awakened bone giant mech?

[strmblsd he/him]

So i have these discussions with my friends about battles between cross universe things and i use the cosmere, this has brought me down a rabbithole of terrifying proportions more than once. One of these is, if you were to awaken the bones of a tai-na would it only take one or take less breaths than usual because it was a living thing? and could i awaken the skeleton of a tai na that i had coated in metal in a similar way to how kalads phantoms are coated to create a mountain sized mech of destruction? what are the implications of this? this was a theoretical idea and i want to hear what you guys think about it.

[Shatter He/Him]

8 minutes ago, strmblsd said:

So i have these discussions with my friends about battles between cross universe things and i use the cosmere, this has brought me down a rabbithole of terrifying proportions more than once. One of these is, if you were to awaken the bones of a tai-na would it only take one or take less breaths than usual because it was a living thing? and could i awaken the skeleton of a tai na that i had coated in metal in a similar way to how kalads phantoms are coated to create a mountain sized mech of destruction? what are the implications of this? this was a theoretical idea and i want to hear what you guys think about it.

ew. and probably this will work

[Treamayne]

15 minutes ago, strmblsd said:

So i have these discussions with my friends about battles between cross universe things and i use the cosmere, this has brought me down a rabbithole of terrifying proportions more than once. One of these is, if you were to awaken the bones of a tai-na would it only take one or take less breaths than usual because it was a living thing? and could i awaken the skeleton of a tai na that i had coated in metal in a similar way to how kalads phantoms are coated to create a mountain sized mech of destruction? what are the implications of this? this was a theoretical idea and i want to hear what you guys think about it.

You would use multiple breaths to make the Lifeless that would then become an Island-sized paperweight because they would lose their Spren and collapse to Square Cube Law and physics. WoB (yes, it's Chasmfiend, not Tai Na - but since that is smaller. . . ) 

Spoiler

Questioner (paraphrased)

Could you Awaken a chasmfiend as a Lifeless with just one Breath, or would it require more?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

It probably would require more.

Questioner (paraphrased)

And would a Lifeless chasmfiend still function normally, because they use spren in order to support their weight?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yeah, it wouldn't be able to make the Nahel bond work, so it would collapse.

Dragonsteel 2023 (Nov. 21, 2023)

 

[strmblsd he/him]

1 minute ago, Treamayne said:

You would use multiple breaths to make the Lifeless that would then become an Island-sized paperweight because they would lose their Spren and collapse to Square Cube Law and physics. WoB (yes, it's Chasmfiend, not Tai Na - but since that is smaller. . . ) 

  Hide contents

Questioner (paraphrased)

Could you Awaken a chasmfiend as a Lifeless with just one Breath, or would it require more?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

It probably would require more.

Questioner (paraphrased)

And would a Lifeless chasmfiend still function normally, because they use spren in order to support their weight?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yeah, it wouldn't be able to make the Nahel bond work, so it would collapse.

Dragonsteel 2023 (Nov. 21, 2023)

 

using something like feruchemical iron or lashings on it, or maybe commanding it to be light or stand strong when you awakened it could you make this work?

[Frustration]

4 minutes ago, strmblsd said:

using something like feruchemical iron or lashings on it, or maybe commanding it to be light or stand strong when you awakened it could you make this work?

I'd doubt it. You could possibly make breath work like a spren, but you would need a lot.

[Through The Living Ash he/him]

10 minutes ago, strmblsd said:

using something like feruchemical iron or lashings on it, or maybe commanding it to be light or stand strong when you awakened it could you make this work?

I don't think that Commanding it would work - a hat commanded to turn invisible wouldn't suddenly find itself capable of doing so. A Lashing could work, but not for long as it would require an influx of Light to maintain the Lashing. You could use the metalmind device that impacts weight though, and that would theoretically work, given it was powerful enough. 

[DoctaDajman]

Could a lifeless be commanded to utilize an iron medallion? 

And would the metalmind storage work by storing a % of the weight or an actual number?  

If Wax stores 30% of his weight or roughly 50-60 lbs all the time which is being stored the weight itself or the % of the attribute?  

30% of something that weighs 1000x as much as him is still only 30% but does it require a metalmind 1000x larger or is feruchemy strictly a % based game? 

[alder24]

22 hours ago, strmblsd said:

So i have these discussions with my friends about battles between cross universe things and i use the cosmere, this has brought me down a rabbithole of terrifying proportions more than once. One of these is, if you were to awaken the bones of a tai-na would it only take one or take less breaths than usual because it was a living thing? and could i awaken the skeleton of a tai na that i had coated in metal in a similar way to how kalads phantoms are coated to create a mountain sized mech of destruction? what are the implications of this? this was a theoretical idea and i want to hear what you guys think about it.

Yes and no. Bones are hard to Awaken and on their own require a lot of Breaths. That's because typical Lifeless are cheap to Awaken as they have body and ichor alcohol in their veins. Bones have neither. A set of human bones require at least 50 Breaths to be Awakened, a gigantic animal like Tai-Na would require much more. 

And if you want to make it into a Phantom, then you need a second influx of Breaths to Awaken the stone/metal itself and make Breaths work like a sinew that will make it move - that's how Kalad's Phantoms work. They are a hybrid between type 2 and type 3 entities. I'm certain you can make Breaths take the function of a spren and make them uphold the naturally too heavy body of the greatshell to prevent it from collapsing (it’s not that much different than Breaths working as sinew in Phantoms), but that would require even more Breaths.

