Era 4 Tech

[StanLemon]

Hey all, what kind of tech do you imagine Era 4 will have besides the FTL? Let's bounce some ideas

Technology I expect Era 4 Scadrial technology to have at least. Most of these are thought of with a military weapon bent, but I'd love ideas for mundane uses too

• Railguns that have weight changing ammunition to act as powerful kinetic energy weapons
• Bombs that drain Investiture
• Super soldiers
• Advanced scanning tech
• Some kind of deflection technology
• Fast and comprehensive information transferring via F-Copper tech
• Time dilated R&D factories
• Power Armor
• Advanced physical & mental health systems
• Ultra high speed computers? Depends on if F-Zinc can speed computer processing
• Ultra high speed light weight air vehicles

[+Oltux72]

• cheap, almost unlimited power (iron feruchemy implies that)
• perfect wireless communication (bronze allomancy)
• personal recreation devices - keeping it family friendly (emotional allomancy)

[Ixthos]

• Hover tanks (possibly storing weight of the vehicle and steel pushes)
• Portable perpendicularity generators - both to escape, to visit planets from ships, and so forth
• Hazekillers equipped with countermeasures for any given invested individual
• Space stations with a Cognitive Realm presence
• Fields to counter any given invested individual while allowing others to function as normal
• Universal translators based on connection
• Fortune-based ship navigation like in Dune
• VR Cognitive Realm based internet

[Edit] Just remembered this was the Mistborn subforum, so the rest are Cosmere spoilers:

Spoiler

• Use of gravitation with the hovering tanks
• Lightwoven lasers
• Spren-bound computers
• For the portable perpendicularity generators - also use as a weapon ("good luck swimming in the bead ocean!")
• Hemalurgic (and possibly Aether-based) cyborgs
• Anti-investiture nukes
• Force fields like with the Sibling's protective nodes
• Subtle use of invested arts for genetic manipulation, in particular modifying existing investiture related organisms such as the lichen on the white sand, Ashyn's diseases, and the microbes on Elantris's walls

 

Edited March 7, 2022 by Ixthos

[Anomander Rake]

• A market/exchange for feruchemical stores where you could, for example, buy unkeyed speed or energy or wakefulness.  Things like paying for an instant bout of good nights sleep is just such a cool and unique concept to me
• Probably dozens of markets for different types of copperminds alone: study crash courses, learning new skills, instantly read a book or watch a movie you have stored away (or, conversely, store your memory of a book or movie or similar, and enjoy it again for the first time, literally!  Mistborn and Lost here I come!).
• some suped-up-allomantic bullet train
• a way to compress time for people travelling, even on a small scale, with time bubbles.  no more long commutes into Elendel!
• super easy space suits (f brass and cadmium)

Edited March 7, 2022 by Anomander Rake

[Wandering Shade]

Might be a little less cool than the rest of these ideas, but a Tinmind microscope or telescope.

[Anomander Rake]

36 minutes ago, Wandering Shade said:

Might be a little less cool than the rest of these ideas, but a Tinmind microscope or telescope.

*Preface that I work with microscopes pretty often, but not telescopes lol*

I think that this is firmly lightweaver territory!  I know (at least to the degree that coppermind is correct) that tin doesnt let you see things that would naturally be unobservable, though perhaps, depending on what tin actually does to your brain / eye, hardware could be made to take advantage of it.

The workhorse of an optical microscope is the objective lens, its the part that gathers light from what you're observing and focuses it.  Different magnifications require different lenses.  Unless tin is actually changing the diopter (essentially magnification power) in your eye, which the coppermind sentence leads me to think it isn't, i'm not sure how hardware would be designed for it.

Lightweaving, however, should allow for the construction of huge lenses that lightweavers can channel light through to create images at crazy magnifications

Edited March 7, 2022 by Anomander Rake
fairly sure telescope lenses are called the same and work under the same principle, just in pointed the other direction lol

[StanLemon]

Interesting perspective on microscopes. We know for sure Tinminds give a telescoping effect from Sazed's pov and the more of the trait he tapped the further he could see

[Anomander Rake]

21 hours ago, Wandering Shade said:

Might be a little less cool than the rest of these ideas, but a Tinmind microscope or telescope.

