, then have them store all of the heat that would be melting the capsule into the capsule as a metal mind?

Edited January 6, 2022 by DougTheRug

[Trusk'our]

On 1/6/2022 at 9:13 AM, DougTheRug said:

Here's my question about brass rephrased. Brass stores your body's heat, right? Well, if you were put into an oven, would you be able to store the heat from the oven into the metal mind and survive? On the one hand, yes, you should be able to because it's heat your body is experiencing therefore you can put into a metalmind. On the other hand, the heat from the oven isn't really a trait your body expresses so maybe you can't. We know that there is a limit to how much weight you can put into a metalmind because you can't store enough to become weightless. Is there a similar limit where you can only put the heat your body produces into a metalmind? 

About space and reentry, when this happens, you are interacting with the atmosphere in a way that generates a lot of heat (I'll attach a picture below to give you an idea). Like, enough heat to melt metal. Could a brass feruchemist just store all of that heat away before it could melt the metal? I.e. could you make that space capsule out of brass, stick a feruchemist on the outside, then have them store all of the heat that would be melting the capsule into the capsule as a metal mind?

I'm fairly certain you could survive pretty extreme temperatures with Feruchemical brass based on this quote.

Quote

Thoughtful Spurts

If tapping heat means your own body gets hotter, does it also mean you become immune to hot temperatures so long as you're tapping it, or should you fill heat and grow colder for that to happen?

Brandon Sanderson

As everything in Feruchemy, you become immune to the effects of the ability only. Like weight doesn't crush you, but at the same time doesn't have a net gain in strength. Growing colder, however, would be more helpful in this regard.

However, you do make a valid point; if your Brassmind(s) melt, you've got a serious problem, and I don't think that you can directly remove the heat from them since Feruchemy only directly alters your own self and not the external world.

I am certain you could survive inside an oven by carefully filling a Brassmind, though you would also need to worry about ventilation and smoke depending on the type of oven you were in (though I'm pretty sure that most are decent in this regard, so it's probably not that big of a deal).

Entering the atmosphere could be a little more problematic however, as the heat is caused by friction, and you may just end up getting your skin striped off even if you don't burn away. Your metalminds would be in serious danger of melting if you couldn't shield them from the heat somehow, and your oxygen would need to be taken care of as well, but Feruchemical cadmium could help there. Not to mention the whole landing thing, buy I suppose Feruchemical iron could fix that little issue.

Actually, if done correctly, a full Feruchemist, or at least someone with Feruchemical brass, iron, and cadmium could probably survive a reentry onto a planet, assuming that they can shield their metalminds from the heat of reentry by using their body, and that they don't get shredded by the friction of moving so fast through the atmosphere (I'm actually not sure if the friction would be that bad, I just wanted to make sure that all variable were accounted for).

[Kandrafish]

On 1/6/2022 at 9:13 AM, DougTheRug said:

Here's my question about brass rephrased. Brass stores your body's heat, right? Well, if you were put into an oven, would you be able to store the heat from the oven into the metal mind and survive? On the one hand, yes, you should be able to because it's heat your body is experiencing therefore you can put into a metalmind. On the other hand, the heat from the oven isn't really a trait your body expresses so maybe you can't. We know that there is a limit to how much weight you can put into a metalmind because you can't store enough to become weightless.* Is there a similar limit where you can only put the heat your body produces into a metalmind? ---I think it is heat produced and absorbed (i.e. from the sun). Someone correct me if I am wrong. This is the basis for my response.

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*---Ok... Here is my interpretation. If you store weight: the theoretical mass minimum is 0 lbs, but in reality there is a limit near lets say 1/8 of your body weight.

The air around you is heated by the oven and cooled by your skin, so any burns that you receive, would be moderated by how much the air is cooled by your skin. This is a thermodynamics problem that would require the heat capacity of your skin and air.

If you were to tap heat, the heat of the air and oven would burn you, but you would be immune to your own heat. This is the same as Wax not breaking his legs with his own weight, but if someone dropped a boulder on top of him, he would still be squashed.

Weight: goes from 0 lbs to infinity

Heat: goes from 0K (-460 Fahrenheit) to infinity... 

