I dont think the basin is going to crack how to make madallions

[ruler of the mists He/His/the survivor of the pit]

I think that they are going to use combustion technology like in the real world. That would make them much much much more powerful than medallion powered aeroplanes, they manged to make ballistic missiles, albeit with the help of autotomy.

[Quantus he/him]

18 minutes ago, ruler of the mists said:

I think that they are going to use combustion technology like in the real world. That would make them much much much more powerful than medallion powered aeroplanes, they manged to make ballistic missiles, albeit with the help of autotomy.

While I do agreed that metallic arts wont entirely displace RL science with combustion engines (any more than they displaced electrical tech and radio) I disagree with this bold part on the science of it.  Modern aeronautics looses a huge portion of it's energy to carrying the weight of (usually) liquid Fuel, and that's the densest material energy storage we have.  Even if we assume that they dont develop with some worldhopping influences and/or foreign magics, the potential energy density of current Metalminds is entirely unrivaled in real science (short of maybe nuclear or similar extremes).

[ruler of the mists He/His/the survivor of the pit]

maybe a mix, combustion with harmonium. That's a revolutionary.

[Quantus he/him]

Hmmm, Maybe current gen Airships that use medallion and harmonium tech for Lift and general cruising but with more traditional jet engines as boosters for sprinting and/or dogfights?

[ruler of the mists He/His/the survivor of the pit]

or replace liquid feul with a harmonium reactor and as you said traditional engines for dogfighting

 

[alder24]

Modern combustion jet engines can be easily replaced by Allomancy. What does this engine do? It compresses and heats up the air to push it from the nozzle at the back with high speeds, which gives thrust to a plane. How is this compression achieved? By spinning a fan which sucks the air into the engine and compresses it. Then in the combustion chamber the air is mixed with fuel and ignited. Simple, right?

Well, Malwish airships already have the first part of this engine developed - they are using steel Allomancy to spin the fans to generate lift. How about putting those fans inside a horizontal, cylindrical tube, wide at the front, narrow at the back, with a chamber inside of it? In that chamber you need to heat up the air - they have heating metallions, why not just use them to heat up the air inside the engine? Hot air expands and thus hot air in the pressurized chamber will want to escape and it can through the nozzle at the back of the tube, which would generate thrust just like in modern jet engines. It's very easy to design using Metallic Arts, does exactly the same thing but you don't have to carry tons of heavy fuel with you, thus it's much more efficient.

A jet engine was not built in a day. The very first planes were extremely slow, hard to maneuver and with a short range. It took almost 4 decades from the invention of the first plane to the first flight of a plane powered by a jet engine and all of those massive developments were done because of two World Wars pushing technology forwards faster than ever before. On Scadrial the aviation was just developed. Yes, it's already a few decades old or more, but there was no global conflict which would force them to innovate new technology to win the arms race. The arms race has just begun and the airships we saw in BoM and TLM will soon be replaced by faster, more maneuverable ones that can easily compete with modern planes. Metallic Arts can be used for that very easily.

This doesn't mean the normal combustion technology won't be used on Scadiral, but claiming it is more powerful than what you can do with Metallic Arts is a little bit too much. The magic on Scadrial can do what technology does very easily, even more efficiently. It just needs a little innovation to push it in that direction. 

[ruler of the mists He/His/the survivor of the pit]

the third book is set in the cold war era, that is enough push on its own, and you need lots of trial and error to make something like a airship. But the Basin has no harmonium to experiment only to make weapons.