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How busted is compounding?


Tamriel Wolfsbaine

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We know from the books that compounding gives you ~ 10x the amount of attribute stored. 

I guess the real question is how full can you fill a metalmind.  

I figure cutting a metalmind in half is also going to cut your stored attribute in half.  I think metalminds take an attribute and disperse it throughout themselves evenly.  If that is the case then we can look at a bit of math here and help us understand whats happening in compounding better.  We can draw a few comclusions and I can take a moment to explain a couple of theories I have had...

If you store 1 minutes worth of weight at 50% you get 1 minutes worth of weight at 150%.  There are diminishing returns to this being that if you wanted to double your weight it might not be for half a minute but somewhere between 25 and 30 seconds.  The math here is fuzzy so lets just assume we are using the standard storing 1 unit for a minute and removing 1 minute for a minute.  

You are limited in feruchemy by how much you have stored.  You can pull it out however you need to.  A bracer sized metalmind is just as good at holding 1 minute of 50% weight as an earing is and you can draw that out however you need to.  In allomancy you are limited by the amount of metal you can burn at one time.  

My biggest conclusion here is that the size of your metalmind matters more than what you have stored in the early stages of compounding!  Storage density matters the most!

If it takes you 20 minutes to burn through an earing sized metalmind that only has 1 minute of 50% weight stored in it then you are getting 10minutes of 50% weight that you can transfer into another metalmind over that 20 minutes as the entire earing needs to be burnt to access all of that stored attribute.  You store that into another earing and you now have 10minutes of 50% weight to burn through over the next 20 minutes giving you 100 minutes at 50% in the next earing and 1000 minutes of 50% after your next 20 minute burn period.   You took 1 hour to burn through that much metal to gain 1000 minutes worth of 50% weight.  

Now instead if you shave off a shaving of iron that burns in 30 second and then store your 1 minutes of 50% weight into it then burn it you get 10minutes of 50% weight in a 30 second period.  If you are able to store 10minutes of weight into a similar 30seconds worth of iron shaving when you burn it and store that new attribute you get 100 minutes of 50% weight to store into your next smallest possible metalmind.  If again you can store all of that into a 30second shaving you have 30seconds worth of burning to produce 1000 minutes worth of 50% weight.  What took you an hours worth of iron burning to compound 1000 minutes worth of 50% weight only took you 1.5 minutes to do. 

Likely your metalminds are starting to get full at this point but again the real question is how full can you make a metalmind?

We know that duralumin being used while compounding is dangerous but it is only as dangerous as your metalmind is full.  You could break down that 20minute earing burn into an instant and still only have tapped the amount of weight as was initially stored in it x10.  

Spoiler

Questioner

What happens if you burn duralumin while Compounding?

Brandon Sanderson

Duralumin while Compounding. So, what duralumin does is it burns out of all of your metal in one burst. So it doesn't necessarily gain you power, it makes it all happen at the same time. The same thing would happen.

Questioner

Could you turn into a baby?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, you could totally turn into a baby. That is within the power of using that, doing <health wrong>, yeah you could totally... You'd be really dangerous.

Questioner

But it wouldn't really do much?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh it would have explosive... it does things really fast. That's what it does. Yes you could achieve very powerful sudden effects through that. It'd be scary. Controlling it can be dangerous, regardless of which metal you use.

Arcanum Unbounded Seattle signing (Dec. 1, 2016)

I found this WoB as well that I think helps me draw on a few thoughts I have had in the past.  

Spoiler

Kurkistan

Could an Augur Compound Health out of a goldmind if its proper owner messed with Identity in the right way?

Brandon Sanderson

This is possible

General Signed Books 2014 (Jan. 22, 2014)

Was Bleeder able to store that much speed in the short time she had Feruchemy?  Speed is said to be one of the hardest, if not the hardest, attributes to store.  She did some totally bonkers things with steel feruchemy and ended the book with a steel spike. 

