Allomantic Pewter and Shardplate

[DoctaDajman]

I always envisioned shardplate as overwriting any existing strength buffs because it encased the user in a way that any motion from the user would be maximized by the plate. 

However I have also heard that plate actually shares stormlight with the wearer to create the effects.  

What are peoples thoughts on pewter and shardplate then? 

Would a pewter misting be able to operate plate at all while burning pewter or would there be an interference between the plate sharing stormlight and the burning pewter? 

Would the pewter add faster movements and reaction time as we see it already do in an additive fashion even if the strength buffs are overshadowed and negated by the plate?

I guess my final question is about duralumin. Do you think that duralumin pushed pewter may add any benefit to a used of shardplate? 

[Trusk'our he/him]

1 hour ago, DoctaDajman said:

What are peoples thoughts on pewter and shardplate then? 

Would a pewter misting be able to operate plate at all while burning pewter or would there be an interference between the plate sharing stormlight and the burning pewter? 

Would the pewter add faster movements and reaction time as we see it already do in an additive fashion even if the strength buffs are overshadowed and negated by the plate?

I think it empowers the wielder rather than operating independently. There are arguments for either direction, but even Deadplate can respond to the wearer's Intent to a degree, such as when donning or doffing it (even coming off on it's own if the wearer dies). Sounds to me like there is a type of Bond, albeit weak. It also increases the reflexes of the user, which could not be achieved through purely external augmentation.

Deadplate does interfere with a Radiant's ability to Surgebind if I recall, which would suggest that it would interfere with the Allomancer.

Or, it might be like with Unsealed Metalminds, and the innate power of a Pewterarm would be fine compared to a bonded piece of Investiture.

Hard to say right now, but I'm leaning towards there being a level of interference, but if overcome would allow you to make your Plate a little better. Maybe even generate a Resonace with the mixing powers?

Edit: I'd also like to bring up, how do we know that Deadplate will interfere with one's powers? I'm sure it's a thing, but all I can remember is Dalinar's vision where he's Lashed by someone else to fly and his Plate would interfere. That's not reliable though, since it isn't even the wearer's Investiture at play. 

Kaladin did wear a Deadplate helmet in WoR to block incoming attacks, and though it was very small it didn't noticeably affect his internal Stormlight abilities (other than feeding on his Investiture to sustain itself).

Did we have a WoB or book section I'm forgetting?

Edited January 14 by Trusk'our

[Returned he/him]

Per Dalinar's observation in WoK, the Shardplate enhances your strength but you still have to use your body to do the work. In that sense, if no other, allomantic pewter should enhance your endurance, balance, speed/reaction, strength to support the Plate's weight, and precision such that you can use the Plate better and for longer than someone else.

Plate itself is highly Invested and so resists being Invested further, as evidenced in Oathbringer when Dalinar takes a Radiant's role in a vision: the Windrunner he is with states that Dalinar couldn't have been lashed with the armor on (Oathbringer, page 352).This might also mean that Dalinar himself could not have been lashed and then simply carried the unlashed armor, but maybe that's just due to efficiency-- expensive in Stormlight to carry something so heavy if you don't need to. Notably, the Windrunner himself is lashed while wearing his own Shardplate. The evidence that it otherwise interferes with Invested arts is very weak (as I understand it, at least). In RoW Ivory suggests to Jasnah that she use her Surgebinding powers because the Blade is less effective against the enemies (RoW, page 753), and Jasnah's considerations do not include additional vulnerability from dismissing her Plate despite being in the midst of enemy soldiers. More telling, she

Quote

[put] one hand against the rock. Steady stone, a part of her mind thought. Happy and pleased with its life on the plains. No, it would resist her requests to change. [...]

Fine.

She reached out to the air, which was stagnant and morose today. Draining Stormlight from the gemstones at her waist, she gave it a single command. Change. No begging, as she'd tried when younger. Only firmness.

The bored air accepted, and formed into oil all around them.

(RoW, page 755).

No suggestion that her armor would factor into any potential soulcasting of the stone, and then a successful soulcasting of air into oil while fully armored.

So the evidence I'm aware of suggests that living Plate does not interfere with Surgebinding in any way.

