F steel more than we think?

[alder24]

2 hours ago, therunner said:

Again, strength change F-Iron does not keep up with mass gain, otherwise Wax could not store to be lighter on his feet (since he would get proportionally weaker), nor can he move as easily when tapping (he cannot even fight properly when tapping a lot, more throwing himself at enemy then hitting them).

At low rates the difference won't be as large sure, but it will still be there. E.g. you physically speed up 2x, but your perception speeds up only ~1.4x

That doesn't seem to be the case in books. Yes, it won't be 1:1 increase, but Bleeder was able to react to Wayne's bubble and their movement in that bubble perfectly fine, and Marasi in BoM, tapping speeds over Mach 1 (when she noted that snow was "hanging motionless in the air"), was still perfectly fine with her reaction, and could grab multiple vials from multiple man, without any trouble. She later reduced tapped speed, and had no difference in her speed of reacting compared to her physical speed.
Yes, "she tapped everything" whatever it means, but base on the amount of speed left in the Bands for Wax, which was noted to be very little, and amount of mental speed, which amount wasn't told to us, but was enough for Wax to be able to thought about every possible option he had in between two words spoken by his uncle, it's fair to assume, Marasi didn't tap zinc at all, or at very least in small amounts. This proves that the mental help Steelrunnes get is quite significant, and can keep up even with Mach 1 speeds (tapped 40x?), and does change the perspective of time for a Steelrunner.

Quote

Marasi clutched the spearhead in two hands.
And tapped everything.
Power flooded into her, lighting her up like an inferno. Snow hung motionless in the air. She stood up and reached to the belt of one of her captors, removing one of his vials of metal. She took them all, several from each guard, and drank them. She was tapping a metalmind, letting her move at a speed so fast that when she lifted her hand, she could briefly see the pocket of vacuum left behind. She smiled

 

[therunner]

53 minutes ago, alder24 said:

Yes, "she tapped everything" whatever it means, but base on the amount of speed left in the Bands for Wax, which was noted to be very little, and amount of mental speed, which amount wasn't told to us, but was enough for Wax to be able to thought about every possible option he had in between two words spoken by his uncle, it's fair to assume, Marasi didn't tap zinc at all, or at very least in small amounts.

I don't think it is fair to assume she did not tap Zinc. Sure she did not tap as extremely as with F-steel, else she would run out, but if tapping only 20x increase combined with increase from F-Steel could bring her up to that point, while using much less Investiture. If the stacking is multiplicative and not additive, even less would be required.

Ultimately we don't know, and she did tap multiple things, so treating her as baseline is misleading.

Bleeder is better example, but she is also Kandra using unusual spikes, and going only for relatively low multiples.

Quote

This proves that the mental help Steelrunnes get is quite significant, and can keep up even with Mach 1 speeds (tapped 40x?), and does change the perspective of time for a Steelrunner.

So I disagree that Marasi proves or disproves anything about mental effects of F-steel, simply because that was not the only thing she was tapping and F-Zinc provably speeds up perception and mental processes (Wax, Sazed).

[StanLemon]

39 minutes ago, therunner said:

Bleeder is better example, but she is also Kandra using unusual spikes, and going only for relatively low multiples.

I believe Bleeder could explicitly only use one type of Spike at a time. 

40 minutes ago, therunner said:

So I disagree that Marasi proves or disproves anything about mental effects of F-steel, simply because that was not the only thing she was tapping and F-Zinc provably speeds up perception and mental processes (Wax, Sazed).

Except while F-Zinc does do that, Brandon has straight up said the bullet time thing is more an F-Steel thing. More evidence exists towards the interpretation that what Marasi experienced is a standard for F-Steel than not

[Frustration]

9 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

I believe Bleeder could explicitly only use one type of Spike at a time. 

But they were all Trellium spikes.

16 hours ago, Nameless* said:

Except that all in-book evidence points to it keeping up with at least at low rates of tapping, much like F-iron.

F-iron's strength never keeps up, even at low rates, while they are always able to handle their own weight as part of magic protecting its user, they are never able to lift in a proportional amount to how heavy they become.

12 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

Except while F-Zinc does do that, Brandon has straight up said the bullet time thing is more an F-Steel thing. More evidence exists towards the interpretation that what Marasi experienced is a standard for F-Steel than not

Um, no.

We have never seen a normal human use exclusively f-steel.

The closest thing is Bleeder, who was using Trellium spikes that we know for a fact stole more than just their base attribute, and should be noted only did so for a fraction of a second.

[Trusk'our]

15 hours ago, HSuperLee said:

All that said, I'm now thinking how interesting it would be to have a power where you can move super fast, and maybe you can even react to things super quickly, but because you wouldn't be able to perceive your own motion, you'd have to move in bursts where you plan out your movements very carefully before doing them. From your perspective it would be a little like teleportation, just with the added effect of doing stuff during the transition. That would have been a cool way to portray f-steel. But I don't think that's actually how it will work, so this particular tangent is mostly irrelevant.

That would be an awesome way to make a super-speed power not game breaking.

Also, it is worth mentioning that there is a type of insect IRL that does basically just that; the tiger beetle.

They can move so fast that their perception can't actually keep up, so they are effectively blind while they move at their top speeds. They solve that by moving in bursts, slowing down and speeding back up to see where they are going and attack their prey.

