Would the U.S. Army be able to take over Era 1 Scadrial

[TheFlatScadrian]

Maybe I’m a little behind, but can weight stack as long as the time used is shortened? So, you’ve stored 50% of your mass for a week and get 400% for one day? Or is it solely time to time, weight to weight?

[Through the Living Hopper He/Him]

8 hours ago, TheFlatScadrian said:

I actually did some math once. An Allomancer steel-pushing a tank round, if they could even generate enough force to do so, would kill them instantly, because of force transfer.

You, friend, are the greatest person I've ever met.

1 hour ago, Ookla the Broken said:

Well, if the ground can no longer support you and it’s starts cracking, I’d say that’s a sign of the upper limit. It doesn’t matter if yuu out could theoretically tap infinite weight if it would turn you into a black hole for doing so

Gonna nitpick here, you don't really store weight. You store the force of gravity acting on your mass (not the force of gravity of your mass), which prevents a typical singularity formation. That's not to say it couldn't happen, but you wouldn't be able to survive. 

Even Miles Hundredlives wouldn't live if trapped in the core of planet that wrapped itself around him.

Edited December 1, 2025 by Ookla the Hoppy

[Returned he/him]

On 12/1/2025 at 4:36 PM, TheFlatScadrian said:

How heavy can you actually get? It’d have to be under 200%, right?

[...]

Maybe I’m a little behind, but can weight stack as long as the time used is shortened? So, you’ve stored 50% of your mass for a week and get 400% for one day? Or is it solely time to time, weight to weight?

There is some asymptotic limit which hasn't been clearly defined yet but it's well above 200% because it can stack, as you've outlined. This happens in some of the books (spoilers for some events in Mistborn era 2):

Spoiler

A Twinborn with Feruchemical iron and Allomantic steel stands in the path of a train and stops it by tapping iron and burning steel. Then he jumps behind it, taps the iron again, burns the steel again, and pushes the train along the tracks (albeit in bursts). In another instance, the same character jumps above a building, taps iron, burns steel and flattens a building underneath him. In yet another instance a character taps weight until the floor he's standing on can't support him any more, dropping him and some associates all the way down to the ground floor.

 

Edited December 9, 2025 by Returned

[TheFlatScadrian]

1 hour ago, Ookla the Hoppy said:

You, friend, are the greatest person I've ever met.

*Bridge Four salute*

33 minutes ago, Returned said:

There is some asymptotic limit which hasn't been clearly defined yet but it's well above 200% because it can stack, as you've outlined. This happens in some of the books:

That makes sense. (I haven’t actually read Era II yet) It may be possible to do that against a tank round… although I don’t know. It might not be enough to prevent at least some critical internal failures. And even then, the KE of the round is still shattering that thing with 12 MJ of force, so everyone nearby still dies or gets concussed, but at least whatever the tank was shooting it is sorta intact.

[Returned he/him]

3 hours ago, TheFlatScadrian said:

hat makes sense. (I haven’t actually read Era II yet) It may be possible to do that against a tank round… although I don’t know. It might not be enough to prevent at least some critical internal failures. And even then, the KE of the round is still shattering that thing with 12 MJ of force, so everyone nearby still dies or gets concussed, but at least whatever the tank was shooting it is sorta intact.

It's definitely a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency tactic. I wouldn't want to have to do it!

[NameIess]

I think in this case, there's just too much working against Scadrial for this to even really be a discussion. Only invested fighters are even going to be a consideration here. Kolloss might be tough, but they won't stand up to guns, mortars, missiles, tanks, etc. Mistborn with Atium could be dangerous (Yes, they could dodge bullets. If Atium lets you see 1 second into the future, you'll have 1 second of warning to dodge no matter how fast the projectile is.) but Atium is very limited unless TLR decides to allow access to the main stockpile, which I find unlikely. Lerasium is also limited with only two pieces left assuming Hoid hasn't taken one yet. So the real question is: Can about 40 inquisitors and a couple dozen to low hundreds at most of assorted mistings and Mistborn defeat the entirety of the US military? No, they cannot.

Now, TLR is another question. With his incredibly powerful allomancy and feruchemy, he could move at incredible speeds, crush tanks, rip planes out of the air, perhaps even block missiles if he's prepared. However, if the US government had basic knowledge of the state of Scadrial prior to the invasion, they could potentially kill him easily with a surprise missile strike. Other than that, a strike by aluminum-coated missiles of very high yield could kill him, a constant barrage of more ordinary missiles and drones could wear him down and eventually kill him, or the military could simply capture the Pits of Hathsin (something they're likely to prioritize given it's the source of Atium), discover the Atium stored there, and just keep TLR from getting any, leaving him to eventually die of old age. Whether that last plan is feasible or not depends on whether or not TLR can get back through the portal to earth and whether or not the Atium can be hidden on Earth.