Dead Plate might draw Stormlight from an Invested wearer in order to repair itself (possibly evidenced by Kaladin using the helmet during his duel alongside Adolin in WoR). That would be interesting as little else inherently draws Investiture out of a person without their willing it to happen. But it also operates just fine when worn by uninvested people, including explicitly magical effects like being able to feel through the fingertips of the gauntlets or turn the visor transparent from the inside and mitigate lightning flash brightness. We (ostensibly, it's not 100% decisive but I think clear enough) see Renarin's futuresight operate while wearing dead Plate in WoR on page 1019, when he scrawls the end of the countdown on the wall of the Oathgate control building. Szeth is narrated as explicitly aware that he could not use lashings with dead Plate because the lashings would interfere with the gemstones that would power it (WoK, page 27), not because the lashings would not work. So I don't think that dead Plate itself interferes with Surgebinding either, at least not directly. It's all about the energy used to fuel Surgebinding or Plate not being available for the other task.

 

I'm not aware of any clear comparisons between different people using Plate for similar tasks, so it's not obvious if Plate offers a specific level of strength or if it adds something on top of your normal strength, whatever that may be. Plate is inherently magical and so I think that it might be fair to compare it to pewter in this way. Pewter delivers similar strength to different allomancers with similar magical ability but is still related to their physical traits, as Ham suggested when Vin seemed to get "more" out of pewter than he did. You don't get more strength out of it unless you're a stronger allomancer, if we accept Ham's assessment, similar to how Vin was a better Seeker than she "should have" been because she had her native ability plus an appropriate hemalurgic spike.

I don't think that duralumin plus pewter would add much to the Plate's function outside of whatever burst of speed you might be able to get from your pewter-enhanced muscles, but maybe I'm not being imaginative enough.

Edited January 14 by Returned

[DoctaDajman]

25 minutes ago, Returned said:

 

I'm not aware of any clear comparisons between different people using Plate for similar tasks, so it's not obvious if Plate offers a specific level of strength or if it adds something on top of your normal strength, whatever that may be. Plate is inherently magical and so I think that it might be fair to compare it to pewter in this way. Pewter delivers similar strength to different allomancers with similar magical ability but is still related to their physical traits, as Ham suggested when Vin seemed to get "more" out of pewter than he did. You don't get more strength out of it unless you're a stronger allomancer, if we accept Ham's assessment, similar to how Vin was a better Seeker than she "should have" been because she had her native ability plus an appropriate hemalurgic spike.

I don't think that duralumin plus pewter would add much to the Plate's function outside of whatever burst of speed you might be able to get from your pewter-enhanced muscles, but maybe I'm not being imaginative enough.

This is a big chunk of what I was curious about. If plate gives 10-20x strength and pewter gives 2-3x it is easy to say pewter will always under perform plate and the plate will be doing the heavy lifting. But if duralumin condenses an hours worth of pewter down into just a couple of seconds we are talking magnitudes more strength from that of the shardplate alone. Would the plate then be additive to the pewter?  Do you think the surge of investiture could interact with the plate in other ways?  

I assume that punching a wall with plate will damage the wall and leave the plate safe. But if someone duralumin burned pewter and took that same swing with plate on, could that extra strength and speed build up enough energy to destroy the plate of a gauntlet? 

 

I feel that no matter what scenario plate and pewter cant play synergistically in a mutually beneficial way when it comes to strength or durability. Either the plate takes over for the pewter or the pewter is too much for the plate for a duralumin fueled burst. 

Yes the speed and balance of pewter would probably cross over and give extra benefits but from a pure strength and durability look at things I feel like one overshadows the other until it briefly, explosively does not. 

[Returned he/him]

5 minutes ago, DoctaDajman said:

If plate gives 10-20x strength

This is the crux of the question, and is an assumption I don't think we know enough to make. If Plate takes whatever your strength is and enhances it by 10x, then burning pewter to become twice as strong would translate to the Plate offering 20x strength over your base state. If, on the other hand, Plate has a flat capacity to lift 1000 pounds (I'm just making up a number) then burning pewter wouldn't do anything because the Plate's maximum lifting ability is still 1000 pounds.

