Practical uses of surges in our modern world

[bmcclure7]

Soulcasting: waist despoil (No more land fields of plastic trash.)

Lightwearing:special effects and hologram technology. (Finally we can make the danger room from x men)

Regrowth: clear medical use 

Dustbring: military or demolition 

Gravitation:search and rescue?

Adhesion:arts and crafts? Emergency medicine, built magnets?

Any other ideas?

[offer]

Gravitation:

Creating artificial gravity in a spaceship to allow astronaunts to live there normally without the side effects of living without gravity. 

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

You could probably use Adhesion in construction, though not permanently. More like holding something in place while you wait for a more permanent solution. You could also use Gravitation in construction, making heavy materials lighter or having them just hover.

Gravitation would come in handy in any kind of space travel or exploration.

I bet we'll see more practical applications of these surges as Roshar gets into a more modern age...

[Rg2045]

Soulcasting literally unlimited food, water, medicine, technology advancement, (just bring them up to the steam age in a matter of months just make the parts out of wax or wood then soulcast it. ) literally the applications of soulcasting it borderline unlimited. 

gravitation extreme workout, Tired of just working out one muscle? Then have two lashes and try to live with double gravity. 

division art works

What? Soulcast food taste bad? I guess we just got to regrowth everything from seeds. The ground is bad? Just soulcast it into better soil. 
litterally roshar should be advancing leaps and bounds the more radiants, and the more peace they have 

[Spren of Kindness she/her]

Definitely gravitation has SAR potential.  Adhesion and Division could probably have uses in construction.

Abrasion, specifically becoming frictionless could be a really interesting way to mess around with dancing.  Think about a dance performance where the performers can glide about - basically ice skating, but without the climate control.

In the same vein of performance, Lightweaving definitely could end up used there.

 

[Letryx13]

5 hours ago, Rg2045 said:

Soulcasting literally unlimited food, water, medicine, technology advancement, (just bring them up to the steam age in a matter of months just make the parts out of wax or wood then soulcast it. ) literally the applications of soulcasting it borderline unlimited. 

What? Soulcast food taste bad? I guess we just got to regrowth everything from seeds. The ground is bad? Just soulcast it into better soil. 
litterally roshar should be advancing leaps and bounds the more radiants, and the more peace they have 

Soulcasting is crazy OP for sure.  BondSmiths may be the strongest order, but Transformation is the most practical surge for sheer versatility, followed closely by Progression for healing and food, and then Gravitation for mobility/transportation of people and objects.  I've always considered these three to be the most useful surges, in that order.  After those three, Cohesion would be great for construction, shaping buildings out of stone far more easily than they can be built, or even steal if Cohesion works on metal. 

I'm not so sure Roshar would advance that quickly.  Transportation would still be an issue, since high storms would make maintaining roads or railways difficult.  And same with any kind of radio tower. They've got span reeds and will probably develop some kind of radio fabrial eventually so that's probably being nit picky.  Air travel seems like the only transportation likely to advance very quickly.

 

[Mr. Misting he/him]

Gravitation could be extremely useful for transportation purposes, just make the plane weigh half as much or lash it in the direction your flying.

Adhesion would be great for construction, lash an object to a wall and then nail it whenever you want.

With Progression there is obvious medical applications but it would also would help regrow forests and stuff really fast. 

Cohesion would also be really useful with construction, if the piece is to short just fuse it with more material and it becomes the perfect size.

Though Transformation is the most practical surge. Useful in almost any situation. 

 

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

2 hours ago, Letryx13 said:

I'm not so sure Roshar would advance that quickly.  Transportation would still be an issue, since high storms would make maintaining roads or railways difficult.  And same with any kind of radio tower. They've got span reeds and will probably develop some kind of radio fabrial eventually so that's probably being nit picky.  Air travel seems like the only transportation likely to advance very quickly.

I guess this is true.

I think what we'll likely see in Roshar's future is that rather than developing technology similar to our own, like Scadrial, they'll achieve the same level of technology through a big reliance on fabrials.

And many of those fabrials will likely emulate these surges for practical purposes.

[Letryx13]

2 hours ago, The Bookwyrm said:

I guess this is true.

I think what we'll likely see in Roshar's future is that rather than developing technology similar to our own, like Scadrial, they'll achieve the same level of technology through a big reliance on fabrials.

And many of those fabrials will likely emulate these surges for practical purposes.

I think there's a WoB saying that all the surges except for BondSmith powers have some kind ancient fabrial.  Kind of like SoulCasting fabrials. But I agree, they'll probably emulate real world technology with fabrials, making it feel more techno-sorcery than true technology.

