What Specifically Is The Deal With Feruchemical Steel?

[Oudeis he/him]

I may be mistaken, but didn't Sazed store weight while he tapped speed?

 

First, no, he did not.

 

Second, even if he stored 90% of his weight, he still has his packs, gear, clothes, and all those metalminds. (though he does mention dropping empty steelminds to reduce weight.)

 

Third, your reasoning is flawed. As Wax says, once you get under about 3/4 weight, it's difficult to move around. A human's walk is a fall indefinitely postponed. The only thing you have to push against is the ground, which is at a 90 degree angle (roughly) to the direction you want to go. You own weight is a large part of how humans are able to walk. If you barely weighed anything, you'd have difficulty getting traction. Errant winds would blow you off course and you'd have to spend effort on constant course corrections. Wax goes around at reduced weight all the time, and he still has trouble with "less than 3/4". For Sazed, who is untrained in traveling around at reduced weight, or at the very least isn't as experienced as Wax, it's unreasonable to assume he could jog along for days at even that much.

 

In conclusion, it's never mentioned that he's storing weight (and while I know he's a scholar, he's shown a frustrating tendency to be not very good at feruchemy. He never once tries to store or tap aluminum, duralumin, or malatium, so we unfortunately can't really assume he'd do it just because it would've been a good idea). Even if he did, he could have reduced his own personal weight by a fraction, reducing the weight of the system of "himself, his clothes, and all his gear including a lot of metalminds" by an even smaller fraction. The amount of metabolic deficit we're talking about is so large, this would be a very small benefit that wouldn't begin to cover it.

 

 

No I'm not, I'm pointing out the issue with your reply then suggesting alternatives in addition to the original claim. The body does also have a caloric storage method, but I am inclined to agree that this one example at least does seem not to conform to that idea, hence why I keep suggesting alternatives. And given that your very first reply started with misunderstanding what I said I don't think I'd be entirely unfounded even if that was what I was doing.

 

First, so which is it? You first say, "I'm not repeating the same point" then you say "I'm repeating the same point because you don't get it." Which is your argument?

 

Second, you're mistaken. Your very first exchange was to say "the body creates energy, steel makes the body create energy faster" and my very first reply was, "that doesn't make sense, the body does not create energy, it produces energy from food, and my point is that he's not getting enough food to power the process of creating energy." I'm not misunderstanding you. I understand exactly what you're saying, and I still believe you're ignoring the one salient fact, and you can restate your initial case as many times as you want, I won't suddenly overlook the gap in logic. Every reply you've had on the subject has been to restate your initial "your body will make energy faster" and you've never once addressed the issue I have brought up time and time again.

 

Think of it like this. We've got a car that can burn a gallon of gas and let you travel a mile in ten minutes. You're trying to tell me that an engine which burns the same amount of gas faster will let you travel a mile in one minute. I'm trying to tell you, it doesn't matter how fast the engine will burn a gallon of gas, it will never let you travel ten miles on one gallon. The engine would have to somehow burn gas more efficiently, or it would have to add more gas, and neither of those things are happening. And you keep saying, "But you're not listening. What if it burns the gas faster?"

[Guest]

*Snoopy skulks away quickly*

[natc]

Perhaps Speed is, as I think someone said, is like an armchair. The armchair sees itself as being all one thing, it's not a bunch of sticks of wood and cloth, it's "I am a chair". So when you store speed, your storing the Cognitive Speed, which is the sum of all the parts of speed-energy, perception time and reaction time, bodily metabolization,etc. In effect, I think that it is like a mini speed buble, but in "reality" haha, it is different.

I actually wouldn't be surprised if that's how most of Feruchemy worked.

If any of that was coherent, that's pretty cool

EDIT: sigh......

Well, perception time is the one thing it doesn't consistently do, since mental speed is a different power entirely and I recall it being possible to be steelrunning so quickly as to be impossible to steer yourself the right way. Slightly beyond the point where you burn up in the atmosphere from air resistance.

It's definitely not just simple velocity though. There's clearly some higher concept of "speed" being involved here. Stormlight healing and bloodmaking presumably work like that as well from what I can tell, with some subconscious input as to what your healthy self is supposed to look like.

[Shaggai]

Given Sazed's description of sluggishness, I think it lets you get more speed for the same effort. When you store, the effort of running makes you go at walking speed. When you tap, the effort of walking lets you go at the speed of a run. How? I don't know. I'm just going to say it's a Cognitive thing, because pretty much everything is a Cognitive thing if you look at it right.