18 hours ago, StanLemon said:

Interesting perspective on microscopes. We know for sure Tinminds give a telescoping effect from Sazed's pov and the more of the trait he tapped the further he could see

Gave the topic some further thought, and brushed up on my anatomy lol.

My guess is tin, when it comes to sight, affects the lens in your eye.  The lens provides about 1/3 of your eyes magnification power, but is the part that changes shape, and thus is the part that allows you to focus on things at various distances by doing so.  Now, Sazed wears glasses when reading and storing tin; most people (including yours truly!) need glasses because the shape of their eye is off, which means the placement of your cornea and lens will be off (think misaligned two lenses in a microscope).  I don't think storing would actually change the shape of your eye, so my guess is it screws with how you communicate with your lens, which is why Saze is using reading glasses - he holds the book from his face or whatever to correct for the lens being wack. I also just feel like this is consistent with the 5 senses being nervous system things and this being something your nervous system controls.

Using tin in low light, and flaring in the dark let you see/glimpse your surroundings.  Normally, your pupil changes sizes depending on how much light is present to properly focus your eyes - it expands in the dark where light scarce to take in more, and shrinks in bright light to keep focus on what you are looking at while avoiding excess light.  If you've never done it before, go to your bathroom mirror and look at your eyes while you flick the lights!  This also happens, at a far far slighter degree, as you focus on things at varying distances

All this to say - even with the influence of actual magic, which seems to adhere to biology, there is a limit to how far the human eye can be pushed, which is in line with Brandon's statement.  Your pupils and lenses can only do so much.  

I think Saze's, and genrally, binocular vision is his eyes and pupils super-adjusting and magically compensating to the far distance.  Whatever the distance of human sight is, Saze can see in perfect detail - he can pick out the leaves on a tree a mile away, but even if he held that leaf to his face he wouldn't be able to pick out cells.

If someone who could use tins eye were held in perfect alignment with a microscope, though (when it comes to high magnification, like, perfect perfect, no room for error perfect, which is VERY VERY hard), there is certainly room to extend the power of even what we currently can do when it comes to magnification, by using the eye as a final lens

Edited March 8, 2022 by Anomander Rake

[StanLemon]

BoM proved that objects can be affected by Feruchemy. It should be possible to use Tinminds then to enhance the optics of telescopes and microscopes

[Anomander Rake]

4 hours ago, StanLemon said:

BoM proved that objects can be affected by Feruchemy. It should be possible to use Tinminds then to enhance the optics of telescopes and microscopes

I agree that objects can be affected by feruchemy, I just don't see how tin could be woven into a microscope in such a way - as far as I'm aware tin cant affect light, which is what it or a tin-affected lens would need to do to raise magnification power.

Storing weight and then tapping to add weight to an object seems, as far as feruchemy can be, straightforward.  Storing visual acuity and then tapping to bend light, less so.

[Duxredux]

I've got some mundane worldbuilding ideas.

Here are my supermarket / commercial ideas:

• Vendors that let you recharge your calorie and fluid levels. (Pay to withdraw from the F-Bendalloy bar at the counter)
• Bronze sensor / cash register that detects amounts deposited/withdrawal of Feruchemical stores
• Fashion doesn't need to be functional. F-Brass built into outfits. 
• Refrigerators! Budget are F-Brass based, high-end use A-Cadmium
• F-Bendalloy weight loss clinics
• Movies/books/media, F-Copper
• F-Brass A/C and heating units
• F-Pewter kit for home moving/manual labor jobs
• F-Gold first aid (revolutionizes first aid, medical field specialists still needed for congenital conditions, OB/GYN, etc.)
• F-Tin anesthetic
• A-Steel and F-Iron speed commuting

Less mundane ideas: 

• F-Copper used for deep cover agents. They literally don't remember who they are or any sensitive information.
• A-Bronze radar
• F-Brass to deal with re-entry level friction for vehicles, trains, people, etc. (Thanks for catching the mistake, Anomander Rake)

Do we think that Era 4 tech will be able to use savant level control? For example Brandon suggested that an A-Bendalloy savant could shape their bubble, which I think could open up quite a lot of options.

