The protagonist's biography

[StanLemon]

On 10/3/2023 at 8:26 AM, Dunkum said:

sure, but there is a HUGE difference between orbiting the planet or even going to the moon vs travel between stars. it's been 50+ years since the moon landing and we still haven't sent a human to even the closest other planets to say nothing sending manned voyages outside the solar system. sure Cosmere folks will have magic, but thats still an enormous leap

That's in part because we are heavily restricted by real world physics. Scadrial has numerous powers that are exceptionally useful for making space travel much more viable. So I could see Scadrial being space age in just one or two hundred years, especially considering they rebounded from near societal collapse and advanced to turn of the 20th century development in only a handful of centuries. 

[Dunkum]

4 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

That's in part because we are heavily restricted by real world physics. Scadrial has numerous powers that are exceptionally useful for making space travel much more viable. So I could see Scadrial being space age in just one or two hundred years, especially considering they rebounded from near societal collapse and advanced to turn of the 20th century development in only a handful of centuries. 

the biggest thing they have over us is the existence of investiture as a potential power source - which is huge, and would definitely speed things up. mass and time manipulation both also help, especially the former. that said, part of the speed for getting to where they are in era 2 is that TLR was suppressing a lot of stuff, like gunpowder, that they basically would have been able to make before without his interference. I doubt they have that advantage for space travel.

though I did realize a bit ago that I forgot to account for the fact that the Malwish are a bit more technologically advanced than the Basin. they are probably equivalent to the US in the 20s or 30s - basic flight and working on something along the lines of nuclear power (Ettmetal) but haven't quite cracked it yet, if memory serves. so that should probably be the tech baseline we use for Scadrial at the end of Era 2.

but also bear in mind that by The Sunlit Man, they had been doing the space travel stuff for quite a while. Sig knows what he is going to find behind the door because the same thing exists across the Cosmere and he has encountered them before. so this isn't just going from Era 2 tech to spacefaring; it's that gap plus probably at least a couple decades for them to establish themselves as enough of a power to have scientific outposts on minor planets and to be included in major space treaties.

[StanLemon]

I think you are vastly underestimatin how much Allomancy and Feruchemy would ease space travel. One of the hardest parts of space travel is just gravity. Iron will be immensely useful for that. Food, water, air storage? Cadmium and Bendalloy. Heat buildup? Brass. Calculations done with Zinc. FTL made possible with time bubbles.

Many of the hurdles we have with space travel are things the Metallic Arts already have answers for, or at least have aspects that simplify the problems.

[Dunkum]

1 minute ago, StanLemon said:

I think you are vastly underestimatin how much Allomancy and Feruchemy would ease space travel. One of the hardest parts of space travel is just gravity. Iron will be immensely useful for that. Food, water, air storage? Cadmium and Bendalloy. Heat buildup? Brass. Calculations done with Zinc. FTL made possible with time bubbles.

Many of the hurdles we have with space travel are things the Metallic Arts already have answers for, or at least have aspects that simplify the problems.

Gravity is mostly an issue for the initial step of getting off-world, and the food/water/air issues are mostly related to the gravity one. the hardest part about traveling between stars is the distance and time and fuel for slowing down at the other end. at lightspeed even the closest stars are years away - it would take almost 7 years to get the first signal from a ship travelling there at approximately lightspeed, and that sort of signal delay slows down space research. you say FTL with speed bubbles, but it isn't clear how that would work, or how much metal they would need to make it work for something as massive as a starship over the course of an entire voyage - its a completely different scale than an individual allomancer in a single fight. certainly Wayne and Marasi weren't capable of anything close to that level in terms of either size or dilation or duration. that isn't to say it doesn't work, but if there is a way to make that work, that breakthrough still needs to happen. and then you need to take all of those individual things and scale them to the size of a ship which is non-trivial, and in some cases make sure they work together correctly. and that's just the cosmere-specific side of things. its also not clear where their basic physics knowledge is, because even with investiture to help, you still need basic physics for things like plotting courses and working out interstellar distances, and determining that you need all that other stuff.

nothing impossible, but its all going to take years to work out, even accounting for them having allomancy and ferruchemy to help. and again once they get that all worked out, its still decades to get from there to the point where they have numerous offworld outposts and inclusion in treaties.

[StanLemon]

Considering how quickly breakthroughs have happened in the real world (car to landingon the moon in less than a century), most of those are reasonable in only a century or two. South Scadrial already has the technology to make machines use Allomancy for example. They already have the seeds to what they need. 

Also, Scadrial has much more reason to invest in space travel than we do. Space development continued advancing and making breakthroughs while we were still funding it but then as a society space travel stopped having the appeal. Partly because we hit the walls of real world physics limitations, but also it became harder for countries to justify the spending on further developments. Take Space-X for example, many of the developments they have done were theorized decades ago, but actual money and engineering were put into it.

I agree that it would take decades to develop colonization and research outposts, but if they create an FTL drive in only a century after Era 2, they could have all that by two hundred years post Era 2. YatNP shows that Investiture is a very good means of propulsion considering the society personally visited another planet in their solar system at a tech level at best comparable to ours. 

[Dunkum]

1 hour ago, StanLemon said:

I agree that it would take decades to develop colonization and research outposts, but if they create an FTL drive in only a century after Era 2, they could have all that by two hundred years post Era 2. YatNP shows that Investiture is a very good means of propulsion considering the society personally visited another planet in their solar system at a tech level at best comparable to ours. 

agree with that. it's tricky to map their progress to ours, but I figure worth trying because this the only real baseline we have. for us, that would be an incredibly short time, but they definitely do have advantages. i'm still inclined to lean toward the gap being a bit higher than that, but its not out of the question - it all depends on exactly what paths their tech and science follow. a heavy focus on allomantic and ferruchemical machines would be both a logical in-world choice and go a long way toward resolving the issues of manned spaceflight.

