Nicrosil Question

[xXEldestXx]

After lurking on and off for a couple years, I finally registered to ask a question that I haven't seen directly addressed anywhere else:

 

 Is it possible to "chain" Nicrosil burners?

 

For example, we have Mistings 1 through n. Mistings 1 through (n - 1) are Nicrobursts, while Misting n is a soother or a lurcher or whatever. They then stand in a line grasping arms. Misting 1 burns nicrosil, causing Misting 2's metal to flare, which causes three's metal to flare even more, and so on down the line, until we get to misting N, who unleashes a quarter second of worldwide soothing (or whatever).

[Kurkistan]

Hi, welcome to the forums!

 

As to your question, I find that I doubt it. It seems that Nicorsil/Duralumin serve to unleash the full power of whatever metal they affect, rather than adding to it. If that is the case, then the power they unleash is always limited by the size of the <metal> reserve the last misting is burning.

[Pechvarry]

I almost made a thread the other day just to ask this!

I'm gonna disagree with kurkistan because Compounding. If you can burn a charge to create something like a tenfold charge, then I see no reason why bursting a burst wouldn't have wild effects.

[Kurkistan]

I fail to see any parallel with Compounding.

[Pechvarry]

Realize this is conjecture, and we don't have information one way or another.

That out of the way, if compounding results in an amplification of power because you're burning a charge, then why not when you're burning a burn, so to speak?

Furthermore, we know burning duralumin doesn't instantly use up your entire metal reserve of duralumin -- just the metal burnt along with it. If ALL that duralumin or nicrosil were burnt at once, why wouldn't that additional power transfer to the burst?

[Kurkistan]

Yeah, I'm still not getting anything from your Compounding comparison. Sorry about that. 

 

As for the second point, that merits some thought.

 

We know that you can burn Duralumin quite normally by itself: it just doesn't do anything. I imagine that the same holds for Nicrosil. Therefore, you can burn them without gaining any actual benefit or utilizing the power that they give you.

 

I imagine that you could D/N burst Pewter on a person who's standing still not doing anything, and wouldn't see any impressive results. Similarly, I imagine that a D/N burst on, well, Duralumin or Nicrosil would result in the normal amount of power going to super-flare other metals and the rest going unused.

 

Once again, the power of these two metals seems to be in enabling the full utilization of other metals in an unnaturally short time-frame, rather than in directly adding anything to the effects of those metals.

Edited July 31, 2013 by Kurkistan

[xXEldestXx]

I almost made a thread the other day just to ask this!

I'm gonna disagree with kurkistan because Compounding. If you can burn a charge to create something like a tenfold charge, then I see no reason why bursting a burst wouldn't have wild effects.

 

 

Wow. I spent all morning pondering how Brandon might have "built" FTL into Scadrial's magic, and not only is my theory rather bland, someone else has already asked about it.

[Kurkistan]

Wow. I spent all morning pondering how Brandon might have "built" FTL into Scadrial's magic, and not only is my theory rather bland, someone else has already asked about it.

 

Sorry, I'm confused again. I suppose it's a habit of mine on this thread. Where are you getting FTL from that quote? 

Edited July 31, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Shardlet]

I think it is probably this quote that he is referring to:

 

Quote

ERICPETERS (14 NOVEMBER 2011)
You mentioned friday night in #Seattle Allomacy has "FTL" built into it, any more hints you can share on how that would work

BRANDON SANDERSON (14 NOVEMBER 2011)
It involves where the lost energy from thermodynamic issues goes in certain Allomantic interactions

 

I couldn't find the source for it though.  I suspect that this is a twitter question due to the #Seattle hashtag.  It is probably a reference to a signing in seattle which took place at around that time.  Apparently Suvudu posted a recording of the Q&A http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2011/11/event-video-brandon-sanderson-qa.html'>here.  I have not followed this link, so I don't know if it is still good or if there is a solid confirmation of the basis of the above quote.  Enjoy!

[Pechvarry]

Kurk, You are under the impression there is no amount of strength to a burst (be it D or N, I'm calling it a burst). You believe the strength comes from the size of your metal reserve and nothing else. The D / N just enables a behavior, with no addition of power.

I believe the burning of the reserve to be more of a side effect, or something that must occur for D or N to enact its change.

That in mind, compounding works because you take a bit of energy with directions on how it will manifest and you put a motor on it. Bursting, under my belief, would have a similar effect. So bursting a burst would be like adding a second motor.