Regardless of how difficult TLR would be to defeat, it is clear to me that no other force on Scadrial would stand up to the US army, for the simple reason that none of them could survive an air bombardment. No other Mistborn or Inquisitor is powerful enough to block missiles or affect aircraft in such a way as to stop carpet bombing. Even with duraluminum, such feats would be impossible. So this discussion should really be centered around how much the Lord Ruler can do.

[Immortal Platypus]

23 hours ago, TheFlatScadrian said:

Possibly. But TLR using a duralumin steelpush could actually generate even more force than I calculated was necessary (with the maximum "instant" time-frame of 0.1 seconds)... and duralumin doesn't negate force transfer. And the other stuff? That's assuming his bands aren't annihilated, or at least ripped off. He might survive the initial impact, but he'd suddenly be under 155,500 Newtons without duralumin, which is a speed of... 

Dang. Assuming he's 160kg, about 98m/s without duralumin. With it? Who knows? And without his metals, I assume his landing to be, you know, a sudden and devastating stop at similar or greater G's, which would be... bad.

Have you ever heard the term "massive catastrophic failure"? Apply that to a human body.

Or, of course, we could just use incendiary bombs (or way to much C4), which would melt the metal right off and then kill him.

Don't forget, if he loses access to his metal minds, which I think that the amount of Newtons we're talking about would do the trick there, he starts aging rapidly, and becomes a very very old man (if I remember the end of TFE correctly). 

22 hours ago, TheFlatScadrian said:

How heavy can you actually get? It’d have to be under 200%, right?

Well, this is where the square-cube law would come into play. It might not be applicable, as it seems to be violated in later books, but it probably holds to some extent.

21 hours ago, Ookla the Broken said:

Well, if the ground can no longer support you and it’s starts cracking, I’d say that’s a sign of the upper limit. It doesn’t matter if yuu out could theoretically tap infinite weight if it would turn you into a black hole for doing so

well, that only applies if scadrial itself is the ground that is cracking. Having a wooden floor crack is very different from having the dirt and rocks below you crumble. 

59 minutes ago, Ookla the Married said:

I think in this case, there's just too much working against Scadrial for this to even really be a discussion. Only invested fighters are even going to be a consideration here. Kolloss might be tough, but they won't stand up to guns, mortars, missiles, tanks, etc. Mistborn with Atium could be dangerous (Yes, they could dodge bullets. If Atium lets you see 1 second into the future, you'll have 1 second of warning to dodge no matter how fast the projectile is.) but Atium is very limited unless TLR decides to allow access to the main stockpile, which I find unlikely. Lerasium is also limited with only two pieces left assuming Hoid hasn't taken one yet. So the real question is: Can about 40 inquisitors and a couple dozen to low hundreds at most of assorted mistings and Mistborn defeat the entirety of the US military? No, they cannot.

Now, TLR is another question. With his incredibly powerful allomancy and feruchemy, he could move at incredible speeds, crush tanks, rip planes out of the air, perhaps even block missiles if he's prepared. However, if the US government had basic knowledge of the state of Scadrial prior to the invasion, they could potentially kill him easily with a surprise missile strike. Other than that, a strike by aluminum-coated missiles of very high yield could kill him, a constant barrage of more ordinary missiles and drones could wear him down and eventually kill him, or the military could simply capture the Pits of Hathsin (something they're likely to prioritize given it's the source of Atium), discover the Atium stored there, and just keep TLR from getting any, leaving him to eventually die of old age. Whether that last plan is feasible or not depends on whether or not TLR can get back through the portal to earth and whether or not the Atium can be hidden on Earth.

Regardless of how difficult TLR would be to defeat, it is clear to me that no other force on Scadrial would stand up to the US army, for the simple reason that none of them could survive an air bombardment. No other Mistborn or Inquisitor is powerful enough to block missiles or affect aircraft in such a way as to stop carpet bombing. Even with duraluminum, such feats would be impossible. So this discussion should really be centered around how much the Lord Ruler can do.

Do we know if scadrial's size (1 cosmere standard unit) is the same as Earth? It's the same as Yolen, but if it's not the same as Earth, that could come into play by making the US forces experience different amounts of Gs, different calibration for missiles and mortars, etc. Even so, they would figure it out fairly quickly, so I agree that TLR is their only line of defense. My question is, can he last against sustained incendiary bombings and other attacks meant to strip him of his metalminds? If that happens, he's no more threat than any other allomancer, albeit one with probably greater skill. He might even be less of a threat, depending on how much his increased aging incapacitates him.

[Through The Living Ash he/him]

On 12/1/2025 at 6:42 PM, Ookla the Hoppy said:

You, friend, are the greatest person I've ever met.