I found this out on this video here, talking about the scientific realities of super speed (tiger beetle at 5:50). The rest of the video is pretty good too, and is probably worth watching to find out more about F-steel.

Why You Don't Want Super Speed

[NameIess]

5 hours ago, therunner said:

Again, strength change F-Iron does not keep up with mass gain, otherwise Wax could not store to be lighter on his feet (since he would get proportionally weaker), nor can he move as easily when tapping (he cannot even fight properly when tapping a lot, more throwing himself at enemy then hitting them).

At low rates the difference won't be as large sure, but it will still be there. E.g. you physically speed up 2x, but your perception speeds up only ~1.4x

F-iron keeps up fairly well while tapping, considering how much Wax normally taps. And increasing strength is something completely outside F-iron's ballpark, so to speak. F-steel, on the other hand, is already increasing the speed at which one's muscles move, one's blood flows through their veins, etc. It won't take that much energy, comparatively, to speed up one's thoughts.

45 minutes ago, Frustration said:

F-iron's strength never keeps up, even at low rates, while they are always able to handle their own weight as part of magic protecting its user, they are never able to lift in a proportional amount to how heavy they become.

Are you saying that Wax should be able to lift ten times as much if he becomes ten times as heavy? Because that doesn't really compare to what we're saying at all.

47 minutes ago, Frustration said:

Um, no.

We have never seen a normal human use exclusively f-steel.

The closest thing is Bleeder, who was using Trellium spikes that we know for a fact stole more than just their base attribute, and should be noted only did so for a fraction of a second.

Bleeder tapped for much more than a fraction of a second when she attacked the governor's mansion. And while Trellium spikes are strange, we have no real reason to think that Bleeder's allomantic or feruchemical abilities were abnormally powered up by them.

[Frustration]

5 minutes ago, Nameless* said:

Are you saying that Wax should be able to lift ten times as much if he becomes ten times as heavy? Because that doesn't really compare to what we're saying at all.

Yes, he's able to innately hold up his own weight without any strain, that requires him to be at least 10 times as strong, but that is shown to not be the case.

7 minutes ago, Nameless* said:

Bleeder tapped for much more than a fraction of a second when she attacked the governor's mansion. .

But she only reacted to Wax in a speed bubble for a fraction of a second.

8 minutes ago, Nameless* said:

And while Trellium spikes are strange, we have no real reason to think that Bleeder's allomantic or feruchemical abilities were abnormally powered up by them.

Not necessarily her feruchemical abilities, but her Connection to Wax certainly was, otherwise she wouldn't be able to use telepathy with him

[NameIess]

16 minutes ago, Frustration said:

Yes, he's able to innately hold up his own weight without any strain, that requires him to be at least 10 times as strong, but that is shown to not be the case.

If he's ten times more massive, wouldn't 10x strength be effectively the same as 1x strength at normal mass, as it takes ten times as much strength to move himself?

18 minutes ago, Frustration said:

But she only reacted to Wax in a speed bubble for a fraction of a second.

Yes, but she had sped up before that, and there was no indication that she was using a different amount of speed in that particular instance than when she'd moved throughout the mansion. Besides, we're talking about reaction time here, so the simple fact that she was able to react relative to her own speed is all that is relevant, regardless of how long she was at that speed.

20 minutes ago, Frustration said:

Not necessarily her feruchemical abilities, but her Connection to Wax certainly was, otherwise she wouldn't be able to use telepathy with him

Yes, but that shouldn't change her reaction time.

[therunner]

14 minutes ago, Nameless* said:

If he's ten times more massive, wouldn't 10x strength be effectively the same as 1x strength at normal mass, as it takes ten times as much strength to move himself?

No, because you don't use up all your strength just to move around, and that part would also be 10x. I.e. if Wax not tapping could bench press 100 kg, then tapped 10x and if tapping F-Iron proptionally increased his stregnth, he could bechn press nearly 1000 kg.

Sure there would be correction for mass of arm: one arm of adult male is ~6kg, so prior to tapping Wax is raising ~112 kg,  after tapping the hands weight ~60 kg each, so he could still bench press ~880 kg, even if he was 10x as strong. Which is certainly not the case, hence F-Iron must provide much less then proportional increase in strength.

[Frustration]

28 minutes ago, Nameless* said:

Yes, but that shouldn't change her reaction time.

If she has such a strong Connection to him she would probably be more aware of him and what he was doing than she would have if it was someone else.

[NameIess]

15 minutes ago, therunner said:

No, because you don't use up all your strength just to move around, and that part would also be 10x. I.e. if Wax not tapping could bench press 100 kg, then tapped 10x and if tapping F-Iron proptionally increased his stregnth, he could bechn press nearly 1000 kg.

Sure there would be correction for mass of arm: one arm of adult male is ~6kg, so prior to tapping Wax is raising ~112 kg,  after tapping the hands weight ~60 kg each, so he could still bench press ~880 kg, even if he was 10x as strong. Which is certainly not the case, hence F-Iron must provide much less then proportional increase in strength.

Yeah, that makes sense. However, easy explanation is that F-iron only siphons off enough investiture to allow one to move normally, as it's not meant to increase strength. might be a bit weird, but F-iron is already pretty weird.

7 minutes ago, Frustration said:

If she has such a strong Connection to him she would probably be more aware of him and what he was doing than she would have if it was someone else.