I hope this clears up confusion of where we're missing each other.

[Kurkistan]

Ah, your compounding comparison makes much more sense to me now. Thank you. I do still think you're wrong, though

 

If you'll recall, Vin has burned Duralumin several times without using up her entire reserve of it: In HoA, for instance, I believe she burns it twice in a row for different metals during her first fight with Marsh. That implies that Duralumin is burned off in proportion to whatever metal it's boosting. I conclude from this that if you burned more Duralumin/Nicrosil than you had some other metal for it to correspond to, the extra energy wouldn't have anything to do.

[Pechvarry]

Duralumin certainly doesn't instantly burn itself up completely.  This is actually commented on directly during the fight at the Assembly in WoA.  It burns up the other metals burning, but Duralumin itself remains.  Though no mention is made of there being a proportion.  I just figure it's "1 charge of duralumin to boost all other currently burning metals."  I don't see the correlation between that and a bursted burst adding nothing, but that comes back to our differences in beliefs.  

 

I'm hoping you are wrong, simply because I don't like the idea that the strength of the Nicrosil misting is completely immaterial.

 

I hate referencing this, but MAG has this to say for Nicrosil mechanics:

 

• Your target's Result increases by 1/2 your Nicrosil rating, rounded up.
• Your target gains a number of Nudges with the roll equal to your Nicrosil rating.

It's not wholly canon, but it means we can't discount the possibility that I'm right.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Pechvarry

[Kurkistan]

Yes, it being proportionate was an assumption, but I think it's a fair one. This concept of "charges" is wholly artificial, an acknowledged contrivance of the MAG. So you're left either saying that any even infinitesimal amount of Duralumin is enough to set off all other metals you're burning or you have to admit to some degree of proportionality--though I suppose you could claim it to be wholly arbitrary instead. We know it isn't all burned off, as you've provided yet more evidence for, so there's almost certainly some way of determining how much is burned off using some scale.

 

I read what happens when you burn N/D as a runaway reaction: you bring N/D and some normal metal in contact with one another and you get a violent, runaway flash-fire until all of one or the other is gone. So N/D is essentially a catalyst which is also destroyed during the reaction (I'm sure there's a name for this, but I cannot recall it). Under such a model, it makes perfect sense that throwing in more of the suicide!catalyst isn't going to get you a more energetic result: it's all dependent on both metals, not one or the other.

 

Under that logic, the only thing nicro-bursting a nicroburst would do is maybe speed up the reaction, but certainly not make it yield more energy overall.

 

As for strength, there are several other avenues you could take to model more/less strength in N/D without needing to go your route. To wit: more efficient utilization of N/D (spending less to burn up more of the other metals) and burning off other metals over a shorter stretch of time (so 0.25s for a vial of Pewter vs. 0.5, for instance) jump to mind immediately. I'm sure there are other possibilities as well.

[Pechvarry]

As a quick aside, I always assumed duralumin just had a static burn rate in the same way I assumed a few atoms of copper isn't enough to create a coppercloud. You would need a certain threshold before an allomancer could enact an effect with it, and I'm guessing D/N and bendalloy have a pretty high threshold. But I'm mostly just thinking out loud.

Your talk of catalyst brings up an interesting point: in chemical reactions, too much catalyst can screw up your reaction.

Example from the plastics world: benzoylperoxide makes polystyrene resin harden into plastic. Add too much, and apparently it gets gummy and soft.

Maybe adding too much catalyst to an allomantic reaction would throw the whole effect off because... Why not? Not something I really believe, but an alternate hypothesis of what would happen.

[Shardlet]

Well, in your plastic example, your benzoyl peroxide is not a catalyst, but rather is an initiator.  The reason it would be soft and gooey if you had too much is because instead of producing, let's just say 10 long polystyrene chains (for the sake of simplicity), you get 100 short chains.  Each chain would be terminated with at least a portion of the benzoyl peroxide.  A catalyst, by contrast, and by definition, facilitates a chemical reaction without directly participating in it (i.e., it never reacts with any of the reactants and is the same before, during, and after the reaction).

[Pechvarry]

Damnit, Shardlet. I realized that while laying in bed. At work, it's erroneously referred to as a catalyst, because they use it in the social sense (a cause of change) as opposed to the chemistry sense which I only have a clue about from 4th grade science class.