Edited March 9, 2022 by Duxredux
Corrected metal type

[Anomander Rake]

58 minutes ago, Duxredux said:

I've got some mundane worldbuilding ideas.

...

nice ones!  IDK why I didn't think to use F-Brass to refrigerate as well.  Maybe brass-minds will come in standard sizes (like our batteries), so when your fridge's brassmind has stored enough heat over time, you can go pop it in your heater instead to tap, and vice versa!  

In your last idea, do you again mean F-Brass? Because wow yeah, heat from friction is a thing of the past now.

58 minutes ago, Duxredux said:

Do we think that Era 4 tech will be able to use savant level control? For example Brandon suggested that an A-Bendalloy savant could shape their bubble, which I think could open up quite a lot of options.

I think so!  For them to work in FTL I've gotta assume some shape manipulation somehow.  This WoB also makes me think so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

Spoiler

Steeldancer (paraphrased)

Have you ever heard of the Alcubierre Drive? 

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes, I know about the Alcubierre drive. 

Steeldancer (paraphrased)

So, if we took two speed bubbles--mechanized, because Allomancers aren't powerful enough to pull it off--could we create a functioning Alcubierre drive?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

You are theorizing in the right direction. 

FanX Spring 2019 (April 19, 2019)

 

Edited March 8, 2022 by Anomander Rake
left an extra word

[cometaryorbit]

1 hour ago, Duxredux said:

• F-Gold first aid (revolutionizes first aid, medical field specialists still needed for congenital conditions

Hmm, the interaction of unsealed F-Gold and conventional (technological) medicine could be really interesting. F-Gold is way better for a lot of things, but technological medicine wouldn't have the Cognitive self-image related limitations.

I wonder about things like parasitic diseases, too. I think Wayne says at one point that F-Gold works better for injuries than infections. F-Gold might have trouble with more complex parasites (hookworms, tapeworms, etc.) if they have more Cognitive presence than a virus or bacterium.

[HSuperLee]

32 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

Hmm, the interaction of unsealed F-Gold and conventional (technological) medicine could be really interesting. F-Gold is way better for a lot of things, but technological medicine wouldn't have the Cognitive self-image related limitations.

I wonder about things like parasitic diseases, too. I think Wayne says at one point that F-Gold works better for injuries than infections. F-Gold might have trouble with more complex parasites (hookworms, tapeworms, etc.) if they have more Cognitive presence than a virus or bacterium.

I think it comes down to the fact that F-Gold heals the damage a disease or sickness can do to you, but it doesn't actually enhance your immune system. The result is that whatever is infecting you might die out faster, since it isn't able to alter your body enough to use as a breeding ground, but it isn't actively being wiped out by anything but a standard immune system. F-Gold can keep you from getting sick, and can allow you to act healthy when you're not, but as soon as you stop tapping, the remaining illness survives and progresses as normal. In the case of parasites, you'd probably only gain a benefit if you tapped long enough to starve them out, and even that might not work depending on the progression of the parasite (its a rather complex and diverse category of creatures). Other medicines would almost certainly be better at dealing with them than F-Gold. Heck, depending on how exactly Identity works with microbial organisms, F-Brass might be better, since you could potentially heat up your body to the point they burn alive inside of you.

[cometaryorbit]

25 minutes ago, HSuperLee said:

The result is that whatever is infecting you might die out faster, since it isn't able to alter your body enough to use as a breeding ground, but it isn't actively being wiped out by anything but a standard immune system.

Huh, I hadn't thought of that. I would have expected Gold Health to actively remove pathogens as it restored the body to a (filtered through the Cognitive) ideal state.

But maybe pathogens don't count as "part of the body" in that sense? I wonder if F-Gold would, then, not do anything to help with out-of-balance gut microflora?

