Mistborn in SPACE

[Phantom Monstrosity]

So I've recently been rereading Triplanetary.  It's by Doc Smith, the guy you might know of as the inventor of Space Opera, and thus most modern science fiction as we know it.

 

Now, Triplanetary is the prequel to the Lensmen series (which is a ton of silly fun, start with Galactic Patrol if you can find it - most of Smith' stuff is public domain now).  It's a fast-paced, breathless novel, and pretty fun.  It's also got some weird mistborn similarities.

 

 

In this scene, the good guys in the Boise have recently reverse-engineered the alien power generation technology.  Their ships basically take any ferric matter (iron or steel), and disintegrate it, converting into raw energy.

 

Once their ships start burning iron and steel, they create lines of force directly towards or away from themselves, which they use to push and pull, and get into a shoving match - the outcome of which is decided by the quality of their anchors.  Sound familiar?

 

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32706/32706-h/32706-h.htm  ( CHAPTER 16)

 

High in the stratosphere, speeding eastward, the immense mass of the Boise slowed abruptly, although no projector had slackened its effort. Cleveland, eyes upon interferometer grating and spectrophotometer charts, fingers flying over calculator keys, grinned as he turned toward Rodebush.

"Just as you thought, Skipper; an ultra-band pusher. C4V63L29. Shall I give him a little pull?"

"Not yet; let's feel him out a little before we force a close-up. We've got plenty of mass. See what he does when I put full push on the projectors."

As the full power of the Tellurian vessel was applied the Nevian was forced backward, away from the threatened city, against the full drive of her every projector. Soon, however, the advance was again checked, and both scientists read the reason upon their plates. The enemy had put down reenforcing rods of tremendous power. Three compression members spread out fanwise behind her, bracing her against a low mountainside, while one huge tractor beam was thrust directly downward, holding in an unbreakable grip a cylinder of earth extending deep down into bedrock.

"Two can play at that game!" and Rodebush drove down similar beams, and forward-reaching tractors as well. "Strap yourselves in solid, everybody!" he sounded in general warning. "Something is going to give way somewhere soon, and when it does we'll get a jolt!"

And the promised jolt did indeed come soon. Prodigiously massive and powerful as the Nevian was, the Boise was even more massive and more powerful; and as the already enormous energy feeding the tractors, pushers, and projectors was raised to its inconceivable maximum, the vessel of the enemy was hurled upward, backward; and that of Earth shot ahead with a bounding leap that threatened to strain even her mighty members. The Nevian anchor rods had not broken; they had simply pulled up the vast cylinders of solid rock that had formed their anchorages.

"Grab him now!" Rodebush yelled, and even while an avalanche of falling rock was burying the countryside Cleveland snapped a tractor ray upon the flying fish and pulled tentatively.

Nor did the Nevian now seem averse to coming to grips. The two warring super-dreadnoughts darted toward each other, and from the invader there flooded out the dread crimson opacity which had theretofore meant the doom of all things Solarian. Flooded out and engulfed the immense globe of humanity's hope in its spreading cloud of redly impenetrable murk. But not for long. Triplanetary's super-ship boasted no ordinary Terrestrial defense, but was sheathed in screen after screen of ultra-vibrations: imponderable walls, it is true, but barriers impenetrable to any unfriendly wave. To the outer screen the red veil of the Nevians clung tenaciously, licking greedily at every square inch of the shielding sphere of force, but unable to find an opening through which to feed upon the steel of the Boise's armor.

 

Okay, but that's just a coincidence.  It's not like they have some sort of weird FTL that you could easily achieve via feruchem...

 

Yeah, they have some kind of weird FTL that can be easily achieved via feruchemical technology.  Well, provided you ignore relativity, which at the time was rather more cutting-edge (heck, Smith started writing in 1915).  And hey, if there's spiritual gravity, there's no reason we can't have some sort of spiritual preferred frame of reference to make Einstein sad.  (The test drive of triplanetary FTL boils down to 'hey, we're two lightyears away now.  Phone home on the ultrawave, ask them if it's been two years.  It hasn't?  So much for relativity then, let's zoom around space some more'.)

 

Oh, yeah, where was I....  right, actually explaining the 'Bergenholm' drive.  It's pretty simple in principle.  You reduce the inertia/mass of your ship practically to zero, and then fire your thrusters.  Cruising speed is reached when the friction of interstellar dust particles against your ship is equal to your thrust.  In practice, this means that the first prototype ship can zip through the whole galaxy in a couple months.

