Kandra and F pewter thoughts

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

Do you think a kandra tapping from a pewter metalmind would be limited in the same way as a human?  Given kandra can alter their shape and size i would guess that while there may be some enlarging of the muscle mass it ought to be less of an impact and at the very least a kandra could, with time, adjust themselves to have less loss of mobility due to hypertrophy of the muscles.  

[EmulatonStromenkiin he/him]

6 hours ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Do you think a kandra tapping from a pewter metalmind would be limited in the same way as a human?  Given kandra can alter their shape and size i would guess that while there may be some enlarging of the muscle mass it ought to be less of an impact and at the very least a kandra could, with time, adjust themselves to have less loss of mobility due to hypertrophy of the muscles.  

I have to agree, many limits of feruchemy seem to be offset by having other powers/investiture in you.

[Quantus he/him]

16 hours ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Do you think a kandra tapping from a pewter metalmind would be limited in the same way as a human?  Given kandra can alter their shape and size i would guess that while there may be some enlarging of the muscle mass it ought to be less of an impact and at the very least a kandra could, with time, adjust themselves to have less loss of mobility due to hypertrophy of the muscles.  

Up to a point yes, but the eventual problem with Pewter is that the muscles bloat out and physically start interfering with the mechanical range of motion. That range is a function of the skeleton and its physical dimensions, so they would not be able to alter that part on the fly.  They could probably be able to make some sort 8ft bigfoot super-skeleton optimized for the pewter muscle mass interference way better than a standard Human, though. It might be as simple as modeling a set of carved bones off the koloss.  

[StanLemon]

I am curious as to the limit for F-Pewter on a normal human. The one in BoM became enormous according to Wax with a neck as thick as a man's thigh. And when Sazed used it in WoA it sounded like he became massive and was even described as comparable in size to a Koloss. The description implied that his bodily structure and not just his muscles transformed from tapping strength 

[Duxredux he/him]

15 hours ago, StanLemon said:

I am curious as to the limit for F-Pewter on a normal human. The one in BoM became enormous according to Wax with a neck as thick as a man's thigh. And when Sazed used it in WoA it sounded like he became massive and was even described as comparable in size to a Koloss. The description implied that his bodily structure and not just his muscles transformed from tapping strength 

I agree that the bodily structure is enhanced to allow for F-Pewter to work. F-Iron should make you immobile but it strengthens you to compensate.

So without too much of a personal background in anatomy and physiology, here's the clues that I see that F-Pewter enhances more than just the muscles, particularly for sustained usage that Sazed was demonstrating in WoA. The contrast is probably best shown with the issues that koloss have.

First, the cardiovascular system was seriously boosted to enable him to not have a heart attack suddenly trying to supply blood to a much, much larger mass. I think the heart, lungs, blood vessels, and volume of blood would need to be enhanced to enable the usually slender scholar to use such enlarged muscles vigorously without passing out. This also was before Cadmium or Bendalloy were discovered, so Sazed didn't need to store breath or calories to support his Pewter. The tell that Brandon thought of this and didn't make it part of the limitation of F-Pewter is that koloss die when they get so big the heart can't sustain them and I think they have blue skin from poor circulation (well, the skin is unusually loose too, and the coloration became a heritable trait in era 2... I'm shaky on this one). Sazed was a human-colored hulk among the blue-colored hulks. Middle-aged people often can have heart attacks from the sudden increased stress on the heart when shoveling snow, at the is nothing compared to smacking around koloss.

Second, Sazed's skin grows and shrinks with him, so more than just muscles can be boosted by F-Pewter, again contrasted with koloss. Sazed doesn't split at the seams whenever he draws on F-Pewter, nor does he get weird and flabby during storage. Again, contrasted with both young and old koloss.

Third is the musculoskeletal system. The ligaments and tendons also need to be strengthened to not break, and I think the skeleton must grow and be strengthened as well, since I don't think only muscle growth will make you as tall as a koloss.

So... long answer short, not sure how hemalurgy affects this, but I think kandra have a fair chance of being able to store more than just muscles in F-Pewter. I doubt they would be able to alter the bones of the body, but it could make swapping from a human skeleton to a horse to a bunny to a lion to an elephant much easier. MeLaan just carried around a bunch of skeletons to suit her purposes.

Even if storing other mass doesn't work, maybe the kandra could change their mass specifically to human muscle to store it, but once they withdrew it they could change it to whatever else they wanted to. If that works, that would be a fairly trivial extra step for a kandra to be able to change their size and muscles drastically on demand.

 

@StanLemon, to answer the limitations of a human growing large with F-Pewter, I read a book a while back called The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios that looked at Giant Man. As long as you are remaining proportionally human, then as you become bigger you can have issues based on your skeletal structure and leverage. The example in the book dealt with the square-cube law, which is when an object is increased in size proportionally, the surface area increases proportionally to the square of the multiplier, and the volume increases proportionally to the cube of the multiplier. In other words, as something gets proportionally bigger, the weight of the object will increase much, much faster compared to the cross section of the object. As an example, if you had object that was a cube 1 meter in length and weighed 1 kilogram, the cross section would be 1 square meter, and the volume would be 1 cubic meter. If you were were to double it size, the cube would now have one side measure 2 meters, the cross section would be 4 square meters, and volume would now be 8 cubic meters, and it would weight 8 kilograms. Making something twice as tall proportionally can make it 8 times heavier but only give it a cross-section 4 times larger as a base to support that weight. Make something three times as tall, and it becomes 27 times heavier, but only 9 times as wide at the cross section. When applied to the bones of a human body, it means that as you get proportionally taller, you get heavier much faster than the bones grow wide until the bones can't support the weight. I think Kakalios said that the spine would give out first, because it is so small relative to the rest of the body. This gets worse if your muscles are growing much faster from F-Pewter than your skeleton is, making the weight of the body far exceed what the skeleton can support, especially if you are doing strenuous things that put a lot of leverage and multiplied force on your back, like twisting and throwing a koloss or swinging a gigantic sword. Even if you are magically strengthening your skeleton, F-Pewter increases muscle mass and strength far faster than bones, and I would expect the skeleton to break first.

Edited April 30, 2022 by Duxredux
added response to StanLemon