 

--

 

I wonder if, in a world where unsealed medallion tech makes F-Gold healing widely available, if the idea of a Cognitive-influenced Spiritual ideal healing works towards would make Scadrian society more negative than ours towards things like plastic surgery.

[Wandering Shade]

1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

Huh, I hadn't thought of that. I would have expected Gold Health to actively remove pathogens as it restored the body to a (filtered through the Cognitive) ideal state.

But maybe pathogens don't count as "part of the body" in that sense? I wonder if F-Gold would, then, not do anything to help with out-of-balance gut microflora?

When Sazed used F-Gold with rings stuck in his body, the healing didn't expel the rings out. It healed over them. Magical healing in the Cosmere doesn't do the Wolverine style "push the bullets out of your body as you heal the wound."

[cometaryorbit]

6 minutes ago, Wandering Shade said:

When Sazed used F-Gold with rings stuck in his body, the healing didn't expel the rings out. It healed over them. Magical healing in the Cosmere doesn't do the Wolverine style "push the bullets out of your body as you heal the wound."

Hmm, good point.

 I guess F-Gold Healing is really more limited than I'd assumed.

[Duxredux]

4 hours ago, Wandering Shade said:

When Sazed used F-Gold with rings stuck in his body, the healing didn't expel the rings out. It healed over them. Magical healing in the Cosmere doesn't do the Wolverine style "push the bullets out of your body as you heal the wound."

Yes and no. I kind of take Era 1 as only pseudo-canon for Cosmere-level significance since Brandon was still working out the kinks. We see this happen, but not consistently. 

In Era 2, Miles pushed bullets out of himself by healing, but that's Savant level compounded Gold. His mask got caught when Wax shot him and restricted his healing until he pulled it free. He didn't expel the dagger he stabbed himself with when brawling with Wax, or the Goldminds that Wax said he kept charged and piercing his body. Maybe he could selectively choose not to expel certain things? I could see the speed of healing affecting this.

[Duxredux]

I'll also use Wayne as an example for Gold. F-Gold can remove toxins from a body (alcohol), and for some reason when we see him actively storing in AoL, he has a running nose and cold symptoms. When he's trying to store a lot, he spends most of the time sick in bed and drunk. I don't know how or why it happens that way, but it looks like active storage can actually make you sick?

Crazy Era 4 idea, especially since there are way easier ways to do this. Commuting looks like stepping onto the pressure sensitive launch plate, dumping your weight into your standardized Ironmind, and the plate fires you with Steel to your destination. The destination? A F-Gold plate. Or they could slow you with Steel and Iron.

[Duxredux]

Oooh. We know FTL is possible, so we have to build a space ship, right? Rather than medallions, astronauts use Iron boots to store their personal weight while A-Iron provides artificial gravity (though the pull would lessen as metalminds fill. Maybe they rotate them out or just have thin plates that aren'ta metalmind?). Providing for other necessities like air, food, water, and heating, all are pretty obvious. A nicrobursted Cadmium bubble could put crew members into stasis for long journeys.

[StanLemon]

9 hours ago, Duxredux said:

I'll also use Wayne as an example for Gold. F-Gold can remove toxins from a body (alcohol), and for some reason when we see him actively storing in AoL, he has a running nose and cold symptoms. When he's trying to store a lot, he spends most of the time sick in bed and drunk. I don't know how or why it happens that way, but it looks like active storage can actually make you sick?

It might not be that it makes you sick, but robs your body of the ability to handle the myriad of every day pathogens ever present in the world. Basically things that would tax your body now putting a larger strain on you than they normally would. Alternatively, maybe it's an odd form of auto immune effects and storing causes your body to try and overcompensate for its weakened ability to heal itself 

[Duxredux]

Hm... the auto immune effects you suggest could make sense, since I think a running nose is an immune system response to flush toxins, bacteria, or viruses out of your system. If storage is lessening your body's immune response/cellular reproduction, I would expect to see less of an immune response, not more.