 

So all you *really* need to do is set up an artificial ironmind, and have it store all the mass inside the ship.  You perfectly duplicate a classic FTL engine.  Isn't that easy?  None of this mucking about with time bubbles and spacewhatsits.  Just get in and blast off.

 

 

But wait, you ask, was the secret to using this technological application of iron ALSO given to inhabitants of an isolated nation by a near-omniscient guy, as part of a plan to thwart an all-destroying evil? 

 

Yes.  Yes it was. 

Edited June 27, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Windborne Sword]

That's so awesome.  I wonder if Brandon ever read this.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

That's so awesome.  I wonder if Brandon ever read this.

Well, Lensmen is a classic series.  I suspect Howard would already have read it and/or bugged Brandon into reading it.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[skaa]

This gave me a "Why the heck didn't I think of that?!" moment. Great find, Phantom!

 

If this really is what Brandon plans to do, then there must be a way to store the weight of inanimate objects as well as that of non-Feruchemists into an Ironmind. I can think of two possibilities:

 

• A full Feruchemist gives everyone and everything inside the ship (including the ship itself) the same Spiritual Identity as himself. This requires a lot of Compounding, so he will have to be an Allomancer as well. Then he stores the weight of the whole ship in an Ironmind.
   
• Use technology to create Ironminds that have no user restrictions. The "public Ironminds" can then store the weight of the ship and everything in it.

Edited June 27, 2013 by skaa

[Satsuoni]

You forget the awesome awesomeness that is hemalurgy, skaa. As far as I can tell, spikes in the body count as body parts, so their weight should be possible to store, too. One wonders if a chipped spike can be healed by Bloodmaker... Baselessly assuming that it can, I present:

 

N-Inducer: The Living Ship

 

Hull made of pure iron, with spikes protruding inwards. As part of construction, thousand of virgins are sacrificed to the ship. Iron feruchemist is impaled at the helm, in place of honor. Other crew members are attached similarly. The attachment is permanent, since the spikes go through the hearts. Amongst other crew members are bloodmakers, possibly complemented by Bendalloy and Cadmium feruchemists. Steel allomancer serves as means of propulsion. All metalminds are also spikes driven through various crew members, so the whole ship is one giant organism sharing gestalt consciousness. 

At launch, the engine mechanisms scrape along the outer hull, dislodging a small amount of metal dust, just as the whole mass of the ship is stored in in the hull. The part of ship that is coinshot pushes off dust, now massing infinitely more than the ship, and is launched away from it at high speed. The Bloodmaker taps fuel goldminds (precharged, or recharged by Compounding), restoring the hull. The mass is tapped out, preserving velocity, and the cycle repeats.

 

The ship can also serve as a weapon, my tapping out all mass at relativistic speeds and ramming into something.

 

Now, who can guess what n stands for?

[Jaaaaaade]

Nutjob?

[king of nowhere]

WOn't work.

Theory of relativity says that your mass is equal to M0/(1-(v^2/c^2)), where M0 is your mass at rest, v^2 is the square of your speed, and c^2 is the square of the speed of light.

So, as long as your speed is much slower than that of the light, (v^2/c^2) approximates to zero, and your mass is your resting mass divided by 1, i.e. your resting mass. as you speed approaches that of light, (v^2/c^2) approaches 1, and you mass becomes divided by something approaching zero. you get close to infinite mass. As you get to light speed, you have infinite wheight. as good as your feruchemy can be, you cannot drain ALL of your wheight. Even if you manage to wheight one millionth of a billionth of your normal mass, it's still infinity once you're close to light speed.

Plus, you can't make ALL the ship into a metalmind. you need food and air in it, and some parts like the rokets or the computers need be of different composition. Now that I think about it, the fuel wouldd keep his wheight too.

 

Still, it is a great way to save energy by reducing the mass of the ship, but you can't go over the speed of light.

 

Also keep in mind that light speed is damnation fast and takes a long way to achieve anyway. For example, if you accelerate at 1 g, starting from still, and ingoring all relativistic effects, you need one year to reach light speed, and another year to decelerate to stop after that. So, no matter how fast your ship can go, you still need years of travel just to accelerate and decelerate, if you want your passengers to retain their shapes and not to end up as a mixed organic sludge on the ship's back.

 

No, to achieve practical FTL, you need to tinker with time and space, otherwise the impracticality of it all will make it, well, impractical. It's just that science fiction writers normally have no sense of scale and don't think of these problems. Readers consider them acceptable breaks from reality.

