Why didn’t Wayne Compund?

[IlstrawberrySeed]

Wayne was a Mistborn with access to gold Fuerochemsitry, meaning he could have compounded enough gold before dumping water and pushing the bombs out of his time bubble. Why didn’t he? Did he just not think of it?

Edited December 30, 2022 by IlstrawberrySeed

[StanLemon]

There is almost no way he would have been able to Compound enough health to survive an explosion on that scale in the little bit of time he had before the ship reached Elendel

[IlstrawberrySeed]

Even with other metallic options, such as setting up a slow bubble to offset explository motion?

Also, we don’t know how long the bubble would have lasted had he not sent the machines out until right before it broke or let the first explosion get going before pushing it out.

Edited December 30, 2022 by IlstrawberrySeed

[alder24]

He didn't have enough of gold. This explosion was just too big.

[Tglassy]

Yeah, as potent as I believe Compounding to be, I don't believe he had enough on him to make a difference at this point.  Compounding takes at least some time, and it takes at least a good bit of your metal to do.  And I'm not even sure if  Miles had enough gold ever stored up to survive what is essentially a thermonuclear explosion at its epicenter.  

[ftl]

Hot take - he could have, but he didn't think of it and Harmony didn't want to remind him. It might have required some modification of the plan - a longer time bubble to give himself time to compound, maybe scrounging through the ship to find just a tiny bit of extra gold - but it could have been done, if Harmony had wanted it to be.

Edited December 31, 2022 by ftl

[Frustration]

The blast was comparable to medium nuclear weapons (I calculated). At point blank range there was nothing he could have done, both him and the gold were instantly vaporized 

[king of nowhere]

22 hours ago, Frustration said:

The blast was comparable to medium nuclear weapons (I calculated). At point blank range there was nothing he could have done, both him and the gold were instantly vaporized 

and frankly, I'd call foul on brandon otherwise. his magic is well grounded in reality, the powers have reasonable effects and consequences. an explosion like that indeed vaporized vayne instantly, gold and everything else. tapping healt is just not enough.

now, after he was dead but before he left the cognitive realm, it is perhaps possible that giving him healing at that moment (somehow) could have caused his "soul" to regenerate a new body from nothing and live again, but i would not count on it.

[cometaryorbit]

Yeah healing from that would probably take a truly absurd amount of gold (far more than was available) if possible at all (if the goldminds get vaporized then even an endless store of health won't save the Feruchemist).

Miles survived a stick or two of dynamite but this is a whole other scale.

On 12/31/2022 at 1:06 PM, Frustration said:

The blast was comparable to medium nuclear weapons (I calculated).

Wow, really? I thought ettmetal-water explosions were just chemical explosions boosted somewhat but nowhere near nuclear scale.

[Frustration]

9 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

Wow, really? I thought ettmetal-water explosions were just chemical explosions boosted somewhat but nowhere near nuclear scale.

They are, but with the amount of metal they used it just worked out to be that large. Three barrels full is a lot.

[+robardin he/him]

9 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

Yeah healing from that would probably take a truly absurd amount of gold (far more than was available) if possible at all (if the goldminds get vaporized then even an endless store of health won't save the Feruchemist).

Miles survived a stick or two of dynamite but this is a whole other scale.

Wow, really? I thought ettmetal-water explosions were just chemical explosions boosted somewhat but nowhere near nuclear scale.

You are not wrong there, but what the shipbomb was built around was not just ettmetal + water = boom-boom, it was the same reaction that Wax produced in his lab with a specific way of manipulating very, very small amounts of harmonium and trellium at close range.

THAT’S what the “shipbomb” was. A giant floating thing like what Wax had done, but with a lot more of the godmetals. A lot lot lot more.

So in effect, yes, the nature of their interaction under those circumstances effectively produced what we know as a nuclear bomb. The explosions near Bilming that were explained as earthquakes were the equivalent of the Set doing atomic bomb test detonations underground.

 

[+robardin he/him]

On 12/30/2022 at 3:06 PM, StanLemon said:

There is almost no way he would have been able to Compound enough health to survive an explosion on that scale in the little bit of time he had before the ship reached Elendel

More to the point, the gold would be instantly vaporized as well as Wayne’s body. Can’t tap a metalmind that isn’t metal any more.

If you consider the impossible insta-heals TLR or Miles was capable of with Compounding, not only had they already prepared enormously full goldminds beforehand, they had those goldminds hidden on in inside their body in a way that still existed during their physical trauma. Burned or flayed alive? Decapitated(!)? Arm blown off? There was enough time to do a mega-tap at the moment of death to get the Investiture ball rolling downhill to immediately heal as the damage was done.

All goldminds destroyed along with one’s entire body in fractions of a second, simultaneously? Say goodnight.

[alder24]

10 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

Wow, really? I thought ettmetal-water explosions were just chemical explosions boosted somewhat but nowhere near nuclear scale.

