Aluminium Extraction?

[Karger]

59 minutes ago, SwordNimiForPresident said:

It's a question that I raised in a different thread. If it is possible, an Allomancer of a high enough Investiture level could potentially push/pull on the ISM and travel through space.

An alomencer of high enough level can basically teleport via the clever use of temporal metals.

[+Oltux72]

9 hours ago, SwordNimiForPresident said:

I guess it would never really become an issue in the books since those kind of conditions are only found in extreme environments like the cores of planets or the lower atmospheres of gas giants.

Actually the reverse is testable. Tin has a nonmetallic phase you can get to by lowering temperature to what you can find in winters of the temperate zones.

[SwordNimiForPresident]

10 hours ago, Karger said:

An alomencer of high enough level can basically teleport via the clever use of temporal metals.

Is there a thread on this somewhere? It's the first time I've heard of it.

[Karger]

On 5/30/2019 at 9:22 AM, SwordNimiForPresident said:

Is there a thread on this somewhere? It's the first time I've heard of it.

Yes and we have several WoBs too but from what we know era 3 will involve massive spaceships that go FTL by manipulating Temporal metals.

[RShara]

40 minutes ago, Karger said:

Yes and we have several WoBs too but from what we know era 3 will involve massive spaceships that go FTL by manipulating Temporal metals.

We don't know how FTL will be accomplished, just that it will be existent.

On 5/30/2019 at 7:22 AM, SwordNimiForPresident said:

Is there a thread on this somewhere? It's the first time I've heard of it.

I think it's speculation, there are a few threads that speculate on the nature of the Era 4 FTL.

 

 

 

Edited June 3, 2019 by RShara

[SwordNimiForPresident]

9 hours ago, Karger said:

Yes and we have several WoBs too but from what we know era 3 will involve massive spaceships that go FTL by manipulating Temporal metals.

The best theory that I’ve seen (and the only one that makes sense IMO) on the FTL system depends on offset speed bubbles. I don’t see how a single Allomancer could utilize it without Ettmetal machinery.

[RShara]

4 hours ago, SwordNimiForPresident said:

The best theory that I’ve seen (and the only one that makes sense IMO) on the FTL system depends on offset speed bubbles. I don’t see how a single Allomancer could utilize it without Ettmetal machinery.

Brandon said that he hasn't given us enough info to figure out how Era 4 FTL is going to work, as of the end of Bands of Mourning. So it's almost certainly more complicated/different than that.

[Pathfinder]

An Alcubierre Drive seems to theoretically at least be going in the right direction. 

 

Steeldancer (paraphrased)

Have you ever heard of the Alcubierre Drive? 

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes, I know about the Alcubierre drive. 

Steeldancer (paraphrased)

So, if we took two speed bubbles--mechanized, because Allomancers aren't powerful enough to pull it off--could we create a functioning Alcubierre drive?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

You are theorizing in the right direction. 

[Kaymyth]

On 5/28/2019 at 7:52 PM, Karger said:

What determines weather or not it can be pushed though?

Chemistry. Aluminum oxide has completely different chemical properties than metallic aluminum. It's not the same substance, and you can only break those chemical bonds with a large input of energy. If you could Push or Pull on oxides, then a duralumin-boosted Steelpush could potentially mess with the iron in someone's blood, and that would just be...horrifying, really.

On 6/3/2019 at 11:34 AM, RShara said:

Brandon said that he hasn't given us enough info to figure out how Era 4 FTL is going to work, as of the end of Bands of Mourning. So it's almost certainly more complicated/different than that.

To be fair, he said that before SoS or BoM were released; I'm pretty sure that the medallions are a key piece of the puzzle that we were missing before the latter came out.

[Karger]

2 hours ago, Kaymyth said:

Chemistry. Aluminum oxide has completely different chemical properties than metallic aluminum. It's not the same substance, and you can only break those chemical bonds with a large input of energy. If you could Push or Pull on oxides, then a duralumin-boosted Steelpush could potentially mess with the iron in someone's blood, and that would just be...horrifying, really.

Reshek could probably do something like this.  No wonder he did not take Vin seriously.

Edited June 5, 2019 by Karger

[Kaymyth]

13 minutes ago, Karger said:

Reshek could probably do something like this.  No wonder he did not take Vin seriously.

I doubt it. The iron in our blood isn't the same as metallic iron; it has distinct chemical bonds to other atoms.

Metallic iron = nothing but Fe and some trace impurities.

Metallic steel = Fe and C atoms stacked together, but not chemically bonded. The smaller C atoms just slot into spaces between the big Fe atoms and make the structure less prone to sliding apart. This is why iron is more brittle than steel.

Hemoglobin = an Fe atom chemically bonded to C, H, N, and O atoms, per the image below. It's not free-floating, metallic iron, and thus not affected by Allomancy. I doubt a Lurcher could even burn chemically bonded iron in their blood no matter how spiced up their Allomancy got (which is good, because that would be an excellent way for Lurchers to accidentally kill themselves).

[Karger]

15 minutes ago, Kaymyth said:

I doubt it. The iron in our blood isn't the same as metallic iron; it has distinct chemical bonds to other atoms.

Inquisitor stealsight allowed them to see internal origins in humans that had metalic makeups.  Reshek was even more powerful then this.  I would not put it past him to be able to affect blood with a strain.