Even if it works that way, if her mind wasn't sped up the extra input wouldn't allow her to react to it any more than she could react to her eyesight. Besides, if it did work that way then she would have had some indication of Wax's plan with Wayne, and wouldn't have been so shocked when Wax started shooting her from the speedbubble.

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

20 minutes ago, therunner said:

No, because you don't use up all your strength just to move around, and that part would also be 10x. I.e. if Wax not tapping could bench press 100 kg, then tapped 10x and if tapping F-Iron proptionally increased his stregnth, he could bechn press nearly 1000 kg.

Sure there would be correction for mass of arm: one arm of adult male is ~6kg, so prior to tapping Wax is raising ~112 kg,  after tapping the hands weight ~60 kg each, so he could still bench press ~880 kg, even if he was 10x as strong. Which is certainly not the case, hence F-Iron must provide much less then proportional increase in strength.

 

1 minute ago, Nameless* said:

Yeah, that makes sense. However, easy explanation is that F-iron only siphons off enough investiture to allow one to move normally, as it's not meant to increase strength. might be a bit weird, but F-iron is already pretty weird.

Even if it works that way, if her mind wasn't sped up the extra input wouldn't allow her to react to it any more than she could react to her eyesight. Besides, if it did work that way then she would have had some indication of Wax's plan with Wayne, and wouldn't have been so shocked when Wax started shooting her from the speedbubble.

The times we see iron being used and steel being used are completely different circumstances.  I think it is well within reason that the more you tap the more you feel the diminishing returns of what you are gaining.  Not just in attribute but in the ability to balance out those attributes. 

We have never seen a steel runner needing to increase beyond 3 or 4x their speed.  Indoors, moving at 80mph would be more than enough to produce the results we have seen I think. 

Every "feat" of iron we have seen was the characters just dumping all of their iron at once basically.  The way iron stores and gets used,  from Waxes point of view at least, would mean when he is tapping he is getting magnitudes more attribute.  

I don't disagree that Marasi likely used some zinc to aid her at those speeds. 

However at those speeds the attribute dump would have been 40x or so her normal speed.  

When Wax crushed the building he drained his metalminds.  He stores a third of his weight all the time.  If he were a 200lb man and was storing roughly 60lbs each waking moment and he slept 8hrs a night you still have him storing nearly 3.5 million lbs accessible for 1 second.  From a single day.  

He drained his metalminds in seconds.  Wax was tapping tens of thousands of times worth of his attribute stores. 

When Sazed needed extra strength to move his weight... he was heavy enough to brace city doors against hordes of koloss. He was likely tapping thousands of times his body weight as well. 

I think that comparing what we see of iron to what we see of steel is foolhardy as the magnitude of the attribute dumps are not comparable at all. 

I also imagine that the spiritual realm would be a lot more efficient at lower levels of tapped attribute.

A person tapping 2 or 3x weight will move a lot better, as the spirit realm is better at compensating than someone at 20000x weight.  

Likewise a person with just 2 or 3x tapped speed will be able to compensate a lot better than 20000x speed.  

The biggest difference is that iron can be used at those magnitudes where the bands ran out after just a few seconds of 40x speed.  

I take bullet time as meaning that the world slows down around you.  I don't think that it is in good spirits to compare tapping 4x speed with tapping tens of thousands of times your body weight.  Yet that is what we have to go off of in the books.  

As far as iron goes.  I believe iron effects the world around you but not you.  

You can squat 400 without tapping anything.  You aren't squatting 800 by being twice as heavy.  Your lungs aren't crushed when you weight millions of lbs pushing down on a building beneath you.  There is a point where moving is more difficult but to assume that it is at 2x weight when our examples have the user going for broke every time is perhaps slightly disingenuous. 

 

How fast was bleeder going?  Waynes speed bubbles have slowed down bullets and even a Shockwave from an explosion enough to react to.  I think to say bleeder only ever went more than 4x normal would be a huge downplay of bendalloy.  I also think that if bendalloy allows compression of time of only 10x would say that bleeders ability to recognize what was happening still suggests the bullet time effect was keeping up even then.  

 

[therunner]

50 minutes ago, Nameless* said:

Yeah, that makes sense. However, easy explanation is that F-iron only siphons off enough investiture to allow one to move normally, as it's not meant to increase strength. might be a bit weird, but F-iron is already pretty weird.

Question there is then 'how much Investiture does F-Steel siphon off for mental enhancements'? I.e. how much mental enhancements does Feruchemy "consider" sufficine', to not kill oneself?
I mean, people can move at speeds on the order of 100 km/h in the city streets already (cars) without any mental enhancements. This is already 3x of maximum typical human speed.
So, from pure suitability perspective, there is not that much need for mental enhancements? Or, they can be ~1/3 of the tapping rate relatively safely.

25 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

The times we see iron being used and steel being used are completely different circumstances.  I think it is well within reason that the more you tap the more you feel the diminishing returns of what you are gaining.  Not just in attribute but in the ability to balance out those attributes. 

We have never seen a steel runner needing to increase beyond 3 or 4x their speed.  Indoors, moving at 80mph would be more than enough to produce the results we have seen I think.

I think the semi-simultaneous shot Bleeder does + her movements are more then ~80mph, and at very least on order of ~100 m/s. She shot what, 4-5 times quickly enough that it sounded like one shot? The repositioning would be at least ~10 meters, and she did in at most 1/10 of second.

She was 'pure' Steelrunner at those points (Trellium effects, and Kandra nature notwhistanding).