What if she didnt need to have multiple spikes?  What if she had full metalminds that she had access to the identity of and simply was always just a coinshot?  Full metalminds could burn for hours and hours with just her steel allomancy and she would be gaining 10x whatever speed was stored and however densely it was stored in those metalminds. 

You dont have to have the feruchemy to gain compounder levels of feruchemical charges.  All you need is filled metalminds with no identity to keep you locked out!

There is going to be a huge market for these types of metalminds in the future.  We will have people gaining access to compounder levels of attributes who were never born with feruchemy and never touched a medallion.  So long as someone with access to making these metalminds exists they will have the market cornered and I suspect that the southerners can already do it.  

The metalmind that Wayne got in BoM would have offered an Augur (all but useless power typically) access to 10x the amount of total healing that Wayne was able to get out of it!  

I guess my biggest conclusion here is that the single biggest deciding factor to the upper limits of compounding is exactly that... How full can you fill a metalmind?  

The bands would have been so much more dangerous in the hands of a mistborn than they would in the hands of a full feruchemist.  The diminishing returns of "tapping everything as much as you can" doesn't matter when you are burning the metalminds.  Even if the mistborn cant tap it all at once and is limited by their burn rate of metals every second of burning something as densely packed as the bands is going to give you far more from them that opening them up and tapping as much as you can.  A mistborn with the bands shaved or piercing their skin would have had access to those bands at a far more terrifying rate than what we saw in BoM.  

 

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We know that there are diminishing returns but I don't think we can use the numbers that th WoB give. If the loss of 5 whole minutes from one doubling was accurate then the inefficiency would be so great that some of the larger feats we've seen with Feruchemy would be practically impossible. I'm pretty sure those numbers were only given as an example so that people could understand the diminishing returns. 

Additionally, the Bands are only a little larger than the palm of the hand and are made of multiple metalminds, each of those metalminds held more Investiture than any other metalmind we are knowledgeable about. 

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It's not ten times what you put in. That's just a number Sazed throws out as it's a theoretical concept to him at this point.

What Brandon has said after is that compounding is using Allomancy to power feruchemy, meaning that the power you get out is equivalent to what you would have gotten burning it allomantically, but it gives the feruchemical power instead.

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4 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

We know that there are diminishing returns but I don't think we can use the numbers that th WoB give. If the loss of 5 whole minutes from one doubling was accurate then the inefficiency would be so great that some of the larger feats we've seen with Feruchemy would be practically impossible. I'm pretty sure those numbers were only given as an example so that people could understand the diminishing returns. 

Additionally, the Bands are only a little larger than the palm of the hand and are made of multiple metalminds, each of those metalminds held more Investiture than any other metalmind we are knowledgeable about. 

I totally agree that the diminishing returns are likely not as severe as that... or else the whole crew would have died in an explosion in Wax's home back in alloy of law.  

The small size of the bands is actually even more evidence that a mistborn with access to them would be more terrifying.  They are so densely packed with investiture it isn't funny.  And my point about using smaller metalminds while compounding is only greater evidence that it is the size of the box you are packing that investiture into plays a more important role than the strength of the allomancer or feruchemist who is doing the compounding.  

4 minutes ago, Frustration said:

It's not ten times what you put in. That's just a number Sazed throws out as it's a theoretical concept to him at this point.

What Brandon has said after is that compounding is using Allomancy to power feruchemy, meaning that the power you get out is equivalent to what you would have gotten burning it allomantically, but it gives the feruchemical power instead.

Yes and yes.  

Burning it allomantically is the reason why the need for more densely concentrated attributes are better for compounders.  

As for Sazed saying a thing... let's not forget he was a feruchemist.  When he observes a compounder I would say his estimation of 10x the attribute is pretty close.   When looking at Miles we never saw him choose to heal something slower.   We did see him tapping metal vs just burning it and that could have something to do with the rate at which it can fill metalminds when burnt but I still would bet flaring the metal will give significantly more power than barely burning it at all. 

I would love a reference to the WoB if you think it is incorrect to assume that a shaving of the BoM would offer less compounded power than burning a shaving from a full bracer or breastplate where only a few seconds of storage was contained in the entire piece.  

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7 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

I totally agree that the diminishing returns are likely not as severe as that... or else the whole crew would have died in an explosion in Wax's home back in alloy of law.  

The small size of the bands is actually even more evidence that a mistborn with access to them would be more terrifying.  They are so densely packed with investiture it isn't funny.  And my point about using smaller metalminds while compounding is only greater evidence that it is the size of the box you are packing that investiture into plays a more important role than the strength of the allomancer or feruchemist who is doing the compounding.  

Yes and yes.  

Burning it allomantically is the reason why the need for more densely concentrated attributes are better for compounders.  

As for Sazed saying a thing... let's not forget he was a feruchemist.  When he observes a compounder I would say his estimation of 10x the attribute is pretty close.   When looking at Miles we never saw him choose to heal something slower.   We did see him tapping metal vs just burning it and that could have something to do with the rate at which it can fill metalminds when burnt but I still would bet flaring the metal will give significantly more power than barely burning it at all. 

I would love a reference to the WoB if you think it is incorrect to assume that a shaving of the BoM would offer less compounded power than burning a shaving from a full bracer or breastplate where only a few seconds of storage was contained in the entire piece.  

If it's only a few seconds of storage it would be used up as the storage is what keys it to the feruchemical power, but the difference between say one gram of metal that is completely full and two grams that are completely full is the same as they would be if they were just burned allomantically.

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3 minutes ago, Frustration said:

If it's only a few seconds of storage it would be used up as the storage is what keys it to the feruchemical power, but the difference between say one gram of metal that is completely full and two grams that are completely full is the same as they would be if they were just burned allomantically.

I agree.  My point was that the bands in the form that they are in the hands of a person who can only tap them can be used once at a 1:1 ratio.  The bands in the hands of a mistborn would have been able to be burned for a 1:10 ratio net positive's (according to Sazed the holder of 2 shards with a lifetime experience as a feruchemist) amount of investiture.  The difference is that once drained the feruchemical way they are empty and able to be filled again... if used by an allomancer they disappear completely.  

A 100% full gram of metal will give you more output than a 10% full gram of metal and they will do it in the same amount of time as allomancy has been shown to burn metals at pretty consistent speeds.  

My point wasnt to live and die on a multiplier of 10.  We saw it in the books and it is a nice round number to use for demonstrations sake.  It's very obviously shown to be a large increase in power allowing for net positive output potential.  Wayne picking up the bracelet and noting how much more health was in it than any of his metalminds ever held just shows us how acutely aware metalborn are of the powers that they hold.  A huge theme in mistborn was the characters knowing instinctively how much much metal they had and how long it would last, and again now, how much attribute they had stored.  Miles was never afraid of running out and he was never afraid of having enough to knit himself back together in time to keep fighting.

Sadly we didnt get to see just how full his metalminds were but I imagine if he were to start all over again with non full metalminds his best bet would be to start storing in the smallest shavings of metal he possibly could and then compounding from there vs storing into a large piece of metal and trying to burn it down and compound it past that.  The density of the power in the metal would make a difference in how fast and likely it is to get to a point where you have so much attribute available to you that between tapping and burning you have zero fear of running out or not being able to get the job done when it is time.  

Hence my thought that bleeder was potentially running on burnt metalminds vs just tapping and then storing in the background.  She made the swap from feruchemy to allomancy really quick.  Even if she did have both spikes and swapped them out in some janky drop one out while dropping one in move that seems awfully risky knowing that Harmony was hovering to take her over as soon as she activated a 2nd spike or that she was going to revert to mistwraith form if she didnt have the swap work out perfectly.  

  

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4 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

"Half compounding" (Allomantically burning previously-Feruchemically-charged steel despite no longer having the Steel Feruchemy spike) for Bleeder makes a lot of sense. Her use of speed is way more impressive than Sazed's.

