Fabrial Firearms.

[Frustration]

@cometaryorbit

Spoiler

Pagerunner

Are there ten metals (and their respective alloys) that can be used in fabrials? The eight allomantic pure metals, silver, and then one more?

Brandon Sanderson

There are more than 10.

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

 

[cometaryorbit]

Oh, ok. Well that idea is out...

Then I guess fabrials are only 10 based through the gemstones? There are surely more than 10 types of usable spren...

[Some Random Spren]

could you use flame fabrials to make flamethrowers? also could duralumin flame fabrials possibly make a targeted beam of fire?

[cometaryorbit]

I'm not sure. Existing heating fabrials using flamespren seem to create heat rather than actual flames, so a weapon like that might be more like an IR laser than a flamethrower.

I can see that duralumin might change the continuous long-term heat output we see from existing heat fabrials into an explosive burst of heat using up all the Stormlight in the gem at once.

Not sure about targeting though... unless it's the feruchemical use of duralumin that's relevant to fabrials? Connection to the target? Possible... but if there isn't a "burst" option I don't know if you could get fabrial powered* weapons at all.

The big weakness I see in existing fabrial tech, in terms of emulating say 20th century Earth tech, is power output / energy concentration. The airships being developed now are chull powered, which is a pretty major limit.

*Even grandbows seem to be using the augmenter fabrial to add material strength, with the actual energy coming from the user/Shardplate, rather than the fabrial converting stormlight to energy.