Frustration's Firepower Index: Windrunners

[Frustration]

Welcome to Frustration's Firepower Index, where I analise the combat capabilities of Cosmere worlds and magic systems. This thread is focused on Windrunners.

 

Preparation: Be a fifth oath Windrunner, as well as a warform singer, along with a full set of second oath squires of Warform singers, we don't know what the maximum is, but the number exceeds twenty, so I'm going to use that as a baseline. Equip each squire and yourself with multiple pouches of large gemstones, allowing for continual renewal of stormlight. Additionally give each squire an aluminum lance(Or a longbow/crossbow with aluminum tipped arrows), heavy aluminum darts, a bag of rocks, and at least one fabrial, such as a painrail, half-shard, or a blood attracter. Additionally each squire as well as the radiant themselves should be equipped with several anti-light grenades in a padded pouch.

 

Offenses: Shardblades can instantly cut through just about any material and change shape to any weapon, and the strength of shardplate on top of warforms already impressive strength makes punches, or blunt force shardweapons equally deadly. With aluminum darts they can drop them from above and let them shower down on opponents. Aluminum tipped arrows and darts can lodge in the body and prevent invested healing. Painrails can cause nearly incapacitating pain to anyone caught in them, and certain attracter fabrials are powerful enough to pull the blood out of anyone nearby(WoR chapter 82, page 993). With rocks you can apply dozens of lashings to a single rock, and send it shooting out with incredible speed, due to the ability to create delayed lashings(OB chapter 34, page 353). And anti-stormlight+stormlight grenades. Additionally they can lash people upward, allowing gravity to kill them.

 

Defenses: Shardplate will protect the radiant, and can move to protect their squires as well, and stormlight will heal both them and their squires, with half-shards protecting any squire that has them. Additionally reverse lashings can pull entire volleys of projectiles out of the air, and are even able to affect the trajectories of bullets.

Spoiler

VindicationKnight

Could a Full Lashing bend the path of bullets? Or do they have too much momentum?

Brandon Sanderson

It could.

/r/books AMA 2015 (June 27, 2015)

 

Mobility: Windrunners can fly, continuing to accelerate until they reach terminal velocity, while also manipulating wind to push themselves faster, and keep their groups in formation. OB(322).

 

Stealth: Shardplate can be commanded to stop glowing, but squires, and other sources of stormlight are highly visible, and they can send spren to invisibly scout ahead.

 

Awareness:Windspren and Honorspren can invisibly search large areas increadibly quickly, with Honorspren seemingly able to sense objects that they want(WoK Chapter 23, 343).

 

Additional abilities: Full lashings can lock people in place, as can shardplate if the radiant is willing to risk it.

 

Edited January 30, 2023 by Frustration

[lacrossedeamon]

With enough investiture and lashings could a Windrunner create a black hole?

[Frustration]

Just now, lacrossedeamon said:

With enough investiture and lashings could a Windrunner create a black hole?

Well, maybe?

Spoiler

the other Nathan

If a large group of Windrunners lashed enough mass towards a single point, could they create a black hole?

Brandon Sanderson

Offhand, I think that would be theoretically possible, though in practicality impossible. We'd need [Peter Ahlstrom] to do some math.

#SandersonChat Twitter Q&A with Audible.com (Feb. 4, 2016)

 

[StanLemon]

2 hours ago, lacrossedeamon said:

With enough investiture and lashings could a Windrunner create a black hole?

Probably would take Shard levels of Investiture 

[alder24]

11 hours ago, lacrossedeamon said:

With enough investiture and lashings could a Windrunner create a black hole?

Well, theoretically, it might be possible to make tiny quantum black holes in Supercollider on Earth. So you need to take two objects and lash them together with such force that some parts of those objects would collapse into a black hole. It is difficult, as with that force of an impact, the objects would just explode and disintegrate. However it might be easier to generate high speeds with lashings - eg. infuse something with strong reverse lashing, and lash a regular object with high speed just next to it, with speed so high that it won't hit the reversed lashed object, but miss it closely, gaining speed, creating some sort of gravity assist we use to accelerate spacecraft. This could recreate a particle collision environment that can result in black hole.

The second option would be to lash an object not in any direction, but towards its center of its own mass. With very strong gravity, the object would crush that mass, finally reaching sizes below Schwarzschild radius (every mass has it, if the mass is compressed below that radius it collapses into a black hole),

But both of those options would require great amounts of investiture, I wouldn't say shard level, but still very great. Maybe some Bondsmith boosting with perpendicularity next to them would create black hole. However as you make it from very, very tiny objects, it would almost instantly evaporate due to Hawking Radiation, killing everyone near it. A 1000 kg object collapsed into a black hole would "live" for 4.7E-8 (0.000000047) second and would explode with energy of tens of thousands nuclear bombs. So it's a bad idea.

[lacrossedeamon]

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

So it's a bad idea.

Not if you do it with a team of a Windrunner/Skybreaker (or just someone with a Skimmer primer cube), a Slider, and an Elsecaller. Well it’s still bad for the target but the perpetrators could potentially survive.

Edited January 15, 2023 by lacrossedeamon

[alder24]

5 minutes ago, lacrossedeamon said:

Not if you do it with a team of a Windrunner/Skybreaker (or just someone with a Skimmer primer cube), a Slider, and an Elsecaller. Well it’s still bad for the target but the perpetrators could potentially survive.

You really think you could avoid an explosion a millions times greater than the Hiroshima bomb? Which would most likely also be present in CR. I think only with automatic devices of some sort, but that's beyond what is currently possible. You basically convert all of the black hole's mass into pure energy via E=mc2 as the black hole last far shorter than 1 second. Even Slider would not be able to create a bubble with that time.

[lacrossedeamon]

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

You really think you could avoid an explosion a millions times greater than the Hiroshima bomb? Which would most likely also be present in CR. I think only with automatic devices of some sort, but that's beyond what is currently possible. You basically convert all of the black hole's mass into pure energy via E=mc2 as the black hole last far shorter than 1 second. Even Slider would not be able to create a bubble with that time.

You create the speed bubble beforehand and have the Windrunner stick a limb outside. And then Elsecall to a place not directly analogous to where the explosion is happening in the different realm (which admitted might not be possible but Oathgates and Skipping implies it should be to a skilled enough one) if that is even required. Theoretically the explosion would affect the elements that are just the cognitive aspects of physical objects ie the beads in Shadesmar but wouldn’t affect the underlying cognitive terrain.

[alder24]

Defenses: Shardplate can protect not only Radiant but also their squires as sprens can move as seen in RoW. It might be a unique ability of Windrunners due to their Ideal focusing on protection.