Forging for cheap space travel?

[king of nowhere]

I've been thinking of that. The main cost of space travel is that fuel is very expensive as you need millions of tons of it to lift something into orbit.

We also saw that forgery can apparently create matter: shan forges a window to be complete, and a glass pane appears.

So, my idea is this. Your first trip into space, you have to do it normally, because forgery requires believability.

After your first launch, however, you do the second launch without loading any fuel on the rockets. Then you stamp the fuel tank with "it has been filled". It is, after all, perfectly believable. So you can send stuff into orbit very cheap, but you still suffer the limitations of real world because then you can't pack much more fuel. Stamping again the fuel tank would not work: it's not believable that the ship is in orbit with a full tank.

 

However, you can send in this way a few tonns of fuel in orbit at a time. you soon build some massive orbital fuel storage for ships to resupply there. Then you resupply a ship on that storage. At this point, you don't need fuel anymore. You can just stamp your ship with "got refueled in orbit from that depot", and this time it is believable enough to wwork. So you can have a ship, in orbit, with millions of tons of fuel in it. you can go fast and pretty much everywhere in the solar system with it. Make a new fuel cash orbiting around any planet, and prepare new stamps for every ship, as they approaches the planet, to stamp "got refueled".

 

You can't achieve FTL travel, but you can go anywhere in the solar sistem easily. It's cheap enough that you could start mining the asteroids already with present day technologies. you can make an automatic stamping system to apply the stamps on an unmanned mission.

 

Would it work?

[Kurkistan]

It depends heavily on if Forgeries really last when you've functionally separated/destroyed the target object.

 

I'd say no, I don't think. If we follow Brandon's rule of "don't break the economy unless you really want to," then Forging like you suggest would allow us to mine infinite gold by turning clay pots into gold, then melting them down and selling them as coins. Or, in a stronger parallel, Forging a treasury chest into being full of coins, then distributing those coins.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[WeiryWriter]

I like it.  The only problem I can think of at the moment is that Forgeries lose power the farther you get from MaiPon.  I wonder if there could be some sort of power booster for Forgery like Aon Rao/Elantris is for AonDor.

[Observer]

If you forged a chest full of gold, ignoring the problems of doing so, would the gold last once taken out of the box?

[Kurkistan]

As I said, I highly doubt it.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

It depends heavily on if Forgeries really last when you've functionally separated/destroyed the target object.

 

Well, there was that whole floor and bed weakness forgery Shai did.

[Observer]

Even if broken, the floor and bed are still a floor and bed. Gold outside of a chest and spent around has changed cognitively, much the same way rocket fuel would change as it burned.

[Kurkistan]

I mean more along the lines of someone scraping the gilt off of Shai's desk and selling it, or if the pieces of the door Shai whammied and then broke, or her bed that she whammied and then broke, reverting to their original forms when they're no longer whole objects. So not functional destruction, as I've been discussing with Thought, but making so that an object is no longer a single object.

 

Really, that question was more rhetorical than anything. What King proposes is essentially a matter replicator (oh yeah, I went there. I hope you weren't planning anything important for the next life or so). Once you work out the kinks, anything and everything could be infinitely recreated, at least unless the Dor runs out. That isn't going to happen if Brandon has anything to say about it, and he does, so it won't.

 

EDIT: And what Observer said.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Hey man, soulcasters are a thing.

[Kurkistan]

Soulcasters, though, have an explicit cost of semi-finite energy (stormlight that can only be gathered at particular times) and, more importantly, gems that are known to be impossible to soulcast. So there's an upper limit to what you can do.

 

Also, it's far harder/rarer/less precise than Forging, and so could not be used on anything like an industrial scale.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Soulcasters, though, have an explicit cost of semi-finite energy (stormlight that can only be gathered at particular times) and, more importantly, gems that are known to be impossible to soulcast. So there's an upper limit to what you can do.

