Moving Speed Bubbles

[EmulatonStromenkiin]

Please note this is speculation with my somewhat limited knowledge.

Speed bubbles will move with an object that is massive enough and moving fast enough, and the faster you are going, the less mass you need. This relationship is probably along the lines of energy and mass being the same thing, but maybe not. I also lack the information of what the threshold is for both of those factors.

I believe that if you draw on enough weight from f-iron, or enough speed from f-steel, you can create a speed bubble that moves with you.

[alder24]

This seems reasonable. But becoming a savant would do the job as well

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Questioner

So my quick question: Can you use Identity (I love the speed bubbles!) to anchor speed bubbles to yourself?

Brandon Sanderson

Uh, this is possible. That's less a matter of Identity. What’s gonna happen there, like, the more someone uses the powers, the more familiar and intermingled with their soul the powers become, and they are able to accomplish things that others can't. This would be like a Mistborn learning to hover a coin, right, which they can do, but most think you can't. That's the sort of level we're going with.

Necarion

So a savant could?

Brandon Sanderson

A savant could totally do that. The problem is, things moving in and out of a speed bubble, there's a transference of energy. This is how we keep speed bubbles from irradiating people when light moves through them, right, red shift. And so there's a transfer of energy directly from the Spiritual Realm, which means that moving with a speed bubble, you're gonna run into that, and it's gonna be, it's gonna cause all kinds of problems, but it would be possible.

Arcanum Unbounded San Francisco signing (Nov. 30, 2016)

 

[Trusk'our]

25 minutes ago, EmulatonStromenkiin said:

I believe that if you draw on enough weight from f-iron, or enough speed from f-steel, you can create a speed bubble that moves with you.

An interesting idea. I'd like to see a hack like that in practice.

I think that it has more to do with the practitioner's perception though. You move on something big enough, like a train, and it feels stationary. This translates over to the Slider's powers, making their Speedbubble move too.

[Frustration]

As @alder24 said a Savant could do it, however you can also use mental training to do it as well, but that seems to be much harder

Spoiler

Questioner

Speed bubbles--

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. Ehhhh... these are the hardest ones.

Questioner

We've seen them work and move with trains, we've seen them not work with carriages: is there a size requirement, or is it how they view themselves?

Brandon Sanderson

That's a good question. So I build in this thing, right? I'm like "Oooh, speed bubbles! Speed bubbles are cool!" but the Delorean problem, right? You're like "I'm going to go back in time: to the middle of SPACE", because the planet is in the same position, right? This is stuff that science fiction writers have been having fun with since the silver age of science fiction. So I'm like "Alright, I need to deal with the Delorean problem". And so I'm like "Alright, we're going to have to say that frame of reference is a big part of it: so perception and frame of reference is a big part of it; and also size of the thing that you're on". So it would be possible to use kind of cosmere cognitive training to get that speed bubble moving with you-- And someone asked me a question about this on tour, I believe, so it would be in one of the reports-- Not this exact same thing, but "Could they learn to move their speed bubble with them?" And yes you can.

Questioner

So it is how the allomancer views it, not how the thing views itself?

Brandon Sanderson

That's a part of it. Partially how it view itself, *garbled* It's really also mass. Big thing-- The speed bubbles required all kinds of physics-gymnastics. I'm sorry physicists, but once you start playing with time the stuff you gotta do. It's just crazy stuff you gotta do.

Questioner

We actually sat down and worked out what the metric would have to do to have a speed bubble-- Yeah, it was gnarly.

Brandon Sanderson

...We did run the math on these things, and stuff like that. And Peter, y'know, he rais-- "Redshift" and stuff like this we talked about. And all kinds of fun stuff about speed bubbles that I then had to--

Bystander

Khriss asked about that?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. So this is-- This one and manipulating weight... Those are the math ones. So these are the ones where-- They create the fun things to talk about, but they are where this is fantasy and not science fiction. Like a lot of these questions I could answer and you'd be like "Alright, if there were this alternate power source, we could buy this" but in this case we're like exception-list-of-asterisks to make it work. But they're too fun to not do, right? And I knew I was doing gravity on Stormlight, so I'm like "I gotta do weight separately".

Arcanum Unbounded Chicago signing (Dec. 6, 2016)

 

[cometaryorbit]

I actually wonder how much savantism is an on/off thing vs a kind of spectrum. Some Allomancers can do things that aren't generally possible without being savants (Kelsier spinning a metal bar rather than just being limited to center-of-mass Pushes/Pulls; he's not a savant or above normal era 1 strength). I wonder if that's a first step in that direction.

Breeze uses Soothing so often - maybe almost instinctively- could that be the first step toward whatever the downside of brass savantism is?