I don't see any particular reason to believe that the Plate offers a simple multiplier. When Jasnah is wearing her Plate she doesn't seem to be any more or less strong than Adolin or Dalinar despite the latter two being professional soldiers and Jasnah being a scholar. We should expect the soldiers to be considerably stronger, but they don't seem to be any more physically capable in their Plate than Jasnah. Maybe Jasnah's inhalation of Stormlight accounts for it. When Renarin first starts training with his Plate in WoR he doesn't seem to be any less strong in his Plate than Adolin. The issue is that we just don't see people who are so dissimilar outside of their Plate doing similar tasks within it and so the comparisons are not straightforward.

But I don't see any obvious reason that Plate doesn't offer some sort of multiplier, either. When Dalinar catches the chasmfiend's claw in WoK people seem surprised and impressed by the feat. Maybe that's a function of him doing something in Plate that is unusually strong, suggesting some kind of multiplier. But maybe they're only impressed with his boldness and decisive action to risk himself in order to be able to catch the claw, and the strength the move required was not surprising, which seems at least as plausible to me.

[Schizoposting]

1 hour ago, Returned said:

This is the crux of the question, and is an assumption I don't think we know enough to make. If Plate takes whatever your strength is and enhances it by 10x, then burning pewter to become twice as strong would translate to the Plate offering 20x strength over your base state. If, on the other hand, Plate has a flat capacity to lift 1000 pounds (I'm just making up a number) then burning pewter wouldn't do anything because the Plate's maximum lifting ability is still 1000 pounds.

I don't see any particular reason to believe that the Plate offers a simple multiplier. When Jasnah is wearing her Plate she doesn't seem to be any more or less strong than Adolin or Dalinar despite the latter two being professional soldiers and Jasnah being a scholar. We should expect the soldiers to be considerably stronger, but they don't seem to be any more physically capable in their Plate than Jasnah. Maybe Jasnah's inhalation of Stormlight accounts for it. When Renarin first starts training with his Plate in WoR he doesn't seem to be any less strong in his Plate than Adolin. The issue is that we just don't see people who are so dissimilar outside of their Plate doing similar tasks within it and so the comparisons are not straightforward.

But I don't see any obvious reason that Plate doesn't offer some sort of multiplier, either. When Dalinar catches the chasmfiend's claw in WoK people seem surprised and impressed by the feat. Maybe that's a function of him doing something in Plate that is unusually strong, suggesting some kind of multiplier. But maybe they're only impressed with his boldness and decisive action to risk himself in order to be able to catch the claw, and the strength the move required was not surprising, which seems at least as plausible to me.

I think that it's useful to think about this like a physicist, being twice as strong would require twice as much investiture; since pewter provides nowhere near enough investiture to match shardplate's strength, a pewter misting, therefore, will not be two times stronger than a regular shardbearer whilst wearing shardplate.

However, burning pewter ought to increase your overall strength, since it would increase the amount of force your muscles are able to impart. So, the strength increase would be linear, i.e., if you can lift 200 pounds extra whilst burning pewter, you would be able to lift an additional 200 pounds when in shardplate. 

[Returned he/him]

50 minutes ago, Schizoposting said:

I think that it's useful to think about this like a physicist, being twice as strong would require twice as much investiture; since pewter provides nowhere near enough investiture to match shardplate's strength, a pewter misting, therefore, will not be two times stronger than a regular shardbearer whilst wearing shardplate.

However, burning pewter ought to increase your overall strength, since it would increase the amount of force your muscles are able to impart. So, the strength increase would be linear, i.e., if you can lift 200 pounds extra whilst burning pewter, you would be able to lift an additional 200 pounds when in shardplate. 

It's as reasonable a guess as any, but it's still a guess about how the Plate works. For Plate to behave as you describe it would need to have some method of accessing additional Investiture, but the only way we know of that dead Plate does that is via spheres (or possibly drawing from an Invested person, if that does indeed work). The only time we see dead Plate vary its rate of drawing Investiture is when repairing damage, with more damage drawing more power more quickly.