[18th Shard he/him]

Could it not be that, when storing speed, you also store caloric energy, and you merely tap this energy when tapping speed, as well as the more well-known effects?

[hoidhunter he/him]

For the people saying "it just releases ATP faster" I've already talked about that... your body doesn't have an infinite amount of ATP. Hoidhunter: I know that you'd still feel the effort of traveling a mile, whether that mile takes you one minute or ten. I addressed that in my first post. What I'm saying is, the cost in metabolic energy to walk across a dominance is significantly more than the food Sazed took in. He should have starved to death. Why didn't he?

 

I know this has been going on for a while since you posted this...but...."In just six days of travel, using steelminds on occasion, he had traveled the equivalent of six weeks' worth of walking." soon after "He hefted his pack, which was much lighter than it had been."  

 

What makes you think that he didn't eat or drink anything along the way?

 

This whole conversation is revolving around how steel could have supplied his body with the fuel that it needed to make the journey faster...but at no point in the story does it say that he made the trip without eating.  It actually says (see above) that he didn't even use all of his speed in one big dash...just that he used it from time to time while making the trip.  I feel that my explanation of temporal manipulation it totally still on the table.

Edited February 25, 2015 by hoidhunter

[natc]

Only in the cosmere can we realistically analyze the mechanics behind the power to "go faster".

*grabs popcorn*

[Shaggai]

Could it not be that, when storing speed, you also store caloric energy, and you merely tap this energy when tapping speed, as well as the more well-known effects?

I think that's bendalloy.

[Oudeis he/him]

What makes you think that he didn't eat or drink anything along the way?

 

Are you being deliberately obtuse here? I never once said he never had a single bite to eat. However, you founds the facts and figures yourself. He traveled six weeks' of distance in six days. That's a week's worth of distance in a day. How much food do you eat in one week, not even in a week where you walk hundreds of miles? Could you eat all of that in a single day? Do you know how much that much food would weigh?

 

And it is mentioned in the book that he doesn't carry much food. When he gets to the village with the crazy cannibal, he comments how he's stopping because he needs food. When he travels with Marsh briefly, they set up camp, and he talks about how all he's really got are some spices to boil in water for broth. There is no way he carried with him enough food to power six weeks' worth of walking, even if physical speed did make your digestion go faster so you could eat an entire week's worth of food in a sitting.

 

Whether he uses the speed constantly or in spurts is immaterial; either way, he needed to express as much energy as it would have taken to push his body across a dominance, and we know that he wasn't carrying very much food, anyway.

 

If you want to disagree with me, that's fine. if you'd rather ignore my points then straw-man me by claiming that I'm insisting he never ate a bite of food when I've clearly stated otherwise, please try to restrain yourself. You can argue against the points I've actually made all you want. Once you start changing my arguments to make me look bad, you've crossed a line.

[Voidus]

I think you're taking this argument a bit personally Oudeius, it's why I deleted my last post. People aren't attacking you or deliberately setting up strawman arguments, they're just doing their best to understand your points much like you were doing your best to understand mine, it's not your fault if you or they misunderstood.

As I already mentioned, people are capable of storing calories, you won't starve to death after a week, even without Steel though a healthy fit person could make that journey in about half the time by running instead of walking. So if you stretched what one day of food between three days would you starve? No, you might be tired and hungry by the end of it but it's hardly physics-defying.

[hoidhunter he/him]

Oudeis...we're all friends here...there is no need to get upset.  If my last post offended you...I apologize...that was not my intent.  

 

The point that I was trying to make is this...while he was not well supplied with food before he begins his journey...we get no insight into what happens along the way until his journey is almost over.  Nor does he ever specifically mention having enough...or a lack of...food to complete the journey after the fact.  This being the case...I'm operating under the assumption he ate enough not to die.

 

Is it possible that my explanation is wrong, and that steel somehow gave him the caloric energy that he needed to survive the journey...could be.  

 

Is it possible that this is just something that Brandon didn't really consider thoroughly enough when writing...maybe.   I don't know.  I'm just trying to form a theory that avoids calling it a shortcoming on Brandon's part.  Not because that would be horrible...but because it isn't much fun to just say..."poorly conceived magic."

 

So...let's get this conversation back on track...while running your body uses quite a bit more calories that going at a brisk walk.  Furthermore...a slow, easy going gait will keep your metabolism burning at an even lower rate. Now everyone has a point were they are burning calories just to live...I believe it's called resting rate.  A slow, easy pace is not going to produce a much higher rate of consumption that your resting rate.  They key here is...Sazed can use as much speed as he wants...and in doing so...doesn't necessarily have to put much effort into his motion in order to travel much much faster.  A slow pace that doesn't raise your pulse very much may not have you covering much ground each day...but it would if you spent 2 hours of each day walking at that same easy pace accelerated to x50...the miles would just fly by, and you will would not be exerting yourself very much.  That's the idea anyway...