[Stigmadiabolicum]

I agree with the breakdown, going by Rysns warning about spren bonds, it's possible he intentionally ended his bond as a windrunner before taking up the dawnshard, but then that doesn't explain why he'd begin a new bond as a skybreaker. 

Feel like Hoid could have warned him about draining his spren, but I guess he only recently got design, idk.

I'm still in the back 3/4, I didn't want to rush it haha, got another year til KoWaT, and (the chasm kata/bridge 4 gave me chills)

But I'm loving all the tidbits we get, i think 5% skip capacity is a bad baseline since it's an immense amount required to skip compared to what would be incredibly strong mistborn/awakeners/radiants in era 1/2. It's like you need Elantrian levels of investiture to skip, since dawnshards are the primordial investiture, seems like you get the base abilities of being invested, like early heightenings (with Rysn) and some of the various powers like elsecaller teleporting/bondsmith connection meddling. 

Now that he's established breath units reeeally want a WoB of him saying the baseline units of a standard radiant/Elantrian/awakener, and what level someone like Rashek and Susebron were at, since they're splinters/close enough in the latters case.. 

Also as far as the timeline, using real world tech progression towards spaceflight to judge length of time isn't a good example, look at Yumi, they're still somewhat limited tech wise but purely having the hion they can travel to a neighboring planet, and roshar/scadrial airship tech is already 75% of the way there, a few more developments in fabrials and metalminds and you got space travel. The scadrian shuttle we see in SotD2 preview isn't a huge leap from era 2. 

At first I also was imagining a century/century and a half based on Hoids comment about his travels..but the thoughts about his friends seems to imply he could still go back and see them, whether that requires shardic intervention/worldhopper extended lifespans/or they're just in old age we can't really tell, could honestly just be 40/50 years since book 5, that's at least the bare minimum to be older than the 3 women. 

He did a really good job at giving us awesome cosmere details while skirting around any tidbits about the state of Roshar. We know horneaters are abroad in TLM, thaylens now too, and iriali, although I noticed he doesn't seem hostile or prejudiced against scadrial, so their inevitable conflict might not have started yet. (Funny how the cinder king has the same idea as Odium that Rosharans could be cosmere wide conquerors)

Now I'm just curious what led Hoid to give him the dawnshard, Honor seemed to think they weren't available in the vision and somehow was unaware 2 were on Roshar?! 

rust, just so many questions. 

The complaints back when the sample chapter was released that they didn't want to see a bleak hopeless future Sigzil since it would mess with his arc in SA are eating their words considering his development into zellion haha

 He kind of touches on it, but since traveling the subastrals through shadesmar already worked there wouldnt be huge pressure to develop space travel, save for reaching Sel, I'm guessing it's the colonial aspect of reaching non shard worlds that would be inaccessible without perpendicularities. 

Aah just so many questions. I think we just don't have enough info to judge if it's been 50 or 200 years, but personally I'd say closer to 50. 

 

[PythonicDreams]

On 10/13/2023 at 6:12 PM, Stigmadiabolicum said:

 Now that he's established breath units reeeally want a WoB of him saying the baseline units of a standard radiant/Elantrian/awakener, and what level someone like Rashek and Susebron were at, since they're splinters/close enough in the latters case..

I mean if 1 Breath = 1 BEU, shouldn't Suseborn be at 50,000 BEU or 250% skip capacity?

I have no idea what Rashek would be at... it seems to me that BEU is a good unit for static investiture or maybe measuring the amount of Stormlight in a broam but i feel like measuring people like mistborn who are passively invested always but are really all about super-investing in bursts would be hard to measure. Though the idea of figuring out the capacity of a metal mind in BEU (along with conversion rates) sounds super cool

[Treamayne]

1 hour ago, PythonicDreams said:

it seems to me that BEU is a good unit for static investiture or maybe measuring the amount of Stormlight in a broam but i feel like measuring people like mistborn who are passively invested always but are really all about super-investing in bursts would be hard to measure. Though the idea of figuring out the capacity of a metal mind in BEU (along with conversion rates) sounds super cool

I feel like things like Mistings would be more of a measure of how much investiture is being channeled - e. g. (numbers total fabrication for the example) Regular Pewter burn is channelling 5 BEU per minute, light burning is only channelling 2 BEU per minute, Flaring is up to 10 BEU per minute.

A Duralumin burn would have to be calcualted by the amount of Pewter available (and possibly how much Duralumin is also available - assuming some limitation like 1 mg duralumin will convert 1g pewter all at once). I know we never saw Vin or anybody test if any small amount of Duralumin would effect a very large source of metal - but I also find it hard to beleive that a single flake of duralumin would expend an entire bag of pewter (as they used when pewter dragging).

[StormDad]

I’m not certain that it is clear if 2 or 3 came first. I think this is the most relevant passage:

Quote

Spoiler

“I was a knight,” he said, “of a very exclusive order. Two different orders actually, at two different times. For the first, I was one of their leaders, with oaths that were supposed to turn what I did from terrible into—if not beautiful—honorable. But then…”

How to explain this next part? A part he didn’t fully understand himself. “I was given charge over an extremely dangerous item. Capable of killing gods. Laying waste to planets. I carried that burden, found new bonds, but the weapon consumed important parts of me. Shredded the soul of one of my dearest friends. Stole my armor.

 

So he does say it was at two different times, that he was in the two orders and that he formed new “bonds” after getting the dawnshard. But I’m not sure why bonds is plural. But I think you could read this as

1. Join the wind runners

2. join the sky breakers 

3. Get the dawnshard