 

But I have faith that sanderson has thought things through. he never let me down on that aspect before, and I'd be surprised if he did so now

[Satsuoni]

Actually, your mass only changes in relation to other object. As far as the ship is concerned, it's mass is always the same, since its speed relative to itself is zero. And you can shunt all that mass (100%) into metalmind for a while (see above), assuming, of course, that the metalmind is also a spike, and fuel is another spike (as well as food, in bendalloy, and oxygen, in cadmium(?)). Of course, you probably won't be able to break lightspeed with that construction. That is quite true  

[Phantom Monstrosity]

You're assuming that relativity has any say in the matter.

 

 

I seriously doubt that Brandon will be close to hard SF on this; if he *was*, then based on relativity any FTL drive would also be a time machine, and we'd need a *really* good explanation why there aren't a bunch of space tourists showing up in orbit during Elantris.

 

 

 

 

As is, there's a lot of funky stuff going on with feruchemical weight - while you're altering the mass of the feruchemist, the momentum transfers aren't actually fully in line with your changed mass.  (Let alone the secondary changes needed to prevent serious bloodflow issues).

 

http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=689

Question

Does Iron store mass or weight?

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent question. The thing is it really does involve mass, but I’m breaking some physics rules, basically. I have to break a number of physics rules in order to make Magic work in the first place. Those whole laws of Thermodynamics, I’m like “You are my bane!” (laughter) But I try to work within the framework, and I have reasonings built up for myself, and some of them have to be kind of arbitrary. But the thing is, it does store mass if you look at how it interacts, but when a Feruchemist punches someone, you’re not having a mass transference of a 1000 pounds transferring the mass into someone else.

So there are a few little tweaks. You can go talk to Peter, because Peter has the actual math. Oh Peter’s back there. Peter is dressed up as Allomancer Jak from the broadsheet. In fact we’re giving some out broadsheets, aren’t we Peter. So when you come through the line, we’re giving out Broadsheets. Please don’t take fifty—I think we might have enough for everybody. The broadsheets are the newspaper from the Alloy of Law time. It’s an inworld newspaper. It’s actually reproduced in the book in four different pages, and we put it together in one big broadsheet.

So anyway, you can talk with him, he’s got more of the math of it. I explained the concept to Peter and he’s better with the actual math, so he said “We’ll figure it out.”

[Kurkistan]

You're assuming that relativity has any say in the matter.

 

I seriously doubt that Brandon will be close to hard SF on this; if he *was*, then based on relativity any FTL drive would also be a time machine, and we'd need a *really* good explanation why there aren't a bunch of space tourists showing up in orbit during Elantris.

 

There's handwaving some impacts of relativity upon simultaneity and then there's throwing it out the window. Breaking light speed in real, un-weirdified space is the later, and I doubt Brandon will do it. 

Edited June 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

There's handwaving some impacts of relativity upon simultaneity and then there's throwing it out the window. Breaking light speed in real, un-weirdified space is the later, and I doubt Brandon will do it. 

 

Feruchemical mass-changing inherently weirdifies space, though.  Or at least, it weirdifies mass, and mass distorts space.

[Kurkistan]

In that case you are essentially acknowledging that "relativity has a say in the matter".

 

Therefore, unless you can get down to negative mass (not just 0, negative), you still can't exceed c, by my understanding. That leaves us with issues.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

In that case you are essentially acknowledging that "relativity has a say in the matter".

 

Therefore, unless you can get down to negative mass (not just 0, negative), you still can't exceed c, by my understanding. That leaves us with issues.

 

Nah, I'm saying that you can go however fast you want,and any questions about 'how fast are you going' will be answered with 'as fast as I want dude'.

 

The fact that space gets totally distorted would be a side effect.  It's like how time bubbles make sure that redshifts and blueshifts don't happen.

 

I mean if you want to get all realmatic, you can argue that the existence of a spiritual and cognitive realm inherently allows for an aether to exist, which makes some of the fundamental underpinnings of SR and GR to poof away.  I mean, under your theory (if I understand correctly) gravity is fully spiritual.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Kurkistan]

Fair enough, I suppose. I'll just leave it to Sats (good old Auotpwail), then.

[Satsuoni]

You know, a thing about blue shifting light I wondered about recently: would one notice a blueshifted light if one's perception is affected by speedup? If your time ticks faster, wouldn't you perceive higher frequencies as being lower than they are?

As for aether: as far as I am concerned, quantum fields are aether: they are everywhere, light propagates through them, and some of them resist acceleration ( Higgs field, I am looking at you). GR seems fine... More or less.

Regardless, I also don't think Brandon will go for blatant disregard of relativity. Warp space, bubbles, etc - that is fine, but on physical level relativity would probably work. To an extent.

Note that even IRL relativity is a bit... Wonky in places. Places like black holes and microscale. And relativity allows wormholes, too with access to exotic matter, but hey: plenty of exotic stuff in Cosmere.

