Brass compounding what does it do?

[Avarickan]

   So I've been thinking about allomancy and feruchemy; the obvious thing to come from that is of course questions about compounding. So I'm curious about brass coumpounding; or more specifically brasses feruchemical properties taken to the extreme.

   

   The way I see it brass affects your heat physically, but one thing I'm curious about is how? does it store heat in degrees (fahrenheit or celsius) or as something multiplicative (current heat times stored number). The difference it would make one way or another is huge because compounding is multiplicative, and would increase the stored number in different ways. It would also change how the power applied; if it multiplies then you would have your current heat multiplied, whereas if it added then you would have the heat added to you. This is however somewhat boring, and so I'll get to why I'm curious about brass... explosions. Because explosions are simply the pressure wave between something incredibly hot all of a sudden, and brass makes you hotter theoretically your could make an explosion, but whether you would survive or it would be big is what I'm wondering; which is why I made this about compounding, that makes it so there's not the problem of it taking a decade's worth of heat to make a little explosion.

 

   So I'm wondering about everyone's take on this because I know that one person can't think in the ways that other people can. (unless you're Stephen Leeds, and I'm not)

[Yata]

The Brass works like all the other "quantificable attributes" in Feruchemy.

If you store some X quantity of Heat, when you burn that brassmind you obtain your k*X Heat, an amount equal to your stored heat multiplied for an unknow numbers (that I suppose It dependts by your allomanic strenght) and probably you have to put the extra Heat in another Metalmind before that burn you or get wasted (this depends to the answer of the next question).

 

The thing that isn't know is "The Heat in your metalmind could harm you ?" there is no a simple answer. I think that you will hurt you, like it will damage any normal people (there are other metalminds that are unsafe to use limitless).

 

Your "Explosion theory" could be right to me, but the Feruchemist will lose his life. And this before that the explosion, just for his own heat.

PS: The "Explosion" itself would be a very poor thing, because there isn't any "gas development" and no costriction of the previous gas.

(Unless you put the Ferring in a sealed box (or something like).

[Topomouse]

Keep in mind that thermal energy(or heat) and temperature are two different things. To someone who has a bit of background in physics it's very cringe-worthy to hear them confused.

 

That said, I think that brass stores thermal energy, measured in Joules. So while storing, there is an heat flow from your body to the metalmind, and vice-versa a flow form the metalmind to your body when you tap, up to the total thermal energy that was stored.

 

By compounding you could store 100J of energy and tap 200J, which is probably not very useful unless you are in the middle of a trip through Antarctica or something similar.

 

As for the explosion, I think it would be pretty hard to do. I'm not an expert of explosive, but I'm fairly sure that in order to get an explosion, you need a container that makes the pressure build up. If you just tapped a lot of heat in the middle of an empty field you just heat yourself to a very high temperature and then pass that heat to the air touching you. You would end up with a strong upward current but no explosion.

 

And if we want to talk about surviving, form the iron feruchemy we know that tapping a certain attribute also gives you secondary power necessary to survive it, so it is reasonable to assume that while tapping brass your body would be able to handle higher temperatures, but I doubt it would be enough to survive being the origin of an explosion.

[Yata]

It's quite my point.

To create an "explosion" there is much more than "high temperatures".

Maybe the Brass could be used to burn someone else while tapping the metalmind. But you will burn too and probably much more than the enemy.

[DreamEternal]

It's quite my point.

To create an "explosion" there is much more than "high temperatures".

Maybe the Brass could be used to burn someone else while tapping the metalmind. But you will burn too and probably much more than the enemy.

Again, you are forgeting that maybevyoy would be imune to your own elevated temperature, like how people don't crush themselves after tapping iron.

[Unodus]

On another note, would it then be possible to freeze yourself Captain America style by compound storing heat? Could be useful in the space age Scadrial... :3

[king of nowhere]

well, an explosion can happen without confinement if there is a lot of heat involved, like in the case of an atomic explosion. But that heats the air to tens of thousands of degrees in a matter of milliseconds or less. I doubt a feruchemist could achieve effects of that magnitude.
 