Gonna nitpick here, you don't really store weight. You store the force of gravity acting on your mass (not the force of gravity of your mass), which prevents a typical singularity formation. That's not to say it couldn't happen, but you wouldn't be able to survive. 

Even Miles Hundredlives wouldn't live if trapped in the core of planet that wrapped itself around him.

I was under the impression that iron stored density, thus increasing weight and mass. I think there was a WoB about it somewhere, but I don't have the time to find it now. 

[Returned he/him]

44 minutes ago, Ookla the Incorrigible said:

I was under the impression that iron stored density, thus increasing weight and mass. I think there was a WoB about it somewhere, but I don't have the time to find it now. 

There are a few that I've found, but the most recent answers indicate that iron Feruchemy does change your mass, but not only that, and not in a way that fits real physics properly. More revisions may be forthcoming.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Six

The fight in the ballroom

From the early days of the Mistborn books, I'd been planning how an Allomantic gunfight would go down. I felt it the next evolution in what has been stylistically a big part of these books.

There is a fine line to walk in a lot of these sequences. I've made something of a name for myself in the fantasy world by attempting to mix some scientific reasoning with my magic systems. At the same time, Allomancy was designed precisely with action sequences in mind. I wanted them to be powerful and cinematic—and a cinematic fight sequence is often at odds with realism. (Watch two people who really know what they're doing fight with swords sometime, then watch any fight sequence in a film. Most of the time, the film sequences stray far from what would really happen.)

So, as I said, I walk a line. Sometimes, there are things I just can't do because they violate what I've set up as the rules of the world. Other times, I design the setting and nature of the fight specifically to allow for certain types of cinematic sequences. One thing I like a lot about Wax’s abilities is the power he has to manipulate his weight. There's some realism to what he does—for example, increasing his weight doesn't make him fall more quickly, but it allows him to do some powerful things while falling. Destroying the chandeliers is an example.

At the same time, I acknowledge that the weight manipulation aspect of Feruchemy is one of its more baffling powers, scientifically. Is he changing his mass? If so, he should become more dense, which I don't actually make the case when it plays out in fights. (Otherwise, increasing his weight enough would make him impervious to bullets.) So, if it's not mass manipulation, is it gravity manipulation, like Szeth and Kaladin do? Well, again, not really—as when his weight increases, his strength and ability to uphold that weight increase as well. Beyond that, Wax can't make himself so light that he has no weight at all.

So . . . well, at this point, the ability to explain it scientifically breaks down. I do like what it does, but I have to set its boundaries and stick to them—and accept that some of what's going on is irrational. (And don't get me started on what should really be happening scientifically when Wayne speeds up time.)

Footnote: Brandon has stated that iron Feruchemy works by manipulating the Higgs field.
The Alloy of Law Annotations (March 14, 2014)

Spoiler

Questioner

So, Metalminds: if you store weight, how does that work, do you decrease your mass or...?

Brandon Sanderson

So, storing weight actually plays with your mass, because if you look at how we do the physics of it… This one is really screwy, because we are changing mass and playing with it. You watch, like with Wax decreases his weight while he's in motion he'll speed up, and if he increases it, he'll slow down. The conservation of momentum and things like that, but we'll doing really weird stuff. It's like, how can you store your mass… Well, in the magic system it works, but it’s one of the weirdest things we do. *pauses to sign book* We kind of play loose and free with the physics sometimes. Like the example that I often use is Wayne doing a speed bubble, the light that is trapped in the speed bubble...like if he turns on a flashlight would actually radiate because of the redshift, and you could just kill everybody by flashing that. So, we make the speed bubbles not cause a redshift for that reason. We kind of work with what is good storytelling first, and then work the physics around it, but we have to put in all these little breaks and things like that in there regularity in order to actually have the story.

Shadows of Self San Jose signing (Oct. 9, 2015)

Spoiler

Bat_Mannington

If a Windrunner lashed Wax upwards, could he dump all of his weight into his metalminds and be unaffected or would the lashing affect his clothes and whatever else he had on him too?

Brandon Sanderson

Wax could mitigate the effect (unless he was in a vacuum) but not eliminate it completely.

faragorn

Vacuum or freefall?

It can be easy to confuse them in the context of surface to orbit.

Brandon Sanderson

I was talking about a Vacuum, but it's good to clarify. What I'm saying is that without wind resistance, his mass doesn't matter--and the books have established that what Wax does is a freakish transformation of his mass, not just his weight.

Kaladin changes how much gravity pulls on someone, and in what direction. Wax (basically, it's more complex than this) changes how much mass he has. The two, then, have some very distinctive effects.

Worldbuilders AMA (Dec. 5, 2015)

Spoiler

clyguy

If Wax were to go to Roshar, and--he's a Skimmer, right? So he can change his weight--if he got Lashed in a different direction if he Stored his weight would that nullify some of the Lashing?