That itself might resolve the mystery: no one with dead Plate knows enough to use it in this way, and that's why we don't see any variation in what it can do. If we were to see more of Plate around when Sunlit Man takes place maybe we would see all kinds of new ways of interacting with it. Living Plate can draw directly from the spiritual realm somehow, but we've seen even less of that than we have dead Plate and so maybe it too is adaptive but no narrators are aware enough to comment on it. A good analogue might be the enhanced strength of objects that have been Awakened, beyond what their materials should be able to do, which would support your idea. All that would be needed is some way to get more Investiture into the already highly-Invested Plate. That seems like a solvable issue.

Plate is often referred to along the lines of being essentially magical powered armor. "Traditional" powered armor (if we can have a traditional version of a made up thing) requires some minimum amount of strength inside to manipulate the controls or otherwise direct the suit, and then the strength the armor offers is static; more electricity doesn't make it mechanically more able to bear weight or do work. If we imagine Plate as being essentially mechanical (though with a magical mechanism), it would be sort of like working the controls of a large piece of equipment: the strength of the operator doesn't matter because it's the machine that does all the work. Being twice as strong might mean you can work the controls twice as hard, but that doesn't affect what the machine itself can lift.

[Schizoposting]

1 hour ago, Returned said:

That itself might resolve the mystery: no one with dead Plate knows enough to use it in this way, and that's why we don't see any variation in what it can do. If we were to see more of Plate around when Sunlit Man takes place maybe we would see all kinds of new ways of interacting with it. Living Plate can draw directly from the spiritual realm somehow, but we've seen even less of that than we have dead Plate and so maybe it too is adaptive but no narrators are aware enough to comment on it. A good analogue might be the enhanced strength of objects that have been Awakened, beyond what their materials should be able to do, which would support your idea. All that would be needed is some way to get more Investiture into the already highly-Invested Plate. That seems like a solvable issue.

IIRC, radiant armor is both stronger and enhances strength more than dead plate. This may be because it has a greater access to investiture, or it may be because it's simply a superior design. Even if adding additional investiture can increase the strength enhancement, there ought to be some fundamental limit; an engine can provide only a finite amount of thrust, regardless to how much fuel it has access to.

1 hour ago, Returned said:

Plate is often referred to along the lines of being essentially magical powered armor. "Traditional" powered armor (if we can have a traditional version of a made up thing) requires some minimum amount of strength inside to manipulate the controls or otherwise direct the suit, and then the strength the armor offers is static; more electricity doesn't make it mechanically more able to bear weight or do work. If we imagine Plate as being essentially mechanical (though with a magical mechanism), it would be sort of like working the controls of a large piece of equipment: the strength of the operator doesn't matter because it's the machine that does all the work. Being twice as strong might mean you can work the controls twice as hard, but that doesn't affect what the machine itself can lift.

I don't think that's how it works; if someone like Steelheart, were to don shardplate, I think that their strength would be enhanced by the plate, not decreased to some baseline. Also, if it were purely mechanical, then you'd expect that it wouldn't feel very natural, e.g., when running at an enhanced speed.

But you're right that ultimately, we don't know, and that the answer is whatever Brandon wants it to be.

[i’m in the details]

I believe it is stated in WaT that plate has a set strength limit and the users strength does not matter. We see this when the spren captain (I forget his name) dons a set at the end of the book. He is incorporeal in the physical realm but can still use plate properly. Granted these were dead plates? or half alive, so that could be a factor. Regardless I think it makes sense to assume all plates of the same category operate a the same level of strength. I could see radiant plate providing more of a buff due to the investiture there.

[Schizoposting]

23 minutes ago, i’m in the details said:

I believe it is stated in WaT that plate has a set strength limit and the users strength does not matter. We see this when the spren captain (I forget his name) dons a set at the end of the book. He is incorporeal in the physical realm but can still use plate properly. Granted these were dead plates? or half alive, so that could be a factor. Regardless I think it makes sense to assume all plates of the same category operate a the same level of strength. I could see radiant plate providing more of a buff due to the investiture there.

We see that it provides a minimum baseline of strength, but I don't think that we've seen any indication that this is the maximum strength that one can have whilst wearing shardplate.