 

Also, it's far harder/rarer/less precise than Forging, and so could not be used on anything like an industrial scale.

Are gems really impossible to soulcast?  Amythest is a stormlight-holding gem, and you can soulcast quartz.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was a breakthrough that happened.

 

Soulcasting is already being used at the industrial-scale, really.  The whole economy relies upon it.

 

Forging has enough limits on plausibility that prevent you from making valuable stuff with it - and it isn't like physical separation is going to matter that much.  If you managed to turn a box full of gold into a box full of gold-plated lead, I suspect that the bars would remain as lead until the soulstamp on the box dispelled, at which point they'd revert to gold.

 

You probably also have to keep them pretty close to the stamp given how Sel's magics are distributed.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Kurkistan]

Are gems really impossible to soulcast?  Amythest is a stormlight-holding gem, and you can soulcast quartz.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was a breakthrough that happened.

 

EDIT: Oops, got so caught up out-quoting you that I forgot to write this part. Shallan mentions how her family could only use the soulcaster to make things like marble and opal, not "actual gemstones": I'll assume (quite rightly, I think, given that they hunt down death-monsters for emeralds) that they only think that soulcasting/stormlight-compatible gems are "actual gemstones".

 

(WoK, Ch 33)

Soulcasters were very rare in Jah Keved, and her family’s marble, jade, and opal would sell at a premium. They couldn’t create actual gemstones with a Soulcaster—that was said to be impossible—but they could create other deposits of near equal value.

 

----

I would be surprised if there is such a breakthrough, given that gems that aren't exactly right are like bad alloys.

 

The idea here is that the physical items (like the metals or the crystals) provide a key by which magical interaction occurs.

So, in a long winded answer, a gemstone with an impure color would be considered like a bad alloy in the Mistborn magic--it either wouldn't work at all, or would work very poorly. The chemical and color signature needs to be of a specific variety to provide the proper key to accessing the power of transformation.

 

(Boom! I out-quoted Phantom! *dances with glee*)

 

Soulcasting is already being used at the industrial-scale, really.  The whole economy relies upon it.

 

Eh, not really. Their armies in the field rely upon it, but they still have farmers. And there's the matter of the relative simplicity of what they produce. For matter!Forging, I'm talking no professions beyond token "this guy is a craftsmen who could have made this really nice chair" and the service industries. Complete disruption of society. Big stuff.

 

Forging has enough limits on plausibility that prevent you from making valuable stuff with it - and it isn't like physical separation is going to matter that much.  If you managed to turn a box full of gold into a box full of gold-plated lead, I suspect that the bars would remain as lead until the soulstamp on the box dispelled, at which point they'd revert to gold.

 

Why would you need to be tricky about it? Go into the treasury, where there are hundreds of caskets of gold. Pick one that happens to be empty at this time. Forge it so it's not, and is instead full of real gold. That's 100% plausible and will stick for the foreseeable future. Even if you throw in "oh but the stamp could wear off" as a token, you can still get a lot of mileage out of this.

 

On a less destroying-currency side, you could do the same thing with basically any physical good that you could put in a box. "Empty shipping container on the side of the street by a warehouse? Oh no, that's full to the brim with silk about to be shipped out." And so on.

 

If the stamp's destructibility is really the only limit, then just keep them safe. For instance, all of those doors and vases and whatnot in the palace, instead of being individually stamped, could have just come out of some big crates that got stamped instead, thus cutting down on both labor (all those joyless "Rememberers") and making it so that your replicas aren't marred in any way by shameful stamps. If it could have happened, it would have.

 

And this is all before I even get Realmatic on you.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Shardlet]

The rub is, in an attempt to forge a box filled with gold, the gold is not an integral part of the box.  In the stained glass window the window glass is an intergral part of the window.  In fact, when Shai tried to forge regular glass into the window, it always broke.  Her forgings didn't work.