I mean, Sazed used up all his speed making a months long journey into a week long journey, sounds pretty impressive to me. I think Bleeder had a ton of speed because by Spiking Idashwy she gained access to all of her stores of speed and those probably had years worth of speed stored in them only used sporadically 

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3 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

I mean, Sazed used up all his speed making a months long journey into a week long journey, sounds pretty impressive to me. I think Bleeder had a ton of speed because by Spiking Idashwy she gained access to all of her stores of speed and those probably had years worth of speed stored in them only used sporadically 

Yeah, I guess Bleeder just used it in short term bursts which *look* more impressive, but it's not really more power overall.

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Would a duralumin burst of a burned metalmind change what you got out of it? If nothing else, the flask method would let you fill a few metalminds in an instant.

Do you think structure of the metals plays any role (like perfect gemstones) in how much they can hold?

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1 hour ago, CMac716 said:

Would a duralumin burst of a burned metalmind change what you got out of it? If nothing else, the flask method would let you fill a few metalminds in an instant.

Do you think structure of the metals plays any role (like perfect gemstones) in how much they can hold?

It would only speed up the process. Which I consider useful in its own way

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I suspect compounding is going to be one of the more busted things in the Cosmere.  Obviously there's all sorts of nonsense roaming around, but especially after The Last Metal, I think Harmony is doing his best to make sure they don't get another full user like Rashek, or worse have it become common.

Sticking to non god metals, we already know it can make you functionally immortal with access to gold, but as Sanderson has been showing off his worlds diving deeper and deeper into the fundamental physics of what's actually going on, I think mere physical immortality is going to seem "quaint" by the end of all this.

Several other metals relate to the "immortality" side of things (Cadmium letting you go without breathing for example), or just the usual superhuman stuff (zinc) but i'm especially interested in the rest. Of Note-

Nicrosil - Lets you store Investiture.  Given it's the magic mcguffin of the universe, I can see this being the catalyst for a lot of nonsense.  Sure seems like "become god" in a can from what we know about using investiture on various things.  Nightblood could be quaint in comparison.

Chromium- Lets you store "luck/fortune".  Knowing sanderson there's rules on this, but this has the potential to blow past "harry potter" and go straight into "Ring World" territory (for those who haven't read the story, it is theorized that the entire universe is bending to the "luck" of a single individual).

Bendalloy- Lets you store "energy".  Now in the examples given it's always just "you can eat lots of food and save it for later", so back in the immortal pile, but seeing as how "eating" is just chemically converting something to energy, I'm wondering if this is very very literal, and the only way they know to store it is eating.  If there were a way to release that energy as something other than chemical energy for your body, this could be tremendously destructive (you'd also need a more efficient way to store energy, as I think downing nothing but nutella for a year still wouldn't do much converted into some kind of force).

Steel- Lets you store "speed".  Compounding steel already has some really really interesting notes from Brandon about how you could kill yourself from air resistance approach FTL, so clearly you could go VERY fast.  Important in just about every "and then it went nuclear" theorycraft in any system ever, but in a world where our fantasy realms are already screwing with nuclear fission and antimatter, I think it's extremely likely to become relevant.  % of C doomsday weapons have been explored in all sorts of Sci Fi, so anything manipulating speed gets dangerous fast.

Iron - Lets you store mass.  Oooh boy the best for last.  The two "apply stupid physics and take this to the extreme" uses I can think of are functionally teleporting/FTL speeds (most wacky physics stuff revolves around massless particles, and it's unclear if they could actually lose all mass) and of course a black hole.  Now i'm not sure Sanderson is going to have a Iron compounder with Duralumin and Nicrosil go full black hole somehow, but again given we've got anitmatter and fission going on, it seems within the realm of possible.  Screwing with mass on a fundamental level seems like such a perfect thing for Sanderson to write about, because it would of course seem barely useful until you started getting a seriously strong understanding of physics, at which point it's potentially absurd.

Now with all of these there's some obvious speculation, and major limitations being that this stuff generally applies to your body, and can't say, be applied to another object, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that gotten around somehow, or just accepted.

Oh and all of this is before you consider someone going savant.