As for the secondary power of surviving the effect of yur main power, that's debatable of far that applies here. It is reasonable to assume that you could heat your body with brass feruchemy much more than it would survive otherwise. But if you heat to scorching levels the air around you, will that air be able to harm you? It is very possible. iron feruchemy makes your body harder so it won't get crushed by its own weigth, but it does noty give resistance to external blows, even if the extra hardness should. If brass feruchemy works the same way, you are immune to your own heat, but external heat sources may still burn you. Even if they are less hot than you are.
And surely you would not be resistant to an explosion, even the small one you may be able to cause without confinement. That's like standing on a roof and using iron feruchemy to collapse the building: it won't give you resistance to falling on the floor below, much less to the rest of the roof collapsing over your head.
 
EDIT:

On another note, would it then be possible to freeze yourself Captain America style by compound storing heat? Could be useful in the space age Scadrial... :3

Hybernation on humans is not so easy to achieve. While movies are full of it, it doesn't seem to work in practice. The main problem is that the bodily fluids freeze slowly, forming crystals that destroy the cells; that at least would be avoided by the extremly fast freezing you coudl achieve with storing heat; that would give amorphous ice.

Still, there is no guarantee whatsoever that the body would wake up once unfrozen. Or that it would still work as it should.

Edited September 27, 2015 by king of nowhere

[Yata]

On another note, would it then be possible to freeze yourself Captain America style by compound storing heat? Could be useful in the space age Scadrial... :3

There are problems to do this:

1) The Feruchemy has an upper bound to the amount storable, I remember that is the 50% of your attribute but also if I am wrong in the number (es. 75-80%) the feruchemist stay at  quite 10° and it's too high to talk about Cryogenic.

2) If you lose consciousness, you stop to charge the metalmind (only the "Sleepmind" could be charge consciousnessless).

3) If you compound heat, you have "more" heat not less. Your method could be if you store "freshness" XD

 

But of course the ability to store huge amount of Heat is priceless to any Life support system

[Oudeis]

Are you talking about an "explosion" like thunder, how the sudden heating of air makes sound and something of a shockwave? I suspect there would be too many forces involved, and the kinetic energy of the air would probably kill you. I'm also gonna parrot what other people have said; we know that feruchemy gives your body a limited ability to compensate for an attribute you draw out rapidly; a lot of people have extrapolated this to, "You gain full immunity to that quality" which I think is an overreach, considering what we've seen; Sazed gets nauseous from tapping too much sight, tapping too much strength makes his muscles swell until he can't bend his elbow, Wax is slower and has difficulty walking when he's tapping a lot of weight, etc. Someone said it above; you could prolly safely raise your temperature above what you normally can by tapping brass, but at some point it will hurt you. Even if you have an infinite ability to deal with just the heat, you'll dehydrate (if not dessicate), or set your clothes on fire and be burned (burn damage =/= just heat, I believe).

[Kaymyth]

So basically, while a brass compounder might indeed have the glorious ability to literally hate someone with the fire of a thousand suns, doing so would annihilate them near-instantaneously. 

[Oudeis]

Are there other compounders with potentially extinction-level powers?

 

I can't see it for pewter, tin, steel, zinc, copper, bronze, bendalloy, cadmium, gold, electrum, or aluminum.

 

We've already discussed brass; a point of enough heat on earth, even if your body is destroyed, could set off firestorms and end life on Scadrial.

 

That leaves iron, duralumin, nicrosil, and chromium. Nicrosil and chromium, while we can speculate, the truth is we have not the first idea how they actually work. Commenting on them is pointless in the extreme at this time.

 

Iron. I would guess not, as a factor of time? Once you die, the weight goes away. While maybe if you created an actual black hole for a moment, you could harm maybe a few miles radius around you, I don't see the effects reaching far enough to end life. Any physicists want to tell me I'm wrong?

 

Duralumin I'm tempted to say no, but maybe? Might your connection extend to every human on the planet? Is it possible you could overload spiritwebs, doing spiritual damage to all humankind that would lead to their extinction? Still, the odds of this causing anything more than humans to go extinct, and maybe the few animals near extinction we're trying to protect/resuscitate, seems slim. If anything, other creatures would thrive, even if this were what duralumin means.