 

In other words, the nature of the box is unchanged if it has gold in it or not.  So, I doubt that you could forge contents into a container.  I suspect the best you could do is forge the box to have been a chest in which gold was contained in it such that there are flakes of gold embedded into the box itself.

 

As to the gold into gold-plated lead, I think you would have a tough time convincing that gold that it is actually lead.

Edited October 29, 2013 by Shardlet

[Kurkistan]

Though I tend to agree with you that Forging likely just changes objects, but not their contents, we know from Shai that it's actually relatively easy to turn gold to lead.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Pechvarry]

Do Elantrians make food out of nothing or transform something into food, soulcasting style?

[Phantom Monstrosity]

If the stamp's destructibility is really the only limit, then just keep them safe. For instance, all of those doors and vases and whatnot in the palace, instead of being individually stamped, could have just come out of some big crates that got stamped instead, thus cutting down on both labor (all those joyless "Rememberers") and making it so that your replicas aren't marred in any way by shameful stamps. If it could have happened, it would have.

You're assuming that the stamps will last forever; the reason that they wear off so quickly on humans is because people are constantly changing.  If you remove something fundamental to your forgery, odds are it'll start getting rejected.

 

Let's say shai stamps a box so that it's full of gold.

<<there's currently a gold bar in this box>>

Shai takes it out.  It now no longer has any gold.

<<FORGERY NOW CRITICALLY IMPLAUSIBLE PREPARE TO DELETE GOLD.BAR>>

And then the stamp pops off, possibly taking a couple minutes to do so.

 

Even if that doesn't happen in the next few minutes, there's probably a maximum distance requirement, given that this is Sel.  So you might be able to forge a box full of gold goblets, put the goblets in your dining room, but not be able to take them out of the room without them turning back into rocks.

 

EDIT: Oops, got so caught up out-quoting you that I forgot to write this part. Shallan mentions how her family could only use the soulcaster to make things like marble and opal, not "actual gemstones": I'll assume (quite rightly, I think, given that they hunt down death-monsters for emeralds) that they only think that soulcasting/stormlight-compatible gems are "actual gemstones".

Quartz is an Essence, dude.  We even see a guy getting quartzified on screen.

 

Shallan continued on her way. Her parshman servant carried a sphere lantern containing a trio of sapphire marks. The soft blue light reflected against the stone walls, portions of which had been Soulcast into quartz purely for ornamentation.

The other three men began to curse, scrambling away, tripping over one another in their panic. One fell. Jasnah turned casually, brushing his shoulder with her fingers as he struggled to his knees. He became crystal, a figure of pure, flawless quartz—his clothing transformed along with him. The diamond in Jasnah’s Soulcaster faded, but there was still plenty of Stormlight left to send rainbow sparkles through the transformed corpse.

Amethyst is a kind of quartz - and soulcasting has thus far demonstrated considerably flexibility.

Aside from that, it's actually trivial to make synthetic amethyst.  Any college chemistry student with time on his hands can do it.

 

It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to soulcast amethyst - either directly, or by leaving trace iron impurities when soulcasting iron into quartz

[Windrunner]

I don't think that anyone is going to be Soulcasting amethyst. I'm pretty sure that the restriction against Soulcasting gems there is in real life just to keep the supply of gems low. Even if amethyst is quartz, it's the color that really matters in Soulcasting. So they can probably Soulcast any type of quartz aside from those that are Polestones.

[Kurkistan]

You're assuming that the stamps will last forever; the reason that they wear off so quickly on humans is because people are constantly changing.  If you remove something fundamental to your forgery, odds are it'll start getting rejected.

 

Let's say shai stamps a box so that it's full of gold.

<<there's currently a gold bar in this box>>

Shai takes it out.  It now no longer has any gold.

<<FORGERY NOW CRITICALLY IMPLAUSIBLE PREPARE TO DELETE GOLD.BAR>>

And then the stamp pops off, possibly taking a couple minutes to do so.