25 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

How fast was bleeder going?  Waynes speed bubbles have slowed down bullets and even a Shockwave from an explosion enough to react to.  I think to say bleeder only ever went more than 4x normal would be a huge downplay of bendalloy.  I also think that if bendalloy allows compression of time of only 10x would say that bleeders ability to recognize what was happening still suggests the bullet time effect was keeping up even then. 

Bendalloys behaves very inconsistently
It is said to compress typically by 10-15x fold, however that is not sufficient to see bullets move (unless the bullets are extremely slow), as even if the bullets would move at ~150 m/s , from bubble perspective they would still move at 10 m/s, so the conversations Wax and Wayne have in bubbles could not happen.
Slowing down the explosion is even more insane, explosives wave front routinely move at ~800m/s, so for that the bubble should have slowed down time by a factor of 1600x at minimum.

So...using bendalloy bubbles won't tell us much, because they do whatever Brandon needs them to do in the moment.

25 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

When Wax crushed the building he drained his metalminds.  He stores a third of his weight all the time.  If he were a 200lb man and was storing roughly 60lbs each waking moment and he slept 8hrs a night you still have him storing nearly 3.5 million lbs accessible for 1 second.  From a single day.  

He drained his metalminds in seconds.  Wax was tapping tens of thousands of times worth of his attribute stores.

Don't forget losses, he did not have 3.5 million lbs accessible, but far less from that one day, if he decided to tap at once. At those rates most of the attribute turns into the Investiture necessary for compression.

And Wax did not crush the building' literally, he just pushed on e.g. the nails and metal elements holding it together, moving them out of place so the building fell down. Far less weight needed for that, it was like a big hammer hitting all the 'binding points' at once.

25 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

As far as iron goes.  I believe iron effects the world around you but not you. 

That is not possible because that is not how Feruchemy works. Feruchemy only ever effects Feruchemist, and nothing external to them. (Southern Fabrials being Fabrials and not natural Feruchemy).
 

Edited March 29, 2023 by therunner

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

13 minutes ago, therunner said:

Question there is then 'how much Investiture does F-Steel siphon off for mental enhancements'? I.e. how much mental enhancements does Feruchemy "consider" sufficine', to not kill oneself?
I mean, people can move at speeds on the order of 100 km/h in the city streets already (cars) without any mental enhancements. This is already 3x of maximum typical human speed.
So, from pure suitability perspective, there is not that much need for mental enhancements? Or, they can be ~1/3 of the tapping rate relatively safely.

I think the semi-simultaneous shot Bleeder does + her movements are more then ~80mph, and at very least on order of ~100 m/s. She shot what, 4-5 times quickly enough that it sounded like one shot? The repositioning would be at least ~10 meters, and she did in at most 1/10 of second.

She was 'pure' Steelrunner at those points (Trellium effects, and Kandra nature notwhistanding).

Bendalloys behaves very inconsistently
It is said to compress typically by 10-15x fold, however that is not sufficient to see bullets move (unless the bullets are extremely slow), as even if the bullets would move at ~150 m/s , from bubble perspective they would still move at 10 m/s, so the conversations Wax and Wayne have in bubbles could not happen.
Slowing down the explosion is even more insane, explosives wave front routinely move at ~800m/s, so for that the bubble should have slowed down time by a factor of 1600x at minimum.

So...using bendalloy bubbles won't tell us much, because they do whatever Brandon needs them to do in the moment.

Don't forget losses, he did not have 3.5 million lbs accessible, but far less from that one day, if he decided to tap at once. At those rates most of the attribute turns into the Investiture necessary for compression.

And Wax did not crush the building' literally, he just pushed on e.g. the nails and metal elements holding it together, moving them out of place so the building fell down. Far less weight needed for that, it was like a big hammer hitting all the 'binding points' at once.

That is not possible because that is not how Feruchemy works. Feruchemy only ever effects Feruchemist, and nothing external to them. (Southern Fabrials being Fabrials and not natural Feruchemy).
 

Perhaps I missphrased that.  Iron feruchemy allows you to effect the world around you without destroying yourself.  

The 3.5million was just what he could store for a single day. He could have had far more than that stored (I actually think that his iron feruchemy habits are a great argument for the amount of attribute a set of bracers could hold).  

I don't want to jump fully on board with the idea that he pushed the nails out and the building fell apart because of how framing nails are designed and used.  Unless he was blowing them through the wood entirely which I think would still suggest he had to have the weight to destroy the structure.  

Even then he also became so heavy to break the floor of his mansion for himself and his little crew at the time.  Perhaps that was the better feat of weight?  

I don't know what Elendel standards are for how their buildings are put together but I imagine the floors of the top 0.5% are pretty sturdy.  

As for the bleeder example of the single shot.  That would be even more of an argument for the fact that she was able to function while working at a very high tapped rate.  Not just function but line up shots and hit her targets while doing it.  

 

Iron is too funky to use for anything.  It makes everything buckle under you unless you are contacting flesh with a punch where it is wholly ineffective.  Thus I trust Iron usage as far as I can throw it... which can differ depending on the rules of iron...

[NameIess]

46 minutes ago, therunner said:

Question there is then 'how much Investiture does F-Steel siphon off for mental enhancements'? I.e. how much mental enhancements does Feruchemy "consider" sufficine', to not kill oneself?
I mean, people can move at speeds on the order of 100 km/h in the city streets already (cars) without any mental enhancements. This is already 3x of maximum typical human speed.
So, from pure suitability perspective, there is not that much need for mental enhancements? Or, they can be ~1/3 of the tapping rate relatively safely.