I do wonder if we see F-Gold used as healing, and we think of it as healing, but it's actually doing something fundamentally different that happens to have healing/sickness as a side effect of storing and tapping. Like if tapping Gold is the physical body reverting itself off to its cognitive or spiritual "template" so to say, and storing is weakening that connection, or possibly allowing the physical body to degrade. Kind of my thought process is that A-Gold and F-Gold may be more connected than it looks like on first glance. I'm not sure if that explains how unkeyed F-Gold works, but it's a thought.

On a similar note, I wonder if F-Pewter can be used to store mass, not just muscle. Sazed's skin, ligaments, and even bones seemed to grow (but not his skull if I remember right), which doesn't seem to be just "strength", though apparently A-Pewter strength can be stored in a Pewtermind.

In this context, another thought for space travel. I don't know enough about this branch of physics, but mass increases as you approach the speed of light, yes? Has anyone come up with something to help with the ship or crew becoming infinitely massive, or are we relying on time dilation to circumvent this? I wonder if F-Pewter could be used initiate the active storage of mass to counteract the accompanying increase in mass, with maybe some sort of A-Chromium sink to syphon off the attributes before the Pewter gets full. Leechers can drain kinetic Feruchemical arts.

Quote

Questioner

Nicrosil and chromium, do those have any interaction with people using Feruchemy, or other Investiture in general? Leechers or Nicrobursts.

Brandon Sanderson

Could you use those on Feruchemists? You should be able to, yes.

Questioner

Would that only work while they're tapping it?

Brandon Sanderson

If it's active Investiture, probably yes. You'd probably need it to be kinetic Investiture in order for them to do anything about it.

Dragonsteel Mini-Con 2021 (Nov. 22, 2021)

Thoughts?

[StanLemon]

2 hours ago, Duxredux said:

On a similar note, I wonder if F-Pewter can be used to store mass, not just muscle. Sazed's skin, ligaments, and even bones seemed to grow (but not his skull if I remember right), which doesn't seem to be just "strength", though apparently A-Pewter strength can be stored in a Pewtermind.

In this context, another thought for space travel. I don't know enough about this branch of physics, but mass increases as you approach the speed of light, yes? Has anyone come up with something to help with the ship or crew becoming infinitely massive, or are we relying on time dilation to circumvent this? I wonder if F-Pewter could be used initiate the active storage of mass to counteract the accompanying increase in mass, with maybe some sort of A-Chromium sink to syphon off the attributes before the Pewter gets full. Leechers can drain kinetic Feruchemical arts.

I think F-Iron has more to do with storing mass. At least for dealing with the consequences of E=MC² but I have also thought that there is more to F-Pewter than just storing strength. As far as why F-Pewter can store A-Pewter strength. I think that is because A-Pewter is actively enhancing your muscles, bones, tendons, etc and then F-Pewter is then storing those enhanced muscles in the Pewtermind. 

Perhaps F-Iron stores the energy of that's bound which makes up most of the mass objects have while F-Pewter stores the structure of mass

[Frustration]

2 hours ago, StanLemon said:

I think F-Iron has more to do with storing mass. At least for dealing with the consequences of E=MC² but I have also thought that there is more to F-Pewter than just storing strength.

I feel this is relevant for the discusion.

Iron feruchemy is complicated, and Brandon goes back and forth 

Spoiler

Bat_Mannington

If a Windrunner lashed Wax upwards, could he dump all of his weight into his metalminds and be unaffected or would the lashing affect his clothes and whatever else he had on him too?

Brandon Sanderson

Wax could mitigate the effect (unless he was in a vacuum) but not eliminate it completely.

faragorn

Vacuum or freefall?

It can be easy to confuse them in the context of surface to orbit.

Brandon Sanderson

I was talking about a Vacuum, but it's good to clarify. What I'm saying is that without wind resistance, his mass doesn't matter--and the books have established that what Wax does is a freakish transformation of his mass, not just his weight.

Kaladin changes how much gravity pulls on someone, and in what direction. Wax (basically, it's more complex than this) changes how much mass he has. The two, then, have some very distinctive effects.