 

Even if that doesn't happen in the next few minutes, there's probably a maximum distance requirement, given that this is Sel.  So you might be able to forge a box full of gold goblets, put the goblets in your dining room, but not be able to take them out of the room without them turning back into rocks.

 

Ooh, I like that way of describing it (a bit). Still, I'm somewhat leery of allowing this, if only because it allows king of nowhere to be happy. In particular, it allows him to get infinite matter, so long as you're sure to use it up in a relatively confined space. Unless destroying/altering these magically acquired contents should also hurt the stamp?

 

Quartz is an Essence, dude.  We even see a guy getting quartzified on screen.

 

No, it's not an essence. It isn't a associated with an essence either. It's a "soulcasting property" of diamond.

http://stormlightarchive.wikia.com/wiki/Ten_Essences

 

Amethyst is a kind of quartz - and soulcasting has thus far demonstrated considerably flexibility.

Aside from that, it's actually trivial to make synthetic amethyst.  Any college chemistry student with time on his hands can do it.

 

It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to soulcast amethyst - either directly, or by leaving trace iron impurities when soulcasting iron into quartz

 

I wouldn't be surprised if synthetic amethyst--of any variety, if you insist that it could be done through soulcasting--is still unusable for soulcasting. I'd bet that either its Spiritual or its Cognitive makeup will be different and so interfere with the soulcasting. Things just break when you can manufacture gemstones.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Quartz is a subset of Lucentia, yes.  The pure form of any essence is easiest to make.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if synthetic amethyst--of any variety, if you insist that it could be done through soulcasting--is still unusable for soulcasting. I'd bet that either its Spiritual or its Cognitive makeup will be different and so interfere with the soulcasting. Things just break when you can manufacture gemstones.

 

Soulcast blood can safely be fed to vampires, which kinda implies it works for mystical interactions... and you just quoted where Brandon said it was the chemical and color signature that mattered, not some cognitive mumbojumbo .  And aren't *all* the gemstones they loot synthetic, anyway?  Growing in a greatshell certainly ain't natural, that's for sure.

 

 

So, I went back to the original, and decided that color was enough to differentiate them. Just as steel and iron are very similar in the mistborn world, Emerald and Heliodor can be very similar--but produce different effects. The idea here is that the physical items (like the metals or the crystals) provide a key by which magical interaction occurs.

And, obviously, it's possible to make steel out of iron in mistborn, and that doesn't have any problems.

 

 

I'm not sure if they'll go the route of generating synthetic stormlight-class gems before the end of the novel, but Brandon *did* say

 

I've wanted to do a series, then, where the magic isn't going away—it's coming back. Where the world is becoming a more wondrous place. Where new races aren't vanishing, they're being discovered.

Having a game-changer built into the system would fit with the whole fabrial renaissance theme.

 

And really, you'd still have issues with accumulating enough stormlight to do anything, and amethyst can only be used to soulcast metal, so it isn't an infinite loop - you're converting diamonds into larger amounts of amethyst.  And it isn't like they can't farm gemhearts on an actual farm, either.

 

Also heat treating a gem for better color will probably make it more efficient, if you do it properly.  Which is something that they're quite capable of doing, technologically (radiation treatment is... well, it's logistically to do, but it's extremely unlikely they'd stumble across it)

 

 

Ooh, I like that way of describing it (a bit). Still, I'm somewhat leery of allowing this, if only because it allows king of nowhere to be happy. In particular, it allows him to get infinite matter, so long as you're sure to use it up in a relatively confined space. Unless destroying/altering these magically acquired contents should also hurt the stamp?

 

Well, forgeries still have to be plausible.  So it'd be basically like Shai making her ugly room into the best one in the castle.  Presumably the plausibility would be reduced with each thing you brought out - just happening to have an old flashlight in this abandoned warehouse?  Plausible.  Just happening to have some cans of pineapple?  And a hammer, and a map to the nearest police station?  Each of those is plausible, but having all at once is implausibly convenient.