Though it's a magic system and not chemistry, that clarification somehow makes the "entirely new outcome" seem less likely to me.

[Oudeis]

I'm with Kurk on this one.

 

I realize that Vin could be wrong, but she expressly says that burning Duralumin boosts a metal by burning it all at once. I guess it's possible that the subtleties could have escaped her; maybe it just multiplied the power of the metal by a static amount, and also burned off all the rest of the metal as a side effect. Nevertheless, since Vin is such an innately good allomancer, I believe she'd have noticed that her bursts were always the same level of power, regardless of if she had a full reserve of a metal or only a bit of it left.

 

Not an ironclad argument, but I think it supports Kurk.

 

This might be even more specious, but as Elend points out, the Metallic Arts make strict, numeric sense. The power from a Steelpush comes from the metal, and a quantity of metal will always output the exact same quantity of force. That's why it makes sense that a burst increases power by burning a metal all up at once. There's no change in the amount of energy that the steel possessed, it's just being applied differently.

 

Actually... maybe I just proved myself wrong. Aluminum simply nulls your metals. They lose all of their power. Where does that power go?

[ThePrinceofMagnets]

Forgive me if I'm incorrect, but IIRC WoB is that Duralumin flares all metals being burned, including itself; leading to a feedback loop that results in the busy of power. Doesn't this mean that a single Nicroburst wouldn't actually cause the person they're touching to burn all their metals, but just flare them?

[Kurkistan]

An interesting observation.

You are likely wrong, though, given that we know from multiple sources that the effects of a Niceoburst an an Allomancer is virtually identical to the effect of that same Allomancer burning Duralumin.

What WoB are you referring to?

[ThePrinceofMagnets]

3) This might have been specified in the books, I don't remember, but does Duralumin expend itself as well as the metal it's used with? If it does, I've got this theory that its effect is actually just to cause a regular flare, not a superflare, but it affects itself in a feedback loop that keeps forcing the flare higher until it runs out.

BRANDON SADERSON

So, I've said before that I want to hold off on talking about different forms of compounding and types of twinborn until I can address them in the series. So I'll have to RAFO the first two. However, in answer to the third one, yes you DO expend Duralumin in the process.

This was the question I was thinking of, I was wrong

[Kurkistan]

An honest mistake. Thank you for correcting yourself.
 
UPDATE:
 
New info from Shardlet:

Shardlet: When burning duralumin to enhance another metal’s burn, does a mistborn get only the sum total of the power of the other metal in a single burst or does he get more than just the sum?

Brandon: I would have to make sure and look, but my original intention was the sum.

Q: Ok, because ethe thing I was wondering about is Elend with the duralumin atium burn because it seemed more than just the sum of a bead of atium.

A: Right, but the thing you have to keep in mind is the thing I’m kind of looking at having it all happen in a moment. So let’s say you have enough steel to burn for an hour. If you reduce a plane to a point it’s infinite, does that make sense. And so it’s very hard to say is it the sum when you are going from a defined amount into a point, I mean a point is infinitely small. Does that make sense?

 
So no, the Duralumin doesn't add any power on top.

[Shardlet]

This is essentially a repost (riposte? ) of my response to your response to the signing report, Kurk.

 

 

So no, the Duralumin doesn't add any power on top.

 

It seems that this will have different effects depending on what metal you are burning.  With steel or iron the effect is going to be more definite.  But, this better explains what happened with Elend and the atium bead.  The effect of that atium burn was compressed into an instant, which yielded an effect that was essentially infinite and let gave him a massive info dump.  With tin, the rush of sensory input would overwhelm your brain.  With steel we see Vin chuck a dozen or so horses and riders without an effective anchor.  With brass or zinc we see control over Kandra and Koloss or complete emotional flatlining or extreming of humans.  With practice, who knows what could be accomplished with duralumin enhanced emotional metals.  Duralumin pewter makes you virtually invulnerable for that instant.

[Kurkistan]

See my response to this response on the signing thread.

[Shardlet]

I Call. 

[Pechvarry]

While in my hole, nursing my wounds from this thread, I've been considering the strength of a Nicrosil misting as a limiter instead. No addition of power, but dictating how much of the summed metal power you actually receive.

The interpretation you guys are using in that other thread (which is derailing and belongs here for better future search-ability, dudes) of "bandwidth" is extremely fascinating. I'm liking the idea of allomantic strength determining max bandwidth a lot.