In short, I think someone with the powers of Rashek and the knowledge of the cutting edge  science in the current Cosmere, and by extension access to metals and alloy's he would've never had, is potentially a walking doomsday weapon. 

I also think that the biggest evidence there's something to all this nonsense is that Harmony likely made it harder for someone like that to exist, rather than make it easier. There might also be moral/long term strategy in making it harder for full Allomancers/Feruchemists to exist, but seeing as how that happened once he took the reigns, I think he's worried about the potential consequences of a developing society looking really close at what they could be doing with their powers.  Less "oh i survived a bunch of spears, scared, everyone, and killed my enemies" and more "So what happens if i push these particles apart....or really really close together".

 

Edit- as a last second thought, you've also got all the parts needed for Hyperion style FTL.  Use silly combo's from above to get something moving FTL, arrive as a paste.  It's cool i'll just heal up.  Beyond stretching at that point but another interesting little thought.

 

Edit 2-  You know, thinking about it, you know what else has basically no mass for it's size?  A shardblade.  Realllly wondering if we're going to get a Rashek 2.0 who figures out how to apply their powers to other objects.

Edited by JustOneMoreQuesiton
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And you didn't even mention Pewter.  

Yeah, combining the powers of various worlds, compounding becomes insanely broken. 

Nicrosil stores investiture.  So become a Radiant, store some Stormlight, then compound it.  Infinite Stormlight.  Go to Nalthas, grab some breaths (which doesn't even require anything but money), then compound them. Instant 10th Heightening or higher.  Grab some Dor, refine it, store it, compound it, infinite raw investiture that you can use for just about anything.  

Become an Edgedancer or Dustbringer with double Steel and you can go as fast as you want without worry of air resistance.  Gain some breaths, and store the Lifesense in a Tinmind, then compound it to increase it's range or accuracy.  

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On 1/8/2023 at 1:36 AM, StanLemon said:

It would only speed up the process. Which I consider useful in its own way

It might also improve efficiency. You might get more out of duralumin burning a metalmind than you would by burning the metalmind normally and storing the attribute, then tapping it all at once (since that would be subject to diminishing returns for tapping at high rates).

It's probably pretty niche though; the better controllability of tapping is likely usually worth much more than extra power, since a Compounder usually has enough.

On 1/8/2023 at 3:28 AM, JustOneMoreQuesiton said:

Chromium- Lets you store "luck/fortune".  Knowing sanderson there's rules on this, but this has the potential to blow past "harry potter" and go straight into "Ring World" territory (for those who haven't read the story, it is theorized that the entire universe is bending to the "luck" of a single individual).

[...]

  Now i'm not sure Sanderson is going to have a Iron compounder with Duralumin and Nicrosil go full black hole somehow

 Fortune is intuitive future sight, the same mechanism Hoid uses to know where he needs to be (but not necessarily why). It's basically incredibly accurate hunches / "my spider sense is tingling" / "I feel a disturbance in the Force".

It's not the Ringworld luck effect changing the world around the person (Feruchemy is inherently internal.)

Duralumin + compounded Iron black hole won't work. Duralumin just burns all the metal at once; it isn't actually *extra* Investiture compared to burning the same mass of metal via regular Allomancy, just compressed in time. There's no way to eat enough charged iron to become a black hole - that metalmind wouldn't fit in a stomach. In fact, a battleship might not be enough iron. Turning a human into a black hole is a ridiculous amount of mass. If the Compounder can scrunch down enough to fit in a 30 cm radius (so a 60 cm = 2' diameter sphere) the mass needed to be a black hole is about 34 times the mass of Earth.

Compounders are still limited by how much will fit in their metalminds / how much metal they can fit in their stomach. I would expect the same limit would prevent relativistic speeds with f-Steel; Marasi is probably breaking the sound barrier- very briefly - in BoM, but even 1% of light speed is nearly 10,000 times Mach 1.