So, (1) if we assume 77 F or 25 C as room temperature or approximate external body temperature, (77+460)/8 = 67      67 F above absolute zero --> -393 F

So suppose you go as cold as -393 F, you would still feel all of the heat of the air around you, but you would not get frostbite. The question is... Would the air cooling around you, start to give you frost bite, and I think so...

2) You are in a furnace, The furnace tries to heat you, but your skin cools it, so now you can risk going to colder temperatures without risking cooling the air around you enough to harm yourself. In addition, the furnace at 977 F or 525 C say would give you an additional amount of heat where you could get really cold  and have the air reach an equilibrium that doesn't hurt you.

3) Eventually, the heat could get so high that you would receive burns anyway.

Finding actual thresholds for what would be too hot and what would be too cold to store would be a significantly complicated thermodynamics problem.

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About space and reentry, when this happens, you are interacting with the atmosphere in a way that generates a lot of heat (I'll attach a picture below to give you an idea). Like, enough heat to melt metal. Could a brass feruchemist just store all of that heat away before it could melt the metal? I.e. could you make that space capsule out of brass, stick a feruchemist on the outside, then have them store all of the heat that would be melting the capsule into the capsule as a metal mind?

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As far as I understand, if the spaceship were made of brass alone, that would not make it easier for the feruchemist to make it cold. Brass metal minds don't get hotter or colder when heat is stored in them. The person just gets hotter when they tap and colder when they store.

I think this is something that will be achieved with medallion-like arcanum and it could very well require specific metals, but I have no idea how that would work. I don't think a feruchemist could do it without doing something very weird. 

Taking a wild guess I would say something like having the feruchemist tap identity and make the spaceship part of his/ her identity might allow them to store heat for the shuttle. But, this is a WILD GUESS. I have no idea.

 

[+Bzhydack]

@Kandrafish I have very good solution for this problem.

What if Spaceshuttle itself would be Feruchemist? 

It is possible to spike computer hemalurgicly, also advanced enough AI in Cosmere can (and probably will) develop Soul, if would be seen as equal to humans (what is very easy to see happen). So we can use Hemalurgy or Medalion to give Spaceship Metalic Arts, and he would use them just fine (maybe only problem would be to have place for burning metals for Allomancy, but this is just construction problem)

[WandererNearby]

Quote

 I don't think that you can directly remove the heat from [brass metalminds] since Feruchemy only directly alters your own self and not the external world ...

@Trusk'our The issue I see here is that you might be able to remove heat from your metal minds because they're touching you. If you remove heat from your body by placing it into a metal mind and then absorb heat from the now-hotter-than-you metalmind, could you put that heat into the metal mind?

On 1/28/2022 at 9:56 PM, Trusk'our said:

Entering the atmosphere could be a little more problematic however, as the heat is caused by friction, and you may just end up getting your skin striped off even if you don't burn away.

Also, your point about friction is false. Heat from reentry is not from friction; it is from compression. That's mostly a moot point because your later point is a really good one. Brass feruchemists would definitely feel the high force winds and dust in the atmosphere and might be killed from that. 

22 hours ago, Bzhydack said:

What if Spaceshuttle itself would be Feruchemist? 

This is hilarious. I love this idea. All of our problems would be solved by making our spaceship into a full feruchemist and then they/he/she/it could battle the shardcookie for Throne of the Cosmere. 

[EmulatonStromenkiin]

On 1/5/2022 at 1:06 PM, Nameless said:

Wouldn't space not actually take heat away from you as there are very few particles to steal heat?

Heat radiates away, though it is slow, so you are more likely to die of suffocation and being ripped apart than heat loss.

[Quantus]

On 2/2/2022 at 9:02 AM, EmulatonStromenkiin said:

Heat radiates away, though it is slow, so you are more likely to die of suffocation and being ripped apart than heat loss.

It's also a pressure issue.  At vacuum pressures that extreme, things that might not do so otherwise start outgassing through evaporation and other mechanism, which in many cases will either lowers the temp to compensate or mimic similar problems from the pressure directly. 

[EmulatonStromenkiin]

In summation, DEATH!