Brandon Sanderson

Okay, you're going to make me think through this. *laughter* So Wax actually changes mass. And the Lashing only affects gravitational pull. So the answer is no because different things with different masses fall at the same speed.

Shadows of Self release party (Oct. 5, 2015)

Spoiler

Seonid

I noticed that you-- Was that a retcon on the way iron Feruchemy works?

Brandon Sanderson

What do you mean?

Seonid

There's a researcher who talks to Wax, asking him about whether he's changing his mass of whether he's changing whether the planet perceives him-- affecting his gravity.

Brandon Sanderson

Right. It's more a re-- Defining something I didn't pin down strongly enough. I wouldn't call it a retcon because it's something that nobody really did until Wax, really, in the series. The only one really capable of doing that in the original trilogy would have been the Lord Ruler, maybe some of the Inquisitors, but we don't have viewpoints from them. So I wouldn't call it a retcon I would just say it’s something that didn't come up in the first series that now I have to make sure is clear.

Seonid

So is it Higgs field stuff going on?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. Mmhmm.

Seonid

My idea was right.

Brandon Sanderson

Mmhmm.

Bands of Mourning release party (Jan. 25, 2016)

Spoiler

Questioner

Does Iron store mass or weight?

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent question. The thing is it really does involve mass, but I’m breaking some physics rules, basically. I have to break a number of physics rules in order to make Magic work in the first place. Those whole laws of Thermodynamics, I’m like “You are my bane!” (laughter) But I try to work within the framework, and I have reasonings built up for myself, and some of them have to be kind of arbitrary. But the thing is, it does store mass if you look at how it interacts, but when a Feruchemist punches someone, you’re not having a mass transference of a 1000 pounds transferring the mass into someone else.

So there are a few little tweaks. You can go talk to Peter, because Peter has the actual math. Oh Peter’s back there. Peter is dressed up as Allomancer Jak from the broadsheet. In fact we’re giving some out broadsheets, aren’t we Peter. So when you come through the line, we’re giving out Broadsheets. Please don’t take fifty—I think we might have enough for everybody. The broadsheets are the newspaper from the Alloy of Law time. It’s an inworld newspaper. It’s actually reproduced in the book in four different pages, and we put it together in one big broadsheet.

So anyway, you can talk with him, he’s got more of the math of it. I explained the concept to Peter and he’s better with the actual math, so he said “We’ll figure it out.”

Alloy of Law release party (Nov. 7, 2011)

Spoiler

Questioner

When Wax changes his weight, is that weight or mass?

Brandon Sanderson

He is actually changing his mass, in a weird...It's kind of halfway in between, is really what it is. But it follows the laws of conservation of momentum, so it's not just weight. It's timidly a half step inbetween.

Calamity Austin signing (Feb. 25, 2016)

 

 

[TheFlatScadrian]

I sketched out a really bad comic while I was in math class based on what it would probably look like if Kell tried to steelpush a tank round. You probably wouldn’t even see what happened.

Turned out a bit more grimdark than I thought it would, but, uh… here we are.

Edited December 4, 2025 by TheFlatScadrian

[Highprince645343]

I think everyone is ignoring the climate of Scadrial. Normal humans can barely stand to exist, the Southern Scadrians had some way of surviving but we don't know what. It's likely that while militarily the Final Empire could be conquered, the hellish conditions of Scadrial would result in the death of most if not every US soldier

[Qianweilian He/him]

On 12/4/2025 at 5:49 PM, Highprince645343 said:

the hellish conditions of Scadrial would result in the death of most if not every US soldier

I mean, world hoppers were fine on Scadrial. I don't really see any challenge of Scadrian conditions that wouldn't be easily conquered by the greatest logistics machine of all time.

[Highprince645343]

22 hours ago, Qianweilian said:

I mean, world hoppers were fine on Scadrial. I don't really see any challenge of Scadrian conditions that wouldn't be easily conquered by the greatest logistics machine of all time.

That's true, but I think it's most likely they have something to keep them alive there. Hoid could be being sustained by 

Spoiler

the Dawnshard

 

[Qianweilian He/him]

2 hours ago, Highprince645343 said:

That's true, but I think it's most likely they have something to keep them alive there. Hoid could be being sustained by 

Sorry, but I just don't see what you think would be that of a challenge to overcome. Ash is a significant issue, but it's not like they're trying to grow food to survive, they can receive all the shipments they want. The temperature during TFE is within the normal range and disease is less of an issue because the innate investiture of people in the cosmere limits disease (can't find the WoB for this, sorry). There's no challenging geography (most of TFE appears to be plains from the maps we have), and we haven't seen any evidence of guerilla tactics on Scadrial.