I think doing much more than what Marasi does in BoM is probably thoroughly impractical. Diminishing returns will eat the Compounder's lunch, so probably the only way to get much faster would be with a Duralumin burning metalmind which is effectively uncontrollable. (Even that wouldn't get you relativity speeds. Just not enough room in the stomach.)

Edited by cometaryorbit
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1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

Duralumin + compounded Iron black hole won't work. Duralumin just burns all the metal at once; it isn't actually *extra* Investiture compared to burning the same mass of metal via regular Allomancy, just compressed in time. There's no way to eat enough charged iron to become a black hole - that metalmind wouldn't fit in a stomach. In fact, a battleship might not be enough iron. Turning a human into a black hole is a ridiculous amount of mass. If the Compounder can scrunch down enough to fit in a 30 cm radius (so a 60 cm = 2' diameter sphere) the mass needed to be a black hole is about 34 times the mass of Earth.

You don't need to fit all that metal in your stomach, you just need to have it. Let's say you have a two huge piles of iron, you start with cutting small, eatable pieces of 1st pile and compounding it, and storing it into more small pieces, and what you can't store in small pieces of 1st pile, you store in second one. After some time you are left only with 2nd pile full of attribute - you touch it and tap it all at once and collaped into black hole. But your compounded weight dissapears in that moment and, via Hawking Radiation, you implode, as that black hole returns into human mass. But yeah, the piles of iron size of the mountain - "theoretically" possible. 

1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

Marasi is probably breaking the sound barrier- very briefly - in BoM, but even 1% of light speed is nearly 10,000 times Mach 1.

I think if she went Mach 10000 not only she would be smashed into bloody goo by atmosphere, but everyone around her would be dead :D Just little above Mach 1 would be ok with description in books.

On 8.01.2023 at 5:40 PM, Tglassy said:

Nicrosil stores investiture.  So become a Radiant, store some Stormlight, then compound it.

Nicrosil stores ability to use investiture, like feruchemy, allomancy, surgebinding. That's what medalions are doing. Not investiture like Stormlight. But what allomancy compounding does? Can it make your allomancy stronger than that of Lord Ruler, or it doubles it so it can be granted to someone else?  

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28 minutes ago, alder24 said:

You don't need to fit all that metal in your stomach, you just need to have it. Let's say you have a two huge piles of iron, you start with cutting small, eatable pieces of 1st pile and compounding it, and storing it into more small pieces, and what you can't store in small pieces of 1st pile, you store in second one. After some time you are left only with 2nd pile full of attribute - you touch it and tap it all at once and collaped into black hole. But your compounded weight dissapears in that moment and, via Hawking Radiation, you implode, as that black hole returns into human mass. But yeah, the piles of iron size of the mountain - "theoretically" possible. 

I think if she went Mach 10000 not only she would be smashed into bloody goo by atmosphere, but everyone around her would be dead :D Just little above Mach 1 would be ok with description in books.

The mountain sized ironmind might work... but might not. If you're tapping and not Duralumin burning, then you're dealing with diminishing returns. Diminishing returns get really bad at much lower levels. Wax spends most of his life at 75% weight or so, but he taps months of weight in a second to become heavier than a building and break through thick floors. Without diminishing returns he could do it with a day's worth.

(If Wax is 160lb he's storing 40lb most of the time. If he stores for 15 hours = 54,000 seconds he could tap 2,160,000 lb = 1080 tons for 1 second, without diminishing returns.)

So he's already probably losing 98-99% of it at this level. If we're 20+ orders of magnitude beyond this ...I think the diminishing returns will just make it impossible in practice. Or at least make the necessary metalmind larger than Mt Everest (which is basically the same as 'impossible in practice').

I agree that Marasi is going more like Mach 1. I just meant that I don't think you could hit the Mach 10,000 / 1% of lightspeed range.

 

Edited by cometaryorbit
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3 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

The mountain sized ironmind might work... but might not. If you're tapping and not Duralumin burning, then you're dealing with diminishing returns. Diminishing returns get really bad at much lower levels. Wax spends most of his life at 75% weight or so, but he taps months of weight in a second to become heavier than a building and break through thick floors. Without diminishing returns he could do it with a day's worth.