And Kurk: no, negative mass won't work. You'd need imaginary mass. Or stuff that travels backwards in time, like tachyons... Though CPT says that antimatter is like reflected matter that moves backwards, so there is that.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

You know, a thing about blue shifting light I wondered about recently: would one notice a blueshifted light if one's perception is affected by speedup? If your time ticks faster, wouldn't you perceive higher frequencies as being lower than they are?

Neurologically, no.  You still get the same rods and cones being activated, so your brain doesn't notice the difference.

 

 

And like I said, time bubbles already just ignore relativistic effects.  Feruchemy is also really useful for getting the required secondary handwaves to make things work - in that respect it's the best magic system in the series, as far as I can tell, and it's already established that feruchemical mass isn't *quite* the same thing as real mass, in terms of how it interacts.  Any FTL drive is going to involve vigorous handwaving at some point, and saying 'we reduce the pseudo-mass of the ship to the point where the speed of light for it is higher' is like one line.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Satsuoni]

How do bubbles ignore relativity? So far, I don't see any proof that they do... I think

[Phantom Monstrosity]

How do bubbles ignore relativity? So far, I don't see any proof that they do... I think

They don't redshift and blueshift light, which if they paid attention to relativity they should.

[Satsuoni]

As I pointed out above, you won't notice the blueshift if your time flows faster, and it would shift back on exit.

And by not noticing I mean " all chemical reactions would treat that light as normal "

Edited June 27, 2013 by Satsuoni

[Phantom Monstrosity]

As I pointed out above, you won't notice the blueshift if your time flows faster, and it would shift back on exit.

And by not noticing I mean " all chemical reactions would treat that light as normal "

If time is actually being messed with (and not just your perception of time), then you'd defnitely get shifting.

[Kurkistan]

Recall also that time bubbles were originally going to mess with light, but then Handwavium was applied when that was found to be impractical. So they almost certainly operate the same way now as they would have then, just with light given a free pass for no good reason.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Satsuoni]

Err, it would shift, and you won't notice the shift, since your reactions are tuned to higher frequency. So nobody would be able to tell if it shifted or not... Please explain in more detail.

[Kurkistan]

Sats, I'm sorry, but it just doesn't shift. If it did, people would get microwaved. Also, as Phantom indicated, you're perception would be of red/blue-shifted events happening very slowly/quickly--what with rods and cones and whatnot being relatively objective--if it did shift.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Satsuoni]

I remember that thread... The thing is, no, you won't get microwaved. Just as you don't explode from the fact that, for the outside world, your temperature just went above 2304 Celsius, as your molecules sped up. As long as light energy is adjusted in the same way your energy is adjusted, and you stay well below speed of light, you won't notice the fact that you now see in ultraviolet range... As far as i can tell anyway.

 

[EDIT] You know what? It is 6:00 here, and I have to leave home at 8:00. Bubbles are weird in more than just light effects - which can be explained away, as far as I can tell, without breaking physics much. Air, for example - there should be a pressure differential reducing the interior of bendalloy bubble to hard vacuum. There isn't. Hooray, handwavium. For now.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Satsuoni

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Also if you're in a 10x slowdown bubble you've got like ten times the amount of light coming in from the surroundings or whatever.

 

But yeah the clues we have are 'It involves where the lost energy from thermodynamic issues goes in certain Allomantic interactions.' and 'Watch for what happens when something leaves a bendalloy bubble'. 

 

And, well, things rapidly change the amount of energy they have when they leave the bubble, and you create/destroy a ton of photons. 

 

Reddit AMA 2011 (Verbatim)

Quafe ()

You have, undoubtedly, mastered the fantasy genre. Do you ever see yourself writing science fiction? I ask because I remember reading two or three years ago on TWG that your plan is to make the second Mistborn trilogy set in a steampunk/industrialized world and the third and final trilogy in a more sci-fi setting. So I'm just wondering if that plan still holds.

Brandon Sanderson

Both of my novellas linked above are SF. I do plan to do SF in the future. The final Mistborn trilogy will indeed be sf, with a deep understanding of Allomancy and Feruchemy having allowed them to figure out a method of FTL travel. I also have a space opera I've been wanting to write. So far, no time.

 

Still, that's a statement that Feruchemy is definitely involved.

 

I guess you could go with the 'reduce mass to zero, all objects with zero mass must travel at c because of physics, also have a guy making a timebubble, which has a really messed up 'position' by virtue of experiencing no time passing, fly until the end of the universe because you have no way to stop, die'

Edited June 27, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity