Do you think Scadrial both north and south together can defeat Roshar in a War.

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

The Rosharans have radiants buth scadrial has more aircraft and Metalborn

[Entr0pic He/him]

So this depends on a few factors to me

1: is this taking place on scadrial or roshar?

2: are they truly ‘unified’, or just temporary allies

3: is this before or after Wat spoilers 

Spoiler

Retribution comes to power

4: how much ettmetal does the scadrian force have access to?

[IcedOutPenguin He/Him]

Yes

Because Scadrial has guns, and Roshar does not.

[DoctaDajman]

I anticipate this will be moved fairly quickly to general discussion.  But I will breakdown what I think Scadrial has going for itself at the moment. 

1. Technology that is well on its way to modern weaponry. 

2. A rapidly growing cosmere awareness. 

3. Medallion tech. 

4. A growing knowledge of hemalurgy, and a way to collect innate investiture and stack spikes (multiple people in a single spike). 

5. Kandra (I really wouldn't sleep on the faceless immortals that Scadrial has, especially now that they are not bound to the contract and you have some that are plenty happy to kill when they need).

6. All other metalborn. It may be strange that I have waited until this far down the list but I really think all of these other pros towards what Scadrial has to offer are more of a boon than the natural born metalborn. 

All in all, while natural born metalborn are what the mistborn books are made off of, I dont think that they are the future of Scadrial. 

We don't often fear aliens for their individual magical abilities... it is the tech that they offer as a whole space traveling culture that is what we fear. The tech is what allows them to get to us and allows them to show us up. As it stands I believe it is pretty straight forward that Scadrial is going to be the most technologically advanced... and momentum in technology only opens your ability to progress further and further. 

Magiteck, in my opinion, will always progress slower and overlook the advantages of pure intellectual advancements. The more magical your base system the less you will rely on tech advancement and the more heavily you will rely on magical ability A, B, or C. 

[BenKenobi7333 He/Him/Mandalorian]

I don’t really know but if it came down to it my guess is Scadrial because of the technological advancement that precedes roshar. Yet I can see roshar giving scadrial a run for their money. 

Either way who ever would have won would have major casualties.

[Through the Living Hopper He/Him]

I really feel Roshar, because even a gold compounder will die if repeatedly stabbed by a Shardblade. Also, if this battle took place in a highstorm - because seriously, Rosharans are smart; they'll know that's the best plan - the Surgebinders have essentially limitless Investiture; the airplanes can't fly, and the bullets would just be thrown around by the wind.

A fourth-level Skybreaker would just kill everyone.

[DoctaDajman]

7 hours ago, ThatOneWorldhopper said:

I really feel Roshar, because even a gold compounder will die if repeatedly stabbed by a Shardblade. Also, if this battle took place in a highstorm - because seriously, Rosharans are smart; they'll know that's the best plan - the Surgebinders have essentially limitless Investiture; the airplanes can't fly, and the bullets would just be thrown around by the wind.

A fourth-level Skybreaker would just kill everyone.

I agree that the defending side has a large advantage. But that is true both ways. What Scadrial has going for itself more than anything is that all of their tech and magics are portable and capable of moving off world. 

Half of the reason that the ghostbloods are on Roshar (and not performing poorly despite radiants I may add) is that they want to see if they can get stormlight off of the planet.... if they can't then neither can the radiants and the only way a war could happen is Scadrial invading, and if they can then both sides will eventually have access to the pure investiture, which we saw how efficient everyones metallic arts were when being driven by investiture as opposed to they typical metals in TLM... super powered super powers. A mistborn fueled by liquid or gaseous investiture may be able to take out a skybreaker. 

Chromium... Scadrial has allomantic chromium and Scadrial has the building blocks to equip their soldiers with F steel. A blitz attack to leech a radiant is going to be a super effective way of getting rid of them... add in that they can't heal around aluminum wounds and Scadrial has all the tools they need. 

Counting on all fighting happening within a highstorm is a bit of a stretch as well. 

A single radiant can do a lot of damage. Roshar for sure has the better fighters when looking at a single unit. Noone can dispute that 4th ideal radiants are a difficult thing to overcome... but Scadrial will soon have nukes and if all out war was simply a race to exterminate the enemy forces then Roshar would quickly, very quickly, become home to nothing but a few high ideal radiants... and then what purpose do they have anyway? 

 

[Quantus he/him]

I think it's an arms race to solve opposite limitations of their magic systems.

Roshar has stronger Powers but relies on naturally occurring sources of Investiture in the Physical Realm in the form of either Perpendicularities or a very Finite number of Godspren-empowered Bonsmiths.  But they have Rosharan Fabrial tech developing that is likely on the way to solving that sort of problem. 

Every Allomancer has the ability to pull Investiture from the Spiritual Realm directly in relatively large quantities, but the actual applications of their Powers (currently appear to be) more Limited, and you generally need to be born with the powers.  Scadrian Fabiral tech is already well on it's way to allowing anyone to use the powers, though we dont yet know all the details and limitations of creating or using them.  

Rosharns have lots of Power and versatility but rely heavily on Investiture Supply Lines.  Scadrians have to work harder (or be luckier by birth) to get specific Powers and/or effects can get to their Investiture source from anywhere in the Cosmere. 

 

[Qianweilian He/him]

The answer to this one really depends on if you are including Wind and Truth or not.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

On 3/12/2025 at 2:25 PM, IcedOutPenguin said:

Because Scadrial has guns, and Roshar does not.

Scadrial has the ability to make nuclear bombs if someone can source trellium. The goals and conditions for the war matter a lot when weapons like that are out there.

[Quantus he/him]

On 3/28/2025 at 4:03 AM, ParaTulip said:

Scadrial has the ability to make nuclear bombs if someone can source trellium. The goals and conditions for the war matter a lot when weapons like that are out there.

Meanwhile, Per WOB Rosharans are one material science lesson away from having nukes in Dalinar's technological era.

 

 

Spoiler

Quote

 

Phantine

At the risk of getting too technical, is there anything besides lack of knowledge preventing a soulcaster from turning some rocks into a bunch of plutonium and exploding?

I know you've got some rules attached to time bubbles to avoid those going nuclear so I wouldn't be surprised if there was something or another.

Brandon Sanderson

Well, Soulcasting isn't fission or fusion. It's a spiritual transformation process, not a physical one, and so you don't have to worry about some of these issues. There IS historical precedent of accidentally setting off fission reactions in the cosmere using the magic, but that was a different process. Soulcasting is actually pretty safe. (Well, on a grand scale.)

You could end up irradiating yourself, though, which wouldn't be very fun.

If you know what you were doing, making plutonium or uranium on Roshar wouldn't be difficult. The problem is more a matter of knowledge, and room for scientific exploration. They're unlikely to make atom bombs for the same reason they haven't made gunpowder. Once they figure out that some substances are important, they can learn to make them with Soulcasting (assuming they have Radiants) but some substances just don't occur naturally--so discovering them in the first place is difficult, and would require more modern scientific process.

Phantine

Okay, just to clarify here (since I'm not sure how up you are on early nuke designs)

A big enough chunk of uranium or plutonium will explode regardless of whether it's in a bomb or not. Early bomb designs just slammed two smaller chunks together so they'd be one big chunk.

For plutonium 'big enough' is about 35 pounds in one place - a chunk somewhere between the size of baseball and volleyball.

If I understand properly, people can soulcast from the cognitive realm into the physical, which implies once we get into a more modern stormlight setting soulcasters will make nuclear submarines look like small potatoes.

Brandon Sanderson

Slamming two chunks together so they became one big chunk seems an understatement, from what I remember. I'm under the impression that you had to use a great deal of explosive force to ram them together in order to set off a viable fission reaction. Doesn't it have to be compressed somewhat in order to react with itself?

I'll admit, it's been a long time since I've looked at this, but I remember glancing it over, and deciding that you'd need more than just soulcasting to get it to happen. Though it's not outside of reason that a soulcaster could learn to create super-dense plutonium. The problem is one of understanding, however.

Just like it's totally possible that we, with our current technology, could figure out some huge breakthrough in science allowing FTL or other incredible discoveries. But we don't have the understanding to pull it off yet.

In a modern setting, however, a lot of these complaints go out the window. Let's just say that this isn't the only reason a modern society that can instantly transmute one substance to another is potentially a very interesting place.

Phantine

You're totally right that everyone currently uses an 'implosion' style compression design. It's a lot more bang for your buck, and you need less radioactive material to work with. They're also a lot safer, because just sitting around they're well below critical mass - without the power-boosting tricks they basically can't go off.

The old "nobody uses these anymore" designs were 'Gun-Type'. Very simple - shoot a uranium bullet into the center of a uranium ring (or vice versa). Inefficient as heck (the Hiroshima bomb only fissioned 1.4% of its uranium), but also super simple to put together.

Despite being simple to build, gun-types were also super unsafe relative to modern implosion devices (among other worries, dropping a gun-type device into the ocean could potentially set it off because of how neutrons react with water). Also, getting the timing perfect on the fissile 'bullet' was a problem, so practically speaking it could only be done with uranium.

After WWII, the only use the US ever had for gun-types was in bunker busters and nuclear artillery (because of course that was a good idea).

Darn, that post turned out longer than I expected it to.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see you make something really cool out of a post-scarcity transmutropolis setting (especially since the liespren would be in charge of nuclear treaties), and also my roommate just pointed out all the laying out of nuclear bomb details is pointless if they could just make antimatter instead. D'oh.

Brandon Sanderson

This is useful information for me, but my gut says that Rosharans couldn't get this working with their current tech level. That said, the REAL issue (as you mentioned in your original question) is knowledge, not feasibility. They'd have to know how to make the right kind of Uranium or Plutonium--and would need to be able to get this across to a soulcaster in a way that works, then THEY would need to get this across to spren. Cross that hurdle, and I suppose it's not at all implausible to imagine Alethi during Dalinar's era with nukes. I suspect the right kind of fabrial could make a trigger device to match ring and bullet at the right time. Depends on how quickly it needs to be going, though.

Stormlight Three Update #4 (Oct. 19, 2016)

 

 

 

[JustQuestin2004 he/him]

I'm going to assume that the respective Shards of both worlds stay out of direct conflict and let their forces do the fighting for them. For the sake of fairness if nothing else.

I think Roshar wins this hands down, because Roshar has a lot of people on it right now who are all on different sides. We've seen what can be accomplished by combining the ancient knowledge of the Fused with the modern practices and understanding of modern humans. And it's something to behold.

Roshar also has a far greater total population than Scadrial, with dozens of different civilizations that in this hypothetical scenario would all be working together. Soldiers willing to fight, Artifabrians developing more kinds of Fabrials, Surgebinders both Radiant and Fused able to match and even exceed all but the most powerful Metalborn.

Scadrial has its advantages, a technological gap advantage, but the Rosharans aren't idiots and will inevitably catch up. I think that Scadrials only hope is through the Trellium Bombs and mass-produced Bands of Mourning. And even then they still need a way to deal with the Fused and Spren of which they are far less familiar with then the Rosharans.

Roshar also has a much more dangerous environment, which the Rosharans are used to but Scadrians won't be, so a Scadrian invasion would be hell, especially with just how huge Roshar is. That is more land than the North and South Combined. And the Scadrians would need to hold that land against the Rosharans taking it back.

And as for a Rosharan invasion of Scadrial? It'd be difficult at first, since they'd need to figure out how to get passed the 'Connection' issue, but if everyone is working together, and not just a few small secret groups, I think that it is inevitable that they'd find a way around that limitation.

In my honest opinion, the war is a draw until the Rosharans figure out how to get their stuff offworld and start invading Scadrial, on which the Scadrians lose pretty quickly.

Edited March 31, 2025 by JustQuestin2004

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

3 hours ago, Quantus said:

one material science lesson away from having nukes in Dalinar's technological era.

Cold wars are funky. They often don't have winners, just one side have some internal matter take its attention away from the proxy wars.

People running around doing Metal Gear Solid stuff to each other with random assortments of magitech is how I see that going. Sure, eventually both Roshar and Scandrial will just be blasted ruins unfit for anything humans can see as life, but colony ships seem really doable for both groups.