(If Wax is 160lb he's storing 40lb most of the time. If he stores for 15 hours = 54,000 seconds he could tap 2,160,000 lb = 1080 tons for 1 second, without diminishing returns.)

So he's already probably losing 98-99% of it at this level. If we're 20+ orders of magnitude beyond this ...I think the diminishing returns will just make it impossible in practice.

I agree that Marasi is going more like Mach 1. I just meant that I don't think you could hit the Mach 10,000 / 1% of lightspeed range.

 

Thanks for that Wax math.  I think that does a lot to tell us just how much metalminds can hold too as he certainly isn't crushing buildings on a daily basis.   

For conservation of momentum though I am shocked Wax hasn't learned how to rocket himself around in combination with his A steel.  

Think to double/triple weight and do a push then store everything once you are skybound... then tap the fatness again as you land.   He could get away with a lot more that what we have seen so far.   

Plate might block coins but I imagine being able to tap that much weight Wax would be able to send some radiants flying (though the question is would that crush him without pewter?)  

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4 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Plate might block coins but I imagine being able to tap that much weight Wax would be able to send some radiants flying (though the question is would that crush him without pewter?)  

 

Well, Plate is too Invested to Push on.

Besides that, sending Radiants in Plate flying would probably be super bad news without pewter, yeah. Dead plate is like 1400lb and when Vin sends horses flying by their horseshoes in WoA she has duralumin pewter to keep it from crushing her.

That's also duralumin boosted steel. Wax's Push strength is also limited - with super high weight he can make sure all the force moves the other object, but it shouldn't give him unbounded Push strength.

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3 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

 

Well, Plate is too Invested to Push on.

Besides that, sending Radiants in Plate flying would probably be super bad news without pewter, yeah. Dead plate is like 1400lb and when Vin sends horses flying by their horseshoes in WoA she has duralumin pewter to keep it from crushing her.

That's also duralumin boosted steel. Wax's Push strength is also limited - with super high weight he can make sure all the force moves the other object, but it shouldn't give him unbounded Push strength.

I am well aware of the limits against pushing plate.  I simply meant when that coin hits the plate or touches the plate and the person pushing it happens to be thousands of lbs.   

I also have been curious of where the line is drawn between weight vs weight and allomantic strength in pushing and pulling metals.  

In TFE it was painted as being just the weight vs weight.  Once we get to Vin blowing down the doors to the well of ascension things get fuzzy.  Was she burning duralumin for the steel or for the pewter to protect herself?   They both went because thats how duralumin worked but what are the odds her being braced against the wall would have still done the job even if it killed her in the process minus the duralumin?  

Also we don't see Wax dying from internal injury when he turns himself into the anchor point to crush the building... I imagine that would put similar pressure on Wax's body... I also imagine that if he needed pewter to make that work we would have known then.  

I see it as iron tapping makes your body capable of withstanding those forces.  

Vin needed pewter to survive as she didn't have the magical barriers to physics that Feruchemical iron granted Wax.  The two examples both had the same outcome but one needed pewter because she was in between 2 anchor points that wanted to crush her.  The other simply turned himself into an anchor point.  

If I am missing something here let me know, but after thinking it through more... unless that coin slides off of the plate instead of smashing nice and tight against the plate then the radiant should go for a tumble when faced with a multiple ton Wax pushing....  Not because he pushes the plate but because once a coin is stuck on it then it becomes the mirror image of Vins push war against Kelsier.  

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21 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

I am well aware of the limits against pushing plate.  I simply meant when that coin hits the plate or touches the plate and the person pushing it happens to be thousands of lbs.

Plate(assuming Rosharan stones are equivelent to real world stones) weighs about 2,000 pounds on Roshar, which has reduced gravity. I don't think even compounders are going to be pushing plated radiants over more than once or twice in a confrontation.

23 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

I also have been curious of where the line is drawn between weight vs weight and allomantic strength in pushing and pulling metals.