I came up with the different conclusion - I've compared the damage done by the blast to the city of Elendel (only buildings in docks collapsed, glass shattered mostly in docks and close to it, not in the entire city)  and it was closer to the Beirut explosion, which was still extremely powerful (one of the most powerful non-nuclear, man-made explosions) with yield of around 1kt. If this was in hydrogen bomb power levels, glass would be shattered across the entire city, which was not observed by Steris (as she was at the other side of the city), and Wax would be engulfed by fireball (above 1Mt fireball has a radius of more than 1.2km), which didn't happen. The biggest damage was done by the tsunami that came after - however we've got no numbers or information about it.

Quoting from "Scadrial vs Roshar post Lost Metal" topic:

Quote

The best way to estimate yield of Harmonium-water reaction is by looking at the damage it had done, as it's often done to estimate explosions. We know that some buildings in the docks (docks are outcite outer circle of the city, along the bay) collapsed, and windows around the docks were shattered, but not across whole city. We also know, that right before Wayne send Wax into the ocean, lights of the city were visable - that could be around 10 km away from the city, but before blast accrued ship would get some distance closer. So let's compare it to the Beirut explosion again, where hospital 1km away was so damaged, that it couldn't function at all, and people were being treated outside, and windows were shattered on the airport 10km away. I would say, that, depending on the distance from the ship to the docks, it could be as powerful as Beirut explosion (0.5-1.2 kt), or if closer, below 1kt but above 100 t - which is still very big for conventional, non-nuclear explosion. Anything around 1MT would shatter windows across the entire city. 

But feel free to disagree.

35 minutes ago, robardin said:

THAT’S what the “shipbomb” was. A giant floating thing like what Wax had done, but with a lot more of the godmetals. A lot lot lot more.

But Wayne prevented Trellium-Harmonium reaction by triggering water-Harmonium reaction first and kicking it out of the electrical trigger, so that Harmonium-Trellium reaction couldn't happened. So it was pure chemical reaction.

 

[cometaryorbit]

3 hours ago, robardin said:

More to the point, the gold would be instantly vaporized as well as Wayne’s body. Can’t tap a metalmind that isn’t metal any more.

If you consider the impossible insta-heals TLR or Miles was capable of with Compounding, not only had they already prepared enormously full goldminds beforehand, they had those goldminds hidden on in inside their body in a way that still existed during their physical trauma. Burned or flayed alive? Decapitated(!)? Arm blown off? There was enough time to do a mega-tap at the moment of death to get the Investiture ball rolling downhill to immediately heal as the damage was done.

All goldminds destroyed along with one’s entire body in fractions of a second, simultaneously? Say goodnight.

Yeah in some ways, as crazy as it sounds, what they healed from was fairly limited in that there was still a mostly intact body with intact goldminds attached. The melting point of gold is pretty high (1948 F/1064 C) - TLR in a burning building shouldn't have gotten that hot.

The most extreme thing we've seen on page is the Miles dynamite one; TLR being decapitated is probably worse, assuming it's not exaggerated through the centuries. He could have done it though -- *if* he'd started tapping before the head was fully disconnected. If I understand it correctly (far from guaranteed!) once he's tapping it's more an Investiture/soul/Spiritual thing than a Physical brain thing so the goldminds being attached to the headless body is good enough (the body would grow a new head, not the reverse).

I don't think gold Compounding or Feruchemy* would save someone from any attack that destroyed the metalminds, and probably also not from any attack that blew the body apart sufficiently that the largest piece remaining was no longer in contact with metalminds.

*I also don't think gold Compounding is inherently better healing than regular gold Feruchemy... just much harder to run out. A regular Bloodmaker with a big unkeyed goldmind like they found in BoM should be basically as hard to kill as Miles.

Edited January 3, 2023 by cometaryorbit

[+robardin he/him]

1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

*I also don't think gold Compounding is inherently better healing than regular gold Feruchemy... just much harder to run out. A regular Bloodmaker with a big unkeyed goldmind like they found in BoM should be basically as hard to kill as Miles.

This is indeed the case. Being a gold/gold Compounding Twinborn doesn't make tapping gold super-powerful, it makes it possible to create enormously OP goldminds that otherwise would not be possible for an ordinary Bloodmaker, who would be limited by a low rate of health storage that kept them alive at the same time.

And even if that could have worked to save Wayne from a proximate mega-blast of wettmetal (as I'll call it), he didn't have either the time to Compound, nor likely the amount of gold it would take to store the resulting health into. Sure he was super-rich and could afford as much gold as he needed, but unless he anticipated being able to Compound, he'd probably just have a small/lightweight goldmind on himself at the time. (Which he'd also have to be able to break or cut up, to allow him to swallow and burn some of it after Investing it with health.)

[cometaryorbit]

I think he actually had zero charged gold to burn at the time, he'd used up all his healing from the fall at the end of the fight with the Wax and Wayne imitators. I believe his goldminds were completely empty - he ran out of healing with some minor injuries from the fall left.