 

And of course you have to spend all the work on each soulstamp, so it isn't like you're getting things for free.

Edited June 28, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[WeiryWriter]

(BTW this discussion on whether it is possible to soulcast gems that can be used in soulcasting should probably get its own thread)

 

Shallan's quote about how creating gems with soulcasters is "thought to be impossible" reminds me of WoT and all of the things that were "thought to be impossible" that ended up happening.  Logically I can see why soulcasters should be able to create such gems but my gut tells me that it isn't going to happen.  I just don't think it would feel right.

 

I'd also like to echo what Windy said about "color" being important, ruby and sapphire, both Polestones, are each a variety of corundum. I could see cognitive aspects coming into play, as Kurk suggests, they are "thought of" as different things and so have different effects.

 

Also, Hissss, non-coppermind wiki...

 

Edit: Curses, Ninja'd

 

As for the gemhearts "not being natural" I would say that they are.  On Roshar they are a part of life (literally).  They may have a magical component but that doesn't make them "unnatural" or synthetic. 

Edited June 28, 2013 by WeiryWriter

[Kurkistan]

@Phantom

 

On quartz: Ah. I had thought you were trying to claim that quartz was a soulcasting gemstone, for some reason. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Still not sure why you went all "quartz is an Essence, dude" in reply to my point about not being able to soulcast the core 10 gem types.

 

On fake gems: I may be wrong here, I just feel that it would be too easy. After all, there has to be a reason why the 10 gems can't be soulcast, and that could bleed over into trying to synthesize them.

 

On Forgeries: My concern is even more fundamental, actually: I would not be surprised if you simply cannot Forge an object in such a way as to change other objects that it contains. So you'd never be able to "remove" things from a Forged object and see where the breaking point is because you can only change the box, not the cargo.

 

If this is the case, then doing anything to damage/destroy the identity of a Forged singular object as a singular object probably compromises the Forging quite severely. The degree to which this is true is still in the air for me, though.

 

You can reuse soulstamps. Quite easily, actually. The maker of the stamp doesn't have to apply it and we see Shai using one stamp for multiple purposes. No doubt the problem comes down to different objects having different histories, but a system such as king of nowhere proposes would be so genericized that it wouldn't matter all that much.

Edited June 28, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

On quartz: Ah. I had thought you were trying to claim that quartz was a soulcasting gemstone, for some reason. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Still not sure why you went all "quartz is an Essence, dude" in reply to my point about not being able to soulcast the core 10 gem types.

Amethyst is purple quartz. 

 

On fake gems: I may be wrong here, I just feel that it would be too easy. After all, there has to be a reason why the 10 gems can't be soulcast, and that could bleed over into trying to synthesize them.

Marble, jade, and opal are all amorphous.  It's possibly a question of difficulty?

"They couldn’t create actual gemstones with a Soulcaster—that was said to be impossible—but they could create other deposits of near equal value."

I'll point out that clear quartz is actually a gemstone, and we see people making that.  Shallan isn't very well informed about gemology, sadly.

 

You can reuse soulstamps. Quite easily, actually. The maker of the stamp doesn't have to apply it and we see Shai using one stamp for multiple purposes. No doubt the problem comes down to different objects having different histories, but a system such as king of nowhere proposes would be so genericized that it wouldn't matter all that much.

Yeah, but shai's wood-worm stamp is for wood in literally the same building, so it's going to take fairly well - and if it doesn't, she literally only needs it to be rotten for a few seconds. 

 

You need to have a similar degree of skill to do a forgery, so if you mass produce stamps you're really doing is saying 'Rafael, instead of painting this wall, we want you to learn how to make soulstamps, and then make a stamp of you painting this wall'.  You still need dudes with training, you still need soulstamp materials, and you get something that's more difficult to upkeep.

[Kurkistan]

Amethyst is purple quartz. 