[Avarickan]

I think that when it comes to compounding you have to think of how the powers work together. It doesn't work very well for brass 'cause all you could do is make people less worried about how you're about to burn to a crisp, but Imagine what an iron compounder could do to a nice big metal skyscraper; so while it may not be able to cause extinction or make a black hole, it could be extremely destructive. If you think of how Elendel is advancing, ;and the more powerful people are starting to use electricity for everyday things it could be very dangerous if an iron compounder pulled on every bit of metal in a building (or multiple buildings) at once. It may be possible to level the city if you had enough iron to compound, and because most of Scadrial's people (on the northern hemisphere anyways) are in Elendel it could kill a huge chunk of the global population. So strategically placed iron compounders could in theory do it, but it'd probably be hard to get that many because twinborn are rare, and compunders are a rarer for of twinborn made harder to get because a certain kind is needed.

[Ascendant Warrior]

Compounding, as we know it, increases the Feruchemical attribute stored in the burning metalmind, not Allomantic power. There is a way to increase allomantic power, but we don't know how yet.

[Kaymyth]

Compounding, as we know it, increases the Feruchemical attribute stored in the burning metalmind, not Allomantic power. There is a way to increase allomantic power, but we don't know how yet.

 

Yes, but an iron compounder can give him or herself enough weight to anchor and pull down an entire building.

 

There's a reason why the AoL MAG supplement states that they're known for "smashing themselves flat".

 

(I know it's not canon, but on a few things I really do think they hit the nail on the head.)

Edited September 28, 2015 by Kaymyth

[king of nowhere]

the heat levels capable of destroying life on our planet are far greater than what any compounder can achieve.

[natc]

Not that there's any known limit to speak of beyond running out of metal and matters of practical physics.

Edited September 29, 2015 by natc

[king of nowhere]

the limit is how much time you have in your lifetime to store.

Say that brass compounding allows you to store heat at the rate of one megawatt, which is the consumptiion of a few hundred households and ten thousand times the energy consumption of a human body. Then in your lifetime you could store the energy content of a medium-sized atomic bomb. You'lll still fall short of the energy needed for an extinction event by about one million times.

[natc]

I'm not sure why you're limiting the storing rate so much when Miles implies you only need to compound on occasion to have so much of a trait to store that you can tap to impressive levels nonstop (that man can detonate dynamite in his own hand or shoot himself in the face with a shotgun and be fine) for ages and still have charge to spare.

You're also placing arbitrary limits on tapping rate. By your amount of heat, you can hit that million times higher temperature if you just empty out in a millionth of the duration. Whether that is long enough to actually kill anything, idk. Not an expert on extinction events. But I'm finding it strange that you're limiting both factors where the very absence of a hard limit is the main advantage feruchemy has over allomancy. Or why we are measuring investiture (which is what would be in the metal, not the energy itself) in megawatts.

Edited September 29, 2015 by natc

[king of nowhere]

i am not limiting the storing rate "so much". I am using - for the sake of hypothesis - a ludicrously high storing rate. do you have an idea how much is a megawatt compared to a person? It's one megajoule per second. it's enough to heat all of your body by about five degrees, or enough energy for your car to travel a few kilometers, or the energy released by a modern cannonball on impact. And storing one megawatt means storing that every second. even sleeping.

Miles implies you only need to compound on occasion to have so much of a trait to store that you can tap to impressive levels nonstop

 

and if - by the sake of this hypothesis - you could store heat at the rate of one megawatt, then with three seconds of compounding you could fully recover yourself from the brink of hypothermia. with one second compounding you'd have enough heat to swim in freezing water for roughly twenty minutes. You could compound one minute per day, and live all your day in freezing water. I'd call it perfectly consistent with "needing to compound only on occasion to tap to impressive levels nonstop.

 

Basically, I think you just don't realize how big are the ammounts of energy we're talking about.

 

You're also placing arbitrary limits on tapping rate. By your amount of heat, you can hit that million times higher temperature if you just empty out in a millionth of the duration.

 

Keep in mind that thermal energy(or heat) and temperature are two different things. To someone who has a bit of background in physics it's very cringe-worthy to hear them confused. (thanks for the quote, topomouse).