It's not about not killing oneself, it's about being able to use the power. And given what we've seen in the books unless you're tapping at an absolutely insane rate, the increased speed of thought is equal to the increased physical speed.

[Werewolff Studios]

6 hours ago, Nameless* said:

It's not about not killing oneself, it's about being able to use the power. And given what we've seen in the books unless you're tapping at an absolutely insane rate, the increased speed of thought is equal to the increased physical speed.

Agreed. Especially if your speed was increased by something like 50% after storing 1 for 1. Feruchemical decay is practically nothing at those levels (WOB below), but moving 50% faster would prove a massive advantage in a fight between equally skilled and athletic opponents. The speed of thought could certainly keep up at those levels, I reckon.

I think this was @Tamriel Wolfsbaine's original point as well. Not to discuss how crazy steelrunning can be when compressed (which it is, but physics gets wonky), but to discuss how little speed it would take to produce a substantial difference in perception and ability. 

Quote

Sporkify

This is more towards the whole physics stuff, but is Feruchemy really balanced? If it gives diminishing returns, wouldn't this end up as a net loss of power?

Brandon Sanderson

It doesn't diminish. Or, well, it does—but only if you compound it. You get 1 for 1 back, but compounding the power requires an expenditure of the power itself. For instance, if you are weak for one hour, you can gain the lost strength for one hour. But that's not really that much strength. After all, you probably weren't as weak as zero people during that time. So if you want to be as strong as two men, you couldn't do it for a full hour. You'd have to spend some energy to compound, then spend the compounded energy itself.

In more mathematical terms, let's say you spend one hour at 50% strength. You could then spend one hour at 150% strength, or perhaps 25 min at 200% strength, or maybe 10min at 250% strength. Each increment is harder, and therefore 'strains' you more and burns your energy more quickly. And since most Feruchemists don't store at 50% strength, but instead at something like 80% strength (it feels like much more when they do it, but you can't really push the body to that much forced weakness without risking death) you can burn through a few day's strength in a very short time if you aren't careful.

Footnote: This question was asked when fueling Feruchemy with Allomancy had only been seen in Rashek. As such, the term compounding is used purely to reference tapping at a higher rate than can be stored.
Hero of Ages Q&A - Time Waster's Guide (Oct. 15, 2008)

 

[therunner]

16 hours ago, Nameless* said:

It's not about not killing oneself, it's about being able to use the power. And given what we've seen in the books unless you're tapping at an absolutely insane rate, the increased speed of thought is equal to the increased physical speed.

But you can use F-steel even without any mental enhancements, you just have to be careful. Nothing stops you from moving.
So from that perspective there is no need for mental enhancements.

16 hours ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Perhaps I missphrased that.  Iron feruchemy allows you to effect the world around you without destroying yourself. 

Ah, argument could be made for that.

Quote

The 3.5million was just what he could store for a single day. He could have had far more than that stored (I actually think that his iron feruchemy habits are a great argument for the amount of attribute a set of bracers could hold).  

Yeah, but phrasing it that way is misleading, since you always store some percentage of attribute, not 'fixed' value I think. So e.g. after one day of your storing, he has enough to become ~140% as heavy for 16 hours. Or 180% as heavy for less then 8 hours and so on. Never will he be able to use it to become 10000x as heavy for more then miliseconds (if that).
I don't want to jump fully on board with the idea that he pushed the nails out and the building fell apart because of how framing nails are designed and used.  Unless he was blowing them through the wood entirely which I think would still suggest he had to have the weight to destroy the structure.  

Quote

I don't want to jump fully on board with the idea that he pushed the nails out and the building fell apart because of how framing nails are designed and used.  Unless he was blowing them through the wood entirely which I think would still suggest he had to have the weight to destroy the structure.  

But that is literally what he did, quote (AoL, pg. 296) (Sidenote: He also says he does not grow more dense when tapping). He never pushed on the building directly, only on the metal pieces used in construction, removing them from their position (which causes the building to fall apart), and the momentum of the metal helps push the building into hole over which it was built..
So he does not literally crush the building.

Quote

Wax drew every bit of weight he had left, draining his metalminds completely. That was hundred upon hundreds of hours of weight, enough to make him crush paving stones if he tried to walk on them. In the strange way of feruchemy he didn't grow more dense - bullets would still cut through him easily if they hit. But with this incredible conflux of weight his ability to Push grew incredible.
He used that weight to Push downward with everything he had. There were numerous lines of metal below. Nails. Doorknobs. Guns. Personal effects.
The building trembled, then undulated, then ripped apart, as every nail in its frame was driven downward as if propelled by a rotary gun. There was enormous crash. The building was crushed down into the railroad tunnel on top of which it had been built.

Quote

Even then he also became so heavy to break the floor of his mansion for himself and his little crew at the time.  Perhaps that was the better feat of weight?  

Don't think so, it was wooden floor in relatively old building (since it was family mansion in capital). If he became ~2 tons heavy, that would be enough I think. So 20x increase.

Quote

As for the bleeder example of the single shot.  That would be even more of an argument for the fact that she was able to function while working at a very high tapped rate.  Not just function but line up shots and hit her targets while doing it.  

