FTL Bendalloy- Now with a way to do it

[Stormgate he/him]

So, for a while now, we have known about the possibility of FTL travel allowed via Allomancy. I'm not sure where, but we are also fairly confident that bendalloy's speed bubbles have something to do with it. Now, in one WoB, Sanderson said that we were close, but we were missing an important part. I have tried to find any theories with relevant information, but it has been inconclusive. So, I'm going off of one WoB that I found when I was bored.

Zas

I’ve got a question kind of based off of the train fight. If you have a time bubble, and you were to make it while you are on the train, would the time bubble move with the train, or would it stay at the same spot relative to the planet?

Brandon Sanderson

Time bubbles don’t move, so it would pull you out of it, then it would vanish.

MI'CHELLE

If you were to pop up a time bubble and someone were to be stuck halfway in and halfway out, would they go splooch?

BRANDON SANDERSON

No, they would be in the time bubble. The time bubbles will move with the planet but not with the train.

 

AUDIENCE

Yeah, I always thought it was relative to the person creating the time bubble.

BRANDON SANDERSON

No, you’ll see Wayne create one, then he’ll walk up to the perimeter, but if he leaves it, it ruins the time bubble.

ZAS

So is that because it’s linked up to the spiritual gravitational bond between the planet?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Yes, and you’re digging very deeply into stuff that I now can’t answer. Time bubbles have some weirdness to them that I don’t want to dig in too deeply, but yes.

(emphasis by me)

 

This is by no means conclusive, but I have played around with it in my head, and I believe I have determined how FTL is possible using bendalloy.

 

Break the Allomancer's spiritual gravitational bond to the planet.

 

I propose that the way to do this is by making the gravity that is influencing the Allomancer come from a different source. Translation: put them on the moon. I don't exactly mean the moon, a spaceship with artificial gravity would probably do the job, assuming it was an adequate distance from the planet.

 

So, you have a bendalloy burner in a spaceship with artificial gravity and plenty of metal. He burns the metal, and, assuming the bubble is bigger than the ship, the ship will begin to go much faster than an identical ship with identical power settings outside the bubble. So, with high enough burning rate and speed of the ship, you could go faster than the speed of light relative to the outside of the bubble. Basically, to an observer outside the bubble, you achieve FTL travel. Inside the bubble, you don't achieve FTL travel.

 

I have little evidence to support this. To those with physics degrees or contradicting WoBs, fire away.

 

[Eagle of the Forest Path he/him]

Sorry to burst your time bubble, but that WoB has been overturned by this one (link to Kurkistan's "Everything we know about time bubbles")

 

Kurkistan: Okay, so I'm contractually obligated to ask about time bubbles one more time [this is a lie].

Brandon: Yes.
Kurkistan: So what's up with frame of reference for time bubbles; in that obviously if you make a bubble and it's still it's not really still, like time moves differently but-
Brandon: We deal with that a little bit in Era 2 Book 2 [shadows of Self], where we talk about the fact that you know- obviously the bubble is moving with the planet. So they're not- the frame of reference is not absolute.
Kurkistan: Yeah.
Brandon: And so we talk about sorta' the idea of mass and momentum and time bubbles and things like that.
Kurkistan: Okay
<Fun fact: at this point I was content to go home (actually to a hotel because I didn't feel like falling asleep at the wheel on the way home, but that's another story), but then Brandon just kept talking, and saying very interesting things.   >
Brandon: For instance you can make a time bubble on a train.
Kurkistan: Oh and it _stays_ on the train?!
Brandon: Yes, but when you start catching stuff off of the train, it's gonna' _jar_ each time, and it's probably going to ruin your time bubble, right?
Kurkistan: So does it get it's "anchor" from- it's asking all the things that are within it what they think "still" is?
Brandon: Yes. That's a good way of looking at it. Frame of reference for the cognitive things around.
Kurkistan: Okay; the things around or the things within it, specifically?
Brandon: The things that it's cutting into, specifically, but yeah.

Edited December 1, 2015 by EagleOfTheForestPath

[Stormgate he/him]

A small bump in the theory. Except for that part, my theory remains intact.

[Khyrindor he/him]

So I guess it would just stay with the ship anyway? 

[Stormgate he/him]

Suppose so. Makes my theory much less groundbreaking (pun if you think about it).

[Kurkistan he/him]

Sadly logic becomes our foe at this point, though.

 

So we've got a space ship with a bendalloy bubble around it, with that bubble sharing the ship's frame of reference. Congratulations. Now the problem is explaining why that ship should be moving any faster through space than it was before the bubble was put up. So far as the bubble is concerned, the ship is stationary.

