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FTL Travel Using Feruchemy


Lord Bookwyrm

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Unlike allomancy, feruchemy has no apparent upper limit on how much of an attribute you can tap. Wouldn't this mean that, theoretically, you could tap enough speed to move faster than light? Of course, this would take an insane amount of speed, and you would likely be torn apart by air molecules before you got anywhere near lightspeed. But, using the medallions from Mistborn Era 2, you could make a spaceship designed to bear those kinds of speeds, and get the ship to tap speed. Admittedly, the people on board would die due to the immense acceleration, but you could still move it faster than light. But, how long would it take to store enough speed to go at the speed of light for a second?

Well, the average human jogging speed is ~8mph, which translates to ~3.6m/s. The speed of light is ~300,000,000,000m/s. Assuming you could store 90% of your speed, you would be storing 3.24m/s every second. Based on these figures...

300,000,000,000m/s (speed of light, or C) / 3.24m/s/s (speed stored/second) = 92,592,592,592.593 seconds = 1,071,673.525... days = 2,936.092... years

So, as you can see, it would take a ridiculously long time to store up any amount of speed that you could realistically use to travel at light speed. But that was only for travelling for one second. 300 million km. In comparison, the nearest star outside of our solar system is 4.3 light-years away from us, or 41 million billion km away. That's 410 billion years of storing speed, just to get to the nearest star (not considering gravity and propulsion, this problem's already complicated enough as it is). 410 billion years is at least 20 times as long as the lifespan of the universe. So, not only would it take a ridiculously long time to store up enough speed to travel at the speed of light, the people on board would probably die from the immense G-forces long before they arrived. You could make the ascent to light-speed safer by accelerating slower, or use gold feruchemy to endlessly heal the passengers, but this doesn't solve the fundamental issue of not having enough speed.

However, this problem of not having enough speed could be solved by compounding steel, which would exponentially reduce the time it would take to get enough speed. This alone wouldn't be enough, so you could also get multiple people to do it at once. So if you had 100 people all compounding at max capacity, how long would it take to store that much speed? Assuming that compounding gives 10x as much as you started with (https://coppermind.net/wiki/Compounding)...

410,000,000,000 / 100 = 4,100,000,000

Assuming you started with 4m/s of speed stored...

4,100,000,000 / 4 = 1,000,000,000 = 10^9

Because compounding is exponential, the time it would take is the exponent of 10. So, 100 people compounding speed would only take 9 years of compounding before they had enough speed to travel to Alpha Centauri A at light-speed!

 

P.S. I probably went wrong somewhere in those calculations. 9 years seems way too short... Plus there's the whole issue about being able to jog through space. Seriously, this theory has more holes in it than Swiss cheese -_-

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Steeldancer

So if a steel compounder became an Edgedancer... 

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, here we go. [Audience laughs]

Steeldancer

If a steel compounder became an Edgedancer, how fast could they go?

Brandon Sanderson

[Dramatic sigh] They could go quite fast. They are not going to ever reach superhero levels of bending reality for speed. So, I will say quick, but not that quick. We aren't outracing an atom bomb, as the Flash periodically does. 

Legion Release Party (Sept. 19, 2018)

 

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Im fully onboard with the idea that manipulating Compounding is going to play a major role in the eventual Scadrial FTL Tech.  But I dont think F-Steel is going to be the primary player, because it's far less useful in space.  Steel is Physical Speed, but it just grants faster rates of movement, not any new form of locomotion, so it's going to be of limited value in space where moving your arms or legs faster doesnt do anything.  Allomantic Iron/Steel might be able to do it, but that cant be compounded so there's the normal Burn/Flare rate limits to it's overall power. 

Personally I think the key is going to be in the Temporal Feruchemy.  The current way I see it going down is a combination of Time Bubbles and Connection manipulation:  Time Bubbles are zones that already naturally counter some of the more dangerous issues with manipulating Relativity, and they lock in place but that location is at least somewhat mutable and/or perception dependent, because it's geographically locked, it ca/will move with a train, for example.  So it defaults to a planetary/Geocentric definition of "not moving", but can be made to use other reference frames.  So what I think they would do is make a Time Bubble, but also use Duralumin to manipulate the bubble/vehicle's Connection to Scadrial such that the "Not Moving" reference frame temporarily some other planet/star/location.  Once that happens, the bubble will still technically Not Move, but while it's Holding Still relative to some distant point, the rest cosmere galaxy would basically move around it.  

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