So weight is just a balast, like how when you physically push on something weight decides whether you move or it does. The strength of the push is independent of your weight.

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2 minutes ago, Frustration said:

Plate(assuming Rosharan stones are equivelent to real world stones) weighs about 2,000 pounds on Roshar, which has reduced gravity. I don't think even compounders are going to be pushing plated radiants over more than once or twice in a confrontation.

I mean, Wax had enough weight stored up in BoM to push a train car which would be a few tons, a Compounder would likely have vastly more weight than that

2 minutes ago, Frustration said:

So weight is just a balast, like how when you physically push on something weight decides whether you move or it does. The strength of the push is independent of your weight.

Not entirely accurate, while the weight of the Allomancer and the metal correspond to how strong a Push is, Vin in TFE and Elend in HoA show that an Allomancer's raw power influences it as well

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2 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

Not entirely accurate, while the weight of the Allomancer and the metal correspond to how strong a Push is, Vin in TFE and Elend in HoA show that an Allomancer's raw power influences it as well

When does the weight of the individual ever impact how strong their push is?

Wax doesn't have any more power in his steel pushes when he's tapping weight, he can just move heavier objects.

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7 minutes ago, Frustration said:

Plate(assuming Rosharan stones are equivelent to real world stones) weighs about 2,000 pounds on Roshar, which has reduced gravity. I don't think even compounders are going to be pushing plated radiants over more than once or twice in a confrontation.

So weight is just a balast, like how when you physically push on something weight decides whether you move or it does. The strength of the push is independent of your weight.

A bunch of whackyness is plate weight.  Normal horses could carry a shardplate wearer on their backs.  I have read 600lbs and I know I heard 1400lbs a few times.   2000 is the highest I have heard and this is a first for me.  

Still kind of besides the fact if Wax is able to store millions of lbs over the course of a day or two to draw from.  Vin vs kelsier probably had a weight difference well within reach for a person storing like Wax even without compounding.   Would it run out?   Of course.   I do think it would be more than a couple pushes though.   And Wax's bracers hold all of that weight... 

1 minute ago, StanLemon said:

I mean, Wax had enough weight stored up in BoM to push a train car which would be a few tons, a Compounder would likely have vastly more weight than that

Not entirely accurate, while the weight of the Allomancer and the metal correspond to how strong a Push is, Vin in TFE and Elend in HoA show that an Allomancer's raw power influences it as well

 

6 minutes ago, Frustration said:

When does the weight of the individual ever impact how strong their push is?

Wax doesn't have any more power in his steel pushes when he's tapping weight, he can just move heavier objects.

This is pretty much my point.  I don't think Vin ever used duralumin to increase the strength of the pushes as much as she did it to brace herself with pewter.  

There is no magical Vin vs Kelsier standing on even ground going weight vs weight where the steel push would do anything more than just shoot her back.   It might shoot her back further or faster but it would never allow Vin to send Kelsier flying.

Hence my thoughts that Wax was able to bring down a building without ripping out his insides due to the protection that F iron gave his hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of lbs self when he crunched an entire structure under him.  

Honestly one of the images in my mind ever since reading TWoK is a crasher bounding above the chasm field with a blacksmiths hammer and then shoving it down through the chasmfiend.   

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11 minutes ago, Frustration said:

When does the weight of the individual ever impact how strong their push is?

Wax doesn't have any more power in his steel pushes when he's tapping weight, he can just move heavier objects.

I probably phrased it badly. But there are multiple examples in the book from Wax and Vin where it's referenced that they Push harder against larger more massive pieces of metal. Mostly in reference to their flight.

This can likely be attributed to two things. One is the larger and more massive a piece of metal is, the further away an Allomancer can be and still keep Pushing on it. This part isn't influenced by the Allomancer's weight

The second reason though is the important part to this conversation. Steelpushing applies the force equally* to both the Allomancer and metal. Accordingly the nature of Newtonian physics means that the greater the disparity in the mass of the two, the harder the less massive one is Pushed away.

*theoretically at least, we do have a few examples of seeming exceptions to this

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