I am not disputing Bleeder was able to function, I am just saying that I don't think F-steel provides as much mental enhancements as 1:1, and that Bleeder being Kandra could compensate for that.

[NameIess]

1 hour ago, therunner said:

But you can use F-steel even without any mental enhancements, you just have to be careful. Nothing stops you from moving.
So from that perspective there is no need for mental enhancements.

And yet, it is less effective without enhancement. One could still use F-iron without being able to stand while tapping, but the power still compensates for that.

1 hour ago, therunner said:

I am not disputing Bleeder was able to function, I am just saying that I don't think F-steel provides as much mental enhancements as 1:1, and that Bleeder being Kandra could compensate for that.

How? She was moving at speeds that should have made it impossible for her to react like she did without a 1:1 mental speed increase, and nothing we know about Kandra suggests they have heightened reaction times.

[cometaryorbit]

 

On 3/29/2023 at 10:47 AM, therunner said:

I mean, people can move at speeds on the order of 100 km/h in the city streets already (cars) without any mental enhancements.

[...]

So...using bendalloy bubbles won't tell us much, because they do whatever Brandon needs them to do in the moment.

That's a good point. Normal people (who aren't trained runners) max out at more like 8 to 12 mph, so that's at least an x5 factor (12 mph ~ 20 km/h).

The canon's actually changed on this. AoL originally had Wayne say he can compress 2 minutes into 15 seconds with a nugget of bendalloy (so, an x8 factor). This was removed in the leather-bound (presumably to match the bullet and explosion scenes), but when SoS was written, it might still have been considered valid. So Bleeder matching bendalloy time compression doesn't necessarily argue for a speed factor higher than x8.

On 3/29/2023 at 6:03 PM, Werewolff Studios said:

Agreed. Especially if your speed was increased by something like 50% after storing 1 for 1. Feruchemical decay is practically nothing at those levels (WOB below), but moving 50% faster would prove a massive advantage in a fight between equally skilled and athletic opponents. The speed of thought could certainly keep up at those levels, I reckon.

I'll agree there. Even a x1.5 acceleration is a very significant advantage, and a decisive one if the opponents are otherwise equally matched.

But not IMO all that decisive if they aren't equally matched otherwise.

A 1.5x acceleration wouldn't let an untrained person beat a trained one. Probably even x2 or x3 wouldn't. Muscle memory is a lot faster than "thinking". (I don't think "speed of thought" is necessarily all that relevant in a fight between trained people, though with no RL experience, I could certainly be way wrong.)

And I think the natural difference between human reaction times is wider than 1.5x, so a naturally slow person with a 1.5x acceleration wouldn't be faster than a naturally fast person. 

On 3/30/2023 at 6:02 AM, Nameless* said:

And yet, it is less effective without enhancement. One could still use F-iron without being able to stand while tapping, but the power still compensates for that.

How? She was moving at speeds that should have made it impossible for her to react like she did without a 1:1 mental speed increase, and nothing we know about Kandra suggests they have heightened reaction times.

Kandra don't automatically have better reaction time, but they get to redesign their bodies. So she could have given herself better reaction time.

And since the bendalloy bubble comparison is an issue, I don't think Bleeder is necessarily moving faster than say x8-x10 normal at any point. We know from Vin wiyh the spikeway in TFE that Allomantic Iron/Steel flight with good anchors is "twice as fast as a galloping horse" (probably about 60 mph, since these aren't super specialized modern racehorses which can hit 40mph), so Wax and Bleeder's chase could easily be freeway speeds of say 60-80mph (Wax has the ability to change his weight, so he'll probably be a bit faster than Vin despite his lesser Allomantic strength and lack of Ironpulling, given the variety of anchors Elendel offers).

[NameIess]

54 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

Kandra don't automatically have better reaction time, but they get to redesign their bodies. So she could have given herself better reaction time.

And since the bendalloy bubble comparison is an issue, I don't think Bleeder is necessarily moving faster than say x8-x10 normal at any point. We know from Vin wiyh the spikeway in TFE that Allomantic Iron/Steel flight with good anchors is "twice as fast as a galloping horse" (probably about 60 mph, since these aren't super specialized modern racehorses which can hit 40mph), so Wax and Bleeder's chase could easily be freeway speeds of say 60-80mph (Wax has the ability to change his weight, so he'll probably be a bit faster than Vin despite his lesser Allomantic strength and lack of Ironpulling, given the variety of anchors Elendel offers).

I don't think a Kandra could significantly increase their reaction time. And Bleeder was able to react to bullets, if not dodge them in time, so she was likely moving faster than 8-10x. Also, Bleeder was using A-steel during her and Wax's chase, not F-steel.

[cometaryorbit]

1 hour ago, Nameless* said:

I don't think a Kandra could significantly increase their reaction time.

I'd be amazed if they couldn't, given the level of control they have over their bodies, especially with what we see in Era 2. Their nervous systems are pretty changeable.

[StanLemon]

1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

I'd be amazed if they couldn't, given the level of control they have over their bodies, especially with what we see in Era 2. Their nervous systems are pretty changeable.

Either way, it's still a stretch to use the unsupported maybe that a Kandra might be able to do this as an argument that F-Steel doesn't speed up perception when the simpler answer which is supported by WoB is that perception and thought speed up with the body.