Not to mention that metal and stone are really hard to Awaken and you need to have at least 9th Heightening to be able to Awaken it. Awakening something as big as an island is just insanely expensive, I doubt even the entirety of Susebron's treasure would be enough to Awaken a Tai-Na encased in metal. And honestly it wouldn't even do much, it's super slow and you can just climb on it, walk beneath it and start cutting it with a Shardblade and it wouldn't be able to defend itself. Just make normal Phantoms like we saw in Warbreaker, they are way better and practical. 

Warbreaker ch 46

Quote

“What about bones?” Vivenna asked.
“They’re strange,” Vasher said. “They take far more Breath to awaken than a body held together with flesh and aren’t as flexible as something like cloth. Still, Breath will stick to them fairly easily, since they were once alive and maintain the form of a living thing.”
“So Idrian stories that talk about skeletal armies aren’t just fabrications?”
He chuckled. “Oh, they are. If you wanted to Awaken a skeleton, you’d have to arrange all the bones together in their correct places. That’s a lot of work for something that will take upwards of fifty or a hundred Breaths to Awaken. Intact corpses make far more sense eco nom ical ly, even if the Breath sticks to them so well that it becomes impossible to recover. Still, I’ve seen some very interesting things done with skeletons which have been Awakened."

 

Spoiler

DylanHuebner

I was wondering how the animation of the lifeless statues worked, in regard to the use of Susebron's Breath. If they were lifeless, then vasher wouldn't have been able to take his Breath back out of them, nor would susebron have needed such a great deal of breath to revive them—he just would have needed a password. But if they were simply Awakened, no password would have been necessary to animate the statues, just Breath and Command.

It seems like the statues could be neither lifeless nor awakened. Are they unique, because of the use of bone, or am I missing something? The only other explanation I could think of was that they were lifeless, but Susebron's breath wasn't used to activate the statues, he simply had it passed down from vasher, in addition to the statues. If that's the case(and then I've simply been confusing myself with unnecessary, convoluted logic), why was it necessary to keep the breath safe for all these years?

Brandon Sanderson

Wow, there are a lot of questions in there. If you follow the drafts, I think you can see the evolution of what became of the Lifeless army. Originally I had planned for the statues to simply have been placed there so that you could Awaken them—just in my original concepts, before I started the writing—and then that became the army.

I eventually decided that didn't work for various reasons. Number one, as I developed the magic system, Awakening stone doesn't work very well. You've got to have limberness, you've got to have motion to something for it to actually be stronger. So a soldier made out of cloth would be more useful to you than a soldier made out of stone, if you were just Awakening something. At that point, as I was developing this, I went back to the drawing board and said okay, I need to leave him a whole group of really cool Lifeless as the army. But that had problems in that the ichor would not have stayed good long enough. Plus they already had a pretty big Lifeless army, so what was special about this one? Remember, I'm revising concepts like this as the book is going along. You can see where in the story I could see what needed to be there. So I went back to the drawing board again.

I think the original draft of WARBREAKER you can download off my website has them just as statues, though at the time when I was writing that I already knew it would need to change. I was just sticking to my outline because I needed to have the whole thing complete on the page before I could work with it. A lot of times that's how I do things as a writer—I get the rough draft down, and then I begin to sculpt.

I eventually developed essentially what you've just outlined in the first part, before you started worrying if you were too convoluted. I said, well, what if there's a hybrid? What happens if you Awaken bones? Can you create something? The reason that you can't draw the Breath back from a Lifeless is because the Breath clings to it. If the Lifeless were sentient enough, it could give up its own Breath, but you can't take it, just like you can't take a Breath from a person by force. You have to get them to give it up willingly. So it sticks to the Lifeless. A Lifeless is, let's say, 90% of a sentient being. The Breath doesn't manifest in them, because they aren't alive, yet they're almost there. A stone statue brought to life would be way down on the bottom rung.

Is there something in between? That's the advancement I had Vasher discover—what if we build something out of bone, but then encase it in stone to make it strong, and build it in ways that the bone is held together by the force of the Breaths? That's really what you're getting at there, that you need a lot of Breath, a lot of power, to hold all that stone together. There are seams at the joints. What the Breath is doing is clinging there like magical sinew, and it's holding all of that together.

Vasher left the Phantoms Invested with enough Breath to hold them together but not to move. You needed another big, substantial influx of Breath in order to actually make them have motion, to bring them enough strength to move and that sort of thing. So it's kind of a hybrid.

Goodreads Fantasy Book Discussion Warbreaker Q&A (Jan. 18, 2010)

 

 

21 hours ago, DoctaDajman said:

Could a lifeless be commanded to utilize an iron medallion? 

Yes.

Spoiler

AndyGranny

If you used a Lifeless body, would a Lifeless be able to access an untapped metalmind...

Brandon Sanderson

An unkeyed type of metalmind?

AndyGranny

Thank you, I could not think of that word. Would they be able to access an unkeyed metalmind if the intent when the Lifeless was created, if the intent was that they could...

Brandon Sanderson

Right, I see what you're getting at. Yes, they could. As they could access and use any tool that is appropriate for what they're Commanded to do, they could indeed access a metalmind in the same way.

In fact, doing so may, depending on the metalmind, be dangerous for keeping your Lifeless a Lifeless.

JordanCon 2021 (July 17, 2021)

 

21 hours ago, DoctaDajman said:

And would the metalmind storage work by storing a % of the weight or an actual number?  

If Wax stores 30% of his weight or roughly 50-60 lbs all the time which is being stored the weight itself or the % of the attribute?  

30% of something that weighs 1000x as much as him is still only 30% but does it require a metalmind 1000x larger or is feruchemy strictly a % based game? 

You store percentages but those are actual numbers. The more you weigh, the more 30% of that weight is, the more investiture you have to store, the bigger storage you need. 30% of 50 kg is less than 30% of 100 kg.