To set off a big enough explosion you need energy. You can use a little amount of energy to heat a very small piece of matter to extremely high temperatures (the sparks you see when hitting a flint stone are actually microscopic pieces of white-hot metal) but you can't get a big explosion out of that, because the energy involved is tiny.

[Oudeis]

You... both seem to be missing the point of compounding. The storing rate is practically irrelevant.

 

I don't know if this is accurate, but it says humans produce 100 watts of energy.

 

My link above gives us a benchpost to reach for; 1.875 terawatts.

 

Let's assume you can only store 1% of your body's energy output. That gives us a nice even number: 1 watt. (I don't like these units, since we've "stored" an absolute amount of energy, you haven't stored 'joules per second', but it's the unit everyone's working with and the math does work out easily, so we're good.)

 

So after an hour, you have enough energy to produce 1 watt of energy for an hour.

 

This is why storing doesn't matter. Compounding gives you a return on your investment by an order of magnitude. Let's say you stored the heat in a few flakes of brass. You swallow the brass, burn it, compound it, and immediately store the return. You now have 10 watts over an hour, for a few seconds work. You've stored this energy in ten times as many flakes. You burn those flakes, and now have 100 watts.

 

A terawatt is simply 12 orders of magnitude. In an hour of compounding, tops, you've compounded twelve times. Hey, let's go one more; now you've compounded an order above a terawatt, and for an hour you can burn with energy at 5x what the article above says you need to end the world.

 

Obviously, you personally would not survive an hour, and would have to stop tapping heat, so you simply pull it all out in one big lump. That much energy infuses your body, which is rapidly your corpse, your clothes, your immediate surroundings, and sets off the firestorm that ends the world, sparked by 1x10^13 watts of power in a second. Or take a week, and keep compounding, until you have so much that the exponent has to be written in scientific notation.

 

My point is, the trick to compounding is that storing speed becomes utterly irrelevant. That's basically the only thing you get out of compounding; otherwise, it can't do anything simple feruchemy can't do.

[Moogle]

A terawatt is simply 12 orders of magnitude. In an hour of compounding, tops, you've compounded twelve times. Hey, let's go one more; now you've compounded an order above a terawatt, and for an hour you can burn with energy at 5x what the article above says you need to end the world.

 

The thing your analysis here fails to take into account is that an Allomancer can only burn a metal so fast, and a metalmind has a maximum amount of storage. Because of this, you will run into a maximum rate of power storage quite quickly (which is when your metalminds are fully charged and you can only burn so much at one time), and you will stop getting exponential gains after that.

 

Of course, with Allomantic duralumin that restriction is removed. Allomantic duralumin spikes: the dream of any Compounder? Of course, then you run into the restriction of only being able to eat so much metal, but that's what Feruchemical steel is for. At that point, the restriction is how much you can shove down your throat before your throat is essentially sandpaper'd to bits. But that's what Feruchemical gold is for...

[baby]

Firefight Spoilers I guess, don't read if you haven't gotten to firefight yet

Could you be like Obliteration with brass compounding, ofc without the heat draining? Like the huge heat release and just projecting heat.

Edited September 30, 2015 by WeiryWriter
please put spoilers in spoiler tags

[natc]

I'm here why I have someone telling me I'm missing the point that storing rate is irrelevant when I'm the one telling someone to not underestimate how much you can pour into a brassmind in short periods of time.

And again, practical limitations being amount of brass and burn rate. A nicroburst might help, but some care should be exercised to not burn him . . .

[Yata]

And again, practical limitations being amount of brass and burn rate. A nicroburst might help, but some care should be exercised to not burn him . . .

Your post made me think, May a Compounder react by storing the "compounding attribute" if the "nicrosilbust" come at surprise (ex. an attack) ?

 

And has a compounder the same "storage-speed" limits of a normal Feruchemist (I think he has) ? If the answer is YES, a compounder could waste its "compounder-attribute" by Durallumin or Nicrosil (he could storage just a little part of the Compounding). With some metals (like brass-hear) He may die in this way.

[natc]

See, I'm still wondering what storing limit you're referring to.

Other than reaching 0% of something being evidently impossible and stuff like being too light making it impossible to move properly, nothing comes to mind.