[Duxredux]

Actually, when people drive cars between 100 km/h and depending on where you live 80 mph, they do so in an environment specifically engineered to put decision making within the scope of human reaction time. Don't compare close combat to that. Highways specifically have gradual turn radii, wider lanes, calculated speed limits, a suggested following distance from other vehicles, brake lights, larger signs, calculated distance from the edge of the road to anything that could enter the road, and possibly more, all of these engineered to increase the opportunity to react in time to not get killed moving at that speed. If there's anywhere that this is safe and an option, try finding a place to stand that is next to a freeway, and look perpendicularly to the passing traffic. In terms of close combat maneuvering, that is what it is more likely to look like.

As for Tamriel Wolfsbaine's 4x reaction difference, if reaction time is increased at anything close to 1 to 1 at this level of Feruchemical utilization, I think the idea is that the person going at normal speed will have that much harder of a time reacting to someone going 2x speed. Once they do decide to react, to the 2x speed person those movements become much easier to read and the Steelrunner can then act knowing what the normal speed person intends. It may not be a straight 4x difference, since a lot goes into reflexes, but being able to respond quickly to what your opponent intends is a potent advantage. Even if you were to only use F-Steel the same way that Ham does in that sparring match that he uses as a demonstration for Vin, F-Steel can be quite potent if you only ever use it to give you just enough of an edge to never get hit.

I'll also note that Feruchemy breaks so many rules of Physics that many of these arguments that whip out calculators are still making assumptions as to how Feruchemy actually interacts with Newtonion motion and thermodynamics. 

Quote

MoriWillow

When a Steelrunner taps speed, does it work by breaking the laws of motion, letting their speed be higher than it should be when considering their kinetic energy during movement or the force they impart upon impact with something (and inversely while storing)?

Brandon Sanderson

A lot of [Feruchemy] breaks the laws of thermodynamics, and this is indeed an example.

Skyward Pre-Release AMA (Oct. 22, 2018)

This doesn't actually confirm what laws Feruchemy breaks, but it does break a lot. Without knowing how exactly this interacts, on paper being able to go twice as fast should in theory allow you to punch someone with 4x as much energy (½mv²), which is a huge advantage in close combat since the force gained is parabolic not linear, and in general will get more from attribute compression than anything that only gives a linear advantage. The fact that Bleeder can zip something as heavy as a pistol around a room that fast should in theory allow for her to throw objects at railgun level speeds, but we never see this (and that was intentionally nixed from a speed bubble's bag of tricks). 

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Twelve

The group investigates the railroad tracks and canal

So, let's talk about the realities of speed bubbles. I did research on this, and got different answers from people on what really should happen if you could slow time like this. One of the issues is that light doesn't change speeds based on this sort of issue, so there was discussion of what things would look like inside looking out or outside looking in. It seems likely that there'd be some sort of red shift, and also that things might grow more dim inside a speed bubble. This is all really very theoretical, however, and so, in the end, I decided that there was enough disagreement among scientists with whom I spoke that it wouldn't be glaringly irregular if I just had the shimmer at the borders and stayed away from dealing with speed of light issues.

There's a much larger issue dealing with slowed time that rarely gets addressed by this type of fiction. I considered using it, and it's this: conservation of energy. Inside the speed bubble, Wax and Wayne are moving far more quickly, and therefore have a ton of kinetic energy compared to those outside of it. And so, a coin tossed from inside the bubble going outside would suddenly move with a proportional increase in speed (proportional to how much slower things were outside).

In essence, speed bubble = railgun.

This is dangerous for narrative reasons. I've often said that the limitations of a power are more interesting than the powers themselves. (It's Sanderson’s Second Law of Magics: Limitations > Powers.) One of the reasons for removing Mistborn and Full Feruchemists from the setting was so that we could focus in on the usefulness of the individual powers in Allomancy and Feruchemy. That falls by the wayside if any of the individual powers become too strong on their own.

I didn't want Wayne to be able to slow time, then sit inside his bubble and leisurely pick off enemies one at a time. And so, I had to place strong limitations on the speed bubbles. (Much stronger limitations than on other aspects of Allomancy. Pushing and Pulling, for example, have their limitations based in solid science. With speed bubbles, I eventually decided that solid science made them way too powerful. So I had to change things.) Therefore, the rules became: No shooting/throwing things out of speed bubbles, no moving speed bubbles, and a required couple second cool-down between creating different speed bubbles. The first rule broke required objects to be deflected when leaving the bubble and that we have the bubble absorb excess kinetic energy when something leaves it.

Disappointing for the scientists, I know, but it makes for a stronger story.

The Alloy of Law Annotations (Nov. 30, 2015)

 

Apparently F-Steel may also allow you to burn metals at a faster rate, which also is pretty busted.

Spoiler

Questioner

Everybody talks about steel-steel twinborns. A big topic of discussion. What I'm thinking about, I haven't seen anybody ask, what happens when somebody who's tapping speed, does a steelpush, does the steelpush react in realtime or accelerated time? And the object-- is it like a railgun?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm surprised that no one's asked me that before. This gets really dangerous really fast... It's RAFO territory, but you are thinking along the right lines.

Oathbringer San Francisco signing (Nov. 15, 2017)

 

Oh, and @cometaryorbit, we discussed Kandra reaction time and intelligence July last year.