Worldbuilders AMA (Dec. 5, 2015)

 

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Six

The fight in the ballroom

From the early days of the Mistborn books, I'd been planning how an Allomantic gunfight would go down. I felt it the next evolution in what has been stylistically a big part of these books.

There is a fine line to walk in a lot of these sequences. I've made something of a name for myself in the fantasy world by attempting to mix some scientific reasoning with my magic systems. At the same time, Allomancy was designed precisely with action sequences in mind. I wanted them to be powerful and cinematic—and a cinematic fight sequence is often at odds with realism. (Watch two people who really know what they're doing fight with swords sometime, then watch any fight sequence in a film. Most of the time, the film sequences stray far from what would really happen.)

So, as I said, I walk a line. Sometimes, there are things I just can't do because they violate what I've set up as the rules of the world. Other times, I design the setting and nature of the fight specifically to allow for certain types of cinematic sequences. One thing I like a lot about Wax’s abilities is the power he has to manipulate his weight. There's some realism to what he does—for example, increasing his weight doesn't make him fall more quickly, but it allows him to do some powerful things while falling. Destroying the chandeliers is an example.

At the same time, I acknowledge that the weight manipulation aspect of Feruchemy is one of its more baffling powers, scientifically. Is he changing his mass? If so, he should become more dense, which I don't actually make the case when it plays out in fights. (Otherwise, increasing his weight enough would make him impervious to bullets.) So, if it's not mass manipulation, is it gravity manipulation, like Szeth and Kaladin do? Well, again, not really—as when his weight increases, his strength and ability to uphold that weight increase as well. Beyond that, Wax can't make himself so light that he has no weight at all.

So . . . well, at this point, the ability to explain it scientifically breaks down. I do like what it does, but I have to set its boundaries and stick to them—and accept that some of what's going on is irrational. (And don't get me started on what should really be happening scientifically when Wayne speeds up time.)

Footnote: Brandon has stated that iron Feruchemy works by manipulating the Higgs field.
The Alloy of Law Annotations (March 14, 2014)

Questioner

So, Metalminds: if you store weight, how does that work, do you decrease your mass or...?

Brandon Sanderson

So, storing weight actually plays with your mass, because if you look at how we do the physics of it… This one is really screwy, because we are changing mass and playing with it. You watch, like with Wax decreases his weight while he's in motion he'll speed up, and if he increases it, he'll slow down. The conservation of momentum and things like that, but we'll doing really weird stuff. It's like, how can you store your mass… Well, in the magic system it works, but it’s one of the weirdest things we do. *pauses to sign book* We kind of play loose and free with the physics sometimes. Like the example that I often use is Wayne doing a speed bubble, the light that is trapped in the speed bubble...like if he turns on a flashlight would actually radiate because of the redshift, and you could just kill everybody by flashing that. So, we make the speed bubbles not cause a redshift for that reason. We kind of work with what is good storytelling first, and then work the physics around it, but we have to put in all these little breaks and things like that in there regularity in order to actually have the story.

Shadows of Self San Jose signing (Oct. 9, 2015)

Questioner

I remember in, I believe it was Hero of the Ages, when Sazed was helping TenSoon escape. When he had fallen on the guard, he said that, by increasing his weight he also increases his density so he doesn't <hurt> himself. Then in The Alloy of Law, it also says that when Wax increases his weight he said that he didn't.

Brandon Sanderson

So, Sazed is just making a mistake. He's mistaking the fact when he increases his weight his musculature changes to be able to handle the new weight and that was what he was talking about. Strength and muscle tone and things like that. I might have just gotten it wrong in the original one [scene], I can't honestly remember, but this is what we kinda decided it needs to be. 

 

Shadows of Self San Jose signing (Oct. 9, 2015)

Questioner

When Wax changes his weight, is that weight or mass?

Brandon Sanderson

He is actually changing his mass, in a weird...It's kind of halfway in between, is really what it is. But it follows the laws of conservation of momentum, so it's not just weight. It's timidly a half step inbetween.

Calamity Austin signing (Feb. 25, 2016)

 

[StanLemon]

Gotta love how much Feruchemy breaks physics