[Shardlet]

On 6/5/2019 at 0:44 PM, Kaymyth said:

 

Metallic steel = Fe and C atoms stacked together, but not chemically bonded. The smaller C atoms just slot into spaces between the big Fe atoms and make the structure less prone to sliding apart. This is why iron is more brittle than steel.

 

This is a bit pedantic, but pure iron is actually quite soft and rather malleable.  This should not be confused with cast iron which is quite brittle.  Though identified with the name iron, cast iron actually has far more carbon in it than steel (2-4 wt% in cast iron vs. 0.002-2 wt% in steel). 

On the previous page, Oltux72 suggested that crystal structure may play an important role in whether a metal can be pushed or pulled.  I think this is unlikely.  Most metals exist in one ore more of four crystal lattice types (simple cubic, body centered cubic, face centered cubic, and hexagonal close packed).  There are of course some outliers.  But most are one of those four (most typically BCC, FCC, and HCP).

[Karger]

6 hours ago, Shardlet said:

This is a bit pedantic, but pure iron is actually quite soft and rather malleable.  This should not be confused with cast iron which is quite brittle.  Though identified with the name iron, cast iron actually has far more carbon in it than steel (2-4 wt% in cast iron vs. 0.002-2 wt% in steel). 

On the previous page, Oltux72 suggested that crystal structure may play an important role in whether a metal can be pushed or pulled.  I think this is unlikely.  Most metals exist in one ore more of four crystal lattice types (simple cubic, body centered cubic, face centered cubic, and hexagonal close packed).  There are of course some outliers.  But most are one of those four (most typically BCC, FCC, and HCP).

This is interesting but I am unsure of what point you are trying to make.

[Kaymyth]

9 hours ago, Shardlet said:

This is a bit pedantic, but pure iron is actually quite soft and rather malleable.  This should not be confused with cast iron which is quite brittle.  Though identified with the name iron, cast iron actually has far more carbon in it than steel (2-4 wt% in cast iron vs. 0.002-2 wt% in steel). 

On the previous page, Oltux72 suggested that crystal structure may play an important role in whether a metal can be pushed or pulled.  I think this is unlikely.  Most metals exist in one ore more of four crystal lattice types (simple cubic, body centered cubic, face centered cubic, and hexagonal close packed).  There are of course some outliers.  But most are one of those four (most typically BCC, FCC, and HCP).

I thank you for the clarification. My metallurgy knowledge is primarily "watches too dang much Nova" with a dash of "researched the crap out of aluminum production for the sake of fanfic."

[RShara]

23 hours ago, Kaymyth said:

I thank you for the clarification. My metallurgy knowledge is primarily "watches too dang much Nova" with a dash of "researched the crap out of aluminum production for the sake of fanfic."

I would basically consider that if you google it and it's called a metal, it'll be Push/Pullable, otherwise not.

[Kaymyth]

15 minutes ago, RShara said:

I would basically consider that if you google it and it's called a metal, it'll be Push/Pullable, otherwise not.

As a reasonable rule of thumb. Stainless steel is a metal. Hemoglobin is not. So I would generally presume that one cannot Push/Pull on blood.

Though even this gets kind of squiggly when aluminum comes into play. We know some alloys keep aluminum's weird Allomancy resistance but not exactly which ones. I keep meaning (and forgetting) to ask whether that carries over to duralumin*. Allomantic/Feruchemical-grade duralumin probably not, but the alloy mixes that someone would use for structure I've no idea.

Fun point of trivia: in our world, duralumin was originally developed for building zeppelins.

*Some of you may think this is a dumb question to ask. There are, in fact, people who have flat-out told me that it's a stupid question and that the answer is obvious. Unfortunately for everyone, those people come from both "yes" and "no" camps, thus making it all the more certain that I'm going to ask this dumb question someday.

[RShara]

9 minutes ago, Kaymyth said:

As a reasonable rule of thumb. Stainless steel is a metal. Hemoglobin is not. So I would generally presume that one cannot Push/Pull on blood.

Though even this gets kind of squiggly when aluminum comes into play. We know some alloys keep aluminum's weird Allomancy resistance but not exactly which ones. I keep meaning (and forgetting) to ask whether that carries over to duralumin*. Allomantic/Feruchemical-grade duralumin probably not, but the alloy mixes that someone would use for structure I've no idea.

Fun point of trivia: in our world, duralumin was originally developed for building zeppelins.

*Some of you may think this is a dumb question to ask. There are, in fact, people who have flat-out told me that it's a stupid question and that the answer is obvious. Unfortunately for everyone, those people come from both "yes" and "no" camps, thus making it all the more certain that I'm going to ask this dumb question someday.

Well yeah, heh. It's not a concrete rule. We know that with sufficient power, you can Push/Pull on anything that has even metal in its chemical formula. But those are pretty rare and special cases. So yeah, it is a reasonable rule of thumb, as you say

[+Oltux72]

On 6/10/2019 at 10:06 PM, Shardlet said:

On the previous page, Oltux72 suggested that crystal structure may play an important role in whether a metal can be pushed or pulled.  I think this is unlikely.  Most metals exist in one ore more of four crystal lattice types (simple cubic, body centered cubic, face centered cubic, and hexagonal close packed).  There are of course some outliers.  But most are one of those four (most typically BCC, FCC, and HCP).

If you take only the type of the crystal structure, that is correct. If you include the distance between the atoms, it is no longer correct.