 

If you say so. The nature of magic on Roshar begs to differ.

 

I'll point out that clear quartz is actually a gemstone, and we see people making that.  Shallan isn't very well informed about gemology, sadly.

 

Not necessarily, if you only consider the 10 Polestones to be "gemstones".

 

Yeah, but shai's wood-worm stamp is for wood in literally the same building, so it's going to take fairly well - and if it doesn't, she literally only needs it to be rotten for a few seconds. 

 

You need to have a similar degree of skill to do a forgery, so if you mass produce stamps you're really doing is saying 'Rafael, instead of painting this wall, we want you to learn how to make soulstamps, and then make a stamp of you painting this wall'.  You still need dudes with training, you still need soulstamp materials, and you get something that's more difficult to upkeep.

 

Enter: "Rememberers". Joyless lines of mass-producing quarter-trained Forgers who keep the heritage faction happy. Turn them to making gold out of thin air and you win.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Enter: "Rememberers". Joyless lines of mass-producing quarter-trained Forgers who keep the heritage faction happy. Turn them to making gold out of thin air and you win.

 

Provided you train them as goldsmiths, and don't ever move that gold more than a few feet from the stamp for a prolonged period, yes.

 

You can already turn a terrible pot into a beautiful highly-decorated one.  I would argue that the type of mass-production is already happening.  I mean, the difference between 'a door right here with gold inlay' and 'enough gold for an inlay' isn't really that big economically speaking.  It's apparently cheaper to make soulstamps than make replicas, but the government has money to burn.  Odds are that a trained forger's time is worth a LOT.

 

 

 

If you say so. The nature of magic on Roshar begs to differ.

It's not the same kind of quartz, obviously (due to lacking the iron impurities), but it's still the same darn mineral.  So you could irradiate goshenite and turn it into heliodor, and that would work as a gem for your soulcaster.  Or you could ruin a helidor by heat-treating it, and turning it a different color.  Heck, emeralds don't all have the same chemical composition.

Edited June 28, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Thought]

Regarding forging, we know that contact is important. To undo a forge, Shai removes the stamp. But what if, say, Shai changed a table by stamping a leg, then broke off that leg? From what we know of stamps requiring physical contact, the leg should retain the forging, the rest of the table should revert. Instantly. We don't see an example of this situation coming up, mind you, but there's good reason to doubt that removing physical contact will result in anything but immediate reversion.

 

From the other touch-specific magics we've seen, it's the same way. Not touching your metalmind? No feuchemy. Your spike's been removed? No hemalurgy.

 

We also saw that forgery can apparently create matter: shan forges a window to be complete, and a glass pane appears.

 

A-nope. The original window was cracked and gap-sided, as per Shai's description in Day 30, but there's no indication it was missing panes of glass, or that she made new ones appear.She did make the frame fit the window-hole, and clearly pigments had to appear in the glass, but if this was creating matter or rearranging what was already there isn't clear. Given that the imperial pots were still roughly the same shape and size of what they were being forged into, it seems that even if forgery can create some matter, there's a limit to it.

 

For forging a tank, the stamp would have to affect whatever the tank already contained (if it's empty, that would be air). Given it's highly improbably that air would actually have the history of fuel, that wouldn't work. A forger might be able to forge a tank full of water into a tank full of fuel: that's still unlikely, but at least we're not trying to turn a gas into a liquid. Of course, we also never see Shai trying to stamp gas or liquid at all, only solids. It's questionable how much of a cognitive presence such things have.

 

What you might be able to do is to forge something heavy into something light, so less fuel is needed to get it into space. Or perhaps inefficient fuel into efficient fuel (though it's been implied that bad things happen when you destroy invested objects: even if you could burn this fuel, who knows what would happen). Or forge rare resources (you know that rare earth mineral MaiPon has to import from Elantris? Yeah, they can just forge the circuity that uses it instead).