 

by the way..."Sazed uses steel for a solid week, covering an incredible distance (my nook is dead and charging; if someone can find the quote and put down actual numbers there's an upvote in it for you)"...I found the quote from the book...can I have an upvote?

 

Second by the way...what does obtuse mean? (you see what I did there?)

Edited February 26, 2015 by hoidhunter

[Frosted Flakes]

Talked to my brother-in-law about this. When he was in the military, they would do rucksack marches a lot. Sometimes they would travel as far as 30km in a single day, and that's at a fast march. Like power-walking so fast that it's uncomfortable. That kind of travel would take them from before sun up until after sun down. They'd do a 5 minute break every 55 minutes, and a 20 minute break every 4 hours. It wasn't uncommon for people to get blisters so bad that their socks were stuck to their bloody feet. Generally, he would eat an apple or a banana or some kind of fruit during the breaks. But the thing that he stressed the most is that the food was barely important compared to the water.

You could easily do the whole day without eating. You'd be too busy hating how much it sucked and wouldn't get really hungry until you stopped. But not having water could kill you.

Traveling that distance at that pace, he'd carry at least 2 gallons of water on his person, and he would have most, if not all, of it drank around 1/3 - 1/2 of the way through the trip. He relied on a logistical vehicle that followed the troops while they marched and filled their water during the longer breaks.

Water weights about 8 lbs a gallon. If my brother-in-law used about 1 gallon every 10 miles, and the physical exertion of running with little weight is comparable to a hard marching pace with a lot of weight, then Sazed would need 8 gallons of water at a minimum for his approximately hundred mile trip. That's 64 pounds of liquid, which is extremely difficult to carry.

So honestly, before we even worry about Sazed feeding himself during this trip, we have to figure out how he stayed hydrated. You could really abuse your body by doing a run like that and not feeding it and live trough it - you cannot make the same sacrifice with water.

[hoidhunter he/him]

I'm going to use the same explanatory cop out that I did earlier and just say...how do we know that he didn't find water along the way?  The book doesn't say that he did...but it also doesn't say that he didn't.

 

Different direction...

 

There has to be some way that Sazed's journey can be possible without grasping at too many straws...What about this:

 

When storing speed in steel, what actually happens is that a field of energy forms around the outside of your body that makes motion more difficult, therefore slowing your movement by varying degrees depending on how much you are storing.  Motion is therefore not required in order to store speed...the mere act of having this field active is enough to store speed.  This also explains why thought speed is not slowed or increased when storing or tapping speed from steel.  

 

When tapping speed, this field assists your body's motion, literally pushing it for you, in order to make you move faster.  Again, motion is not required in order to use speed that you have stored...the very act of having the potential assistance in place uses up your reserve.  This also allows you to move your body at incredible speeds (well past the limit of what is physically possible for your body to move on it's own) without actually using any extra metabolic energy.

Edited February 26, 2015 by hoidhunter

[kinxer he/him]

I think Hoidhunter's theory could explain the effects of Feruchemical steel, but it still seems unlikely. After all, it's important to realize that Feruchemy always stores something. I can't see Feruchemical steel working just by regulating the output of energy (or time, or however you phrase it). While I don't yet have a theory for how it works, I think it's pretty intuitive that because Steel makes you faster, it also allows you to move farther with the same amount of energy. After all (and this may or may not be applicable; I'm no expert), position is the integral of velocity, which is a fundamental connection between the two.

Perhaps, instead of storing caloric energy like Bendalloy does, Feruchemical steel allows the Ferring/Feruchemist to exert those calories (while storing) toward the movement they will make later (while tapping). I mean, this is hardly a novel concept (at least one person has already basically said as much), but might be able to get rid of the issues with Sazed's trip. Then again, it would require more caloric input while storing.

I guess the point of this reply is to say that however Feruchemical steel does its thing, it has to be consistent with the nature of Feruchemy. That's why I think ideas like personal time shift (which, as shown by Allomantic bendalloy and Allomantic cadmium, requires energy input no matter whether you're expanding or contracting time) and the assistance field (which doesn't really seem enough like storing and tapping) don't work. At the same time, I think that however Feruchemical steel works, it has to provide the energy for the extra movement from tapping.

Edited February 26, 2015 by kinxer