 

 

[therunner]

30 minutes ago, Duxredux said:

Actually, when people drive cars between 100 km/h and depending on where you live 80 mph, they do so in an environment specifically engineered to put decision making within the scope of human reaction time. Don't compare close combat to that. Highways specifically have gradual turn radii, wider lanes, calculated speed limits, a suggested following distance from other vehicles, brake lights, larger signs, calculated distance from the edge of the road to anything that could enter the road, and possibly more, all of these engineered to increase the opportunity to react in time to not get killed moving at that speed. If there's anywhere that this is safe and an option, try finding a place to stand that is next to a freeway, and look perpendicularly to the passing traffic. In terms of close combat maneuvering, that is what it is more likely to look like.

Point is that the powers are not designed to be combat useful, hence there is no a priori reason why F-Steel should include mental enhacements. F-Steel stores physical speed, the fact that actually using that speed in urban environments is difficult does not mean that Feruchemy should change somehow.

Now, F-steel does include some measure of mental enhancements, but I think they are most likely not 1-1 (based on my prior arguments).

33 minutes ago, Duxredux said:

As for Tamriel Wolfsbaine's 4x reaction difference, if reaction time is increased at anything close to 1 to 1 at this level of Feruchemical utilization, I think the idea is that the person going at normal speed will have that much harder of a time reacting to someone going 2x speed. Once they do decide to react, to the 2x speed person those movements become much easier to read and the Steelrunner can then act knowing what the normal speed person intends. It may not be a straight 4x difference, since a lot goes into reflexes, but being able to respond quickly to what your opponent intends is a potent advantage. Even if you were to only use F-Steel the same way that Ham does in that sparring match that he uses as a demonstration for Vin, F-Steel can be quite potent if you only ever use it to give you just enough of an edge to never get hit.

But there is no multiplication there anyway, it does not make sense to think of it like that.
There are two perspectives, Ferring's and their oponents:
 

• Ferring is sped up 2x physically, and by some measure mentally (<=2x). If the mental enhacement is equal to gained speed, then from Ferrings perspective they move as usual, and everything around them is slowed down to 50%. So no 4x advantage.
• From outside perspective, Ferring is moving 2x fast, again no 4x advantage.

37 minutes ago, Duxredux said:

This doesn't actually confirm what laws Feruchemy breaks, but it does break a lot. Without knowing how exactly this interacts, on paper being able to go twice as fast should in theory allow you to punch someone with 4x as much energy (½mv²), which is a huge advantage in close combat since the force gained is parabolic not linear, and in general will get more from attribute compression than anything that only gives a linear advantage. The fact that Bleeder can zip something as heavy as a pistol around a room that fast should in theory allow for her to throw objects at railgun level speeds, but we never see this (and that was intentionally nixed from a speed bubble's bag of tricks).

From Bleeder (and Marasi in BoM) we see that somehow they can interact with objects as if they were 'just' moving as usual, so somehow F-steel does not include increase in kinetic energy or momentum (otherwise Bleeder would be breaking doors everytime she opened them, and Marasi would break vials with metal by interacting with them, or her shoes, or really anything).
So similarly to how F-Iron does not let you punch harder, neither does F-steel let you hit harder or throw objects like that (seemingly).

[cometaryorbit]

1 hour ago, StanLemon said:

Either way, it's still a stretch to use the unsupported maybe that a Kandra might be able to do this as an argument that F-Steel doesn't speed up perception when the simpler answer which is supported by WoB is that perception and thought speed up with the body.

Oh, I think F-Steel does speed up at least perception, and WoBs do show that. I just don't think Bleeder is a good example to show that, because her brain/nervous system is dramatically non-human to start with.

I'm not sure I agree that F-Steel speeds up thought, though, depending on what you mean by "thought". It speeds up perception/reaction to stimuli/muscle memory for sure, and likely 'snap decisions' - swerve left or right, kind of things. I don't think it necessarily speeds up complex thought.

 

43 minutes ago, Duxredux said:

Actually, when people drive cars between 100 km/h and depending on where you live 80 mph, they do so in an environment specifically engineered to put decision making within the scope of human reaction time. Don't compare close combat to that. Highways specifically have gradual turn radii, wider lanes, calculated speed limits, a suggested following distance from other vehicles, brake lights, larger signs, calculated distance from the edge of the road to anything that could enter the road, and possibly more, all of these engineered to increase the opportunity to react in time to not get killed moving at that speed. If there's anywhere that this is safe and an option, try finding a place to stand that is next to a freeway, and look perpendicularly to the passing traffic. In terms of close combat maneuvering, that is what it is more likely to look like.

[...]

Oh, and @cometaryorbit, we discussed Kandra reaction time and intelligence July last year.

 

 

Oh, yeah, the fast turns and such will make it far more demanding than driving. Still, there's an additional mechanical delay between slamming on the brakes and a car stopping (on top of the human reaction time) - I'm not convinced a person couldn't function at those speeds without much mental acceleration.

Yeah, I think I still agree with what I said there. They can't just dissolve their brain matter without risking their memories etc. That doesn't mean they can't drastically rearrange their peripheral nervous system, or move their brain matter around - they have to do that anyway to take radically different bodies, or for MeLaan to put her brains in her thigh.

4 minutes ago, therunner said:

Now, F-steel does include some measure of mental enhancements, but I think they are most likely not 1-1 (based on my prior arguments)

I think they may well not be 1:1,  but also and probably more importantly they're narrow. Just what you need to use the physical speed. F-steel isn't f-zinc plus all the physical stuff. There's some overlap, but it's not "everything zinc does".