Unless there's some way to mimic spiritual Adhesion (which seems unlikely), I feel like Adhesion is the only surge that wouldn't be useful. I have an image in my head of radio fabrials using Illumination and a link similar to span reeds to act as a way to transmit sound. Tension could be useful in engineering and construction.  Abrasion could be useful in moving objects, similar to Gravitation, but making the object slide easily instead of float.  Division would be great for demolition, trash removal, or mining. And Transportation could be useful for going in and out of Shadesmar more easily; good for keeping in touch with spren populations, maintaining relationships with the spren, and travel between worlds.

[+Invocation]

Division welding might work. 

[cometaryorbit]

On 8/20/2022 at 9:04 PM, Letryx13 said:

I think there's a WoB saying that all the surges except for BondSmith powers have some kind ancient fabrial.  Kind of like SoulCasting fabrials. But I agree, they'll probably emulate real world technology with fabrials, making it feel more techno-sorcery than true technology.

However, from RoW these Surge fabrials seem to require sapient spren. So that might limit scaling-up their use. Roshar fabrial-tech might look different from RL industrialization: incredible capabilities, but no mass production of them. It might end up like a world where a nation has a few fighter jets and tanks but most of their rank and file soldiers are still using swords and bows, or where most people are still traveling by chull-drawn wagon while a few people have spaceships and teleporters.

Although "regular" fabrials (spanreed, heating fabrial, etc.) types do seem to be capable of mass production. So probably not that extreme.

Soulcasting logistic capabilities are crazy though. Given the warcamps' population, it doesn't take many Soulcasters to produce a lot of Soulcast material.

[Stonerward]

I've been thinking about a frictionless abrasion powered mega train for a while now, got to be one of the more practical uses 

[TheOtherDave]

Flying sounds fun… it’d probably cut down on rush hour traffic, too.

[Letryx13]

On 8/22/2022 at 8:20 PM, cometaryorbit said:

However, from RoW these Surge fabrials seem to require sapient spren. So that might limit scaling-up their use. Roshar fabrial-tech might look different from RL industrialization: incredible capabilities, but no mass production of them. It might end up like a world where a nation has a few fighter jets and tanks but most of their rank and file soldiers are still using swords and bows, or where most people are still traveling by chull-drawn wagon while a few people have spaceships and teleporters.

Agreed. Large scale production of these kinds of fabrials seems unlikely.  But considering how much of a difference the soul casters make, and there doesn't seem to be more than a few dozen of those, even a few such fabrials would make a huge difference.  And there are likely at least a few of such fabrials already made.     

On 8/23/2022 at 8:17 AM, Stonerward said:

I've been thinking about a frictionless abrasion powered mega train for a while now, got to be one of the more practical uses 

I love the idea, but they'd have trouble maintaining tracks because of the high storms.  If they could figure out a way around that, it'd be amazing.

[Returned]

Free mechanical energy is a big advantage I can see to Gravitation. Lash something big and heavy to make it easy to move high up, loading it with potential energy, fasten it to that height, and then let it drop when you need to harvest some power. This is basically the same idea as the heavy weights in the shaft in Rhythm of War, but easier and cheaper to set up when Stormlight is available so that you can use it when the Stormlight is more scarce.

But you could also rig up something like a perpetual motion machine, where equal weights are connected to two pulleys. Lash at least one weight so that it's effectively weightless (or at least less heavy) and the device can produce more mechanical power than it takes to run. Obviously the difference is that you have to use Stromlight to make this work (so there's really outside energy in the system, so it's not quite cheating thermodynamics), but it's a pretty straightforward way to convert Stormlight into mechanical energy.

You could use Abrasion to make perfectly efficient magnetic flywheels, again a great way to store energy for later use. You could use Transformation to create perfectly machined parts, making precision engineering a trivial problem (a very simple example would be an unpickable pin-and-tumbler lock, which might be a popular product). Similarly, Soulcasting could easily produce perfectly reliable basic inputs for industry, like complex chemicals, which could then be used by anyone and would eliminate the need for industrial chemical refinement.

Stormlight being relatively hard to use by non-Surgebinders, plus its inconsistent availability, seems to be one of the biggest hurdles to it impacting the world and so converting it into more reliable energy or mundane items that are otherwise complicated to produce seems like a good way to scale it up and make it available to anyone without even the need for an intricate fabrial. I do expect that advances in fabrial technology will ultimately eclipse the awesomeness of Surgebinding in most everyday circumstances, but the flexibility of a Surgebinder in using their powers on demand will always give them a niche.