 

Any model that tries to make the ship move faster in space just because its encapsulated by a same-frame-of-reference bendalloy bubble needs to explain why Wayne doesn't shoot off in some random direction the moment he puts down a "stationary" bubble on Scadrial.

 

My own thoughts on the matter are covered in the thread that Eagle was kind enough to link to.

[Stormgate he/him]

If you are a Star Trek fan, it's similar to the warp drive, making space around you pass faster than normal.

Edited December 2, 2015 by Stormgate

[thegatorgirl00 she/her]

Do we have a WoB saying it uses bendalloy? Maybe you actually use one of the God metal alloys of bendalloy.

[Kurkistan he/him]

If you are a Star Trek fan, it's similar to the warp drive, making space around you pass faster than normal.

  

The Alcubierre drive looks a bit more sophisticated than just "maker time go faster here". It works by shuffling around the space that the ship happens to inhabit, rather than by the ship jetsetting around going "faster than the speed of light outside the bubble." Maybe the Alcubierre drive is how it'll all turn out to work, through precise manipulation of space time using bubbles, but that kind of stuff is almost entirely speculative from what we've actually seen of time bubble use.

Do we have a WoB saying it uses bendalloy? Maybe you actually use one of the God metal alloys of bendalloy.

We don't have any such WoB, but FTL using time bubbles is both a very educated guess on most's part and somewhat hinted at over the years.

[Moogle]

The problem with using bendalloy by itself is that, frame the frame of reference of those inside the ship, they won't be going at FTL speeds. Which means you need to put people in stasis or something, which brings its own set of problems.

 

You can fix this problem with a cadmium bubble to counteract the effects of bendalloy, but then you run into the logical problem of why this would allow the ship to move forward any faster.

 

You lose kinetic energy if you try to move something outside the bubble, and because of that anything inside the cadmium bubble (such as the crew) would be prevented from going at FTL speeds and act like an anchor on the ship.

 

(Assuming the bendalloy works at all, which it might not as Kurk says. Various WoBs from before SoS are pretty blatant on the fact that we don't have all the pieces of the puzzle required for FTL travel, and I don't feel SoS had any super huge clues on this front.)

[Eagle of the Forest Path he/him]

Yup, we'll probably have to wait for the 'contemporary' trilogy to get the clue we need.

I think it will have something to do with the southern hemisphere way of using allomancy and/or feruchemy.

[Confused]

I love this stuff!

Galileo: all motion is relative to the observer.

Newton: all motion is relative to the observer, but time is constant.

Einstein: all motion and time is relative to the observer, but the speed of light is constant.

MISTER Sanderson: EVERYTHING is relative!

What if the crew of the spaceship was inside a cadmium bubble, slowing them down, while the spaceship hurdles through space at its normal speed? Does the crew die of old age when they leave the bubble or can they also change their age connection to Scadrial?

Physicists (and you Kurkistan), will this work if the ship doesn't need navigation or repair?

[natc]

Well, it's impossible to have everything be relstive, because then you have a mass of inter-referencing variables in the universe and no actual numbers.

[Confused]

But numbers are an artificial construct anyway. Who needs them? It's so much more fun to work with glyphs!

[Stormgate he/him]

Pattern: "Terrible lies."

[Kurkistan he/him]

@Moogle

 

My own interpretation/solution dealing with the cadmium/bendalloy overlap issue is to have the cadmium bubble be stationary relative to the ship while the bendalloy bubble is in motion relative to the ship. So (hopefully) you get the time-warping effects of both types of bubbles (cancelling out) but the movement-warping effect of only one of them (the bendalloy bubble).

 

@Confused

 

People age normally (read: at an accelerated rate relative to everyone not in a bubble) in bendalloy bubbles, so I don't see why they shouldn't do the same (or the inverse, depending on your frame or reference) inside cadmium bubbles.

[Dunkum he/him]

The Alcubierre drive looks a bit more sophisticated than just "maker time go faster here". It works by shuffling around the space that the ship happens to inhabit, rather than by the ship jetsetting around going "faster than the speed of light outside the bubble." Maybe the Alcubierre drive is how it'll all turn out to work, through precise manipulation of space time using bubbles, but that kind of stuff is almost entirely speculative from what we've actually seen of time bubble use.

As I understood it, it works more or less by sort of compressing space in front of the ship and expanding space behind, causing the bubble of space containing the ship to move, while the ship stays stationary within that bubble.

following from that, i wonder if you couldn't accomplish a similar effect using time bubbles. not sure how it would work, precisely, but time and space are related, so it wouldn't be completely unreasonable that with some controlled overlapping of cadmium and bendalloy bubbles you could create a similar effect, where local spacetime itself moves taking the ship with it.

[Voidus]

The real secret method to FTL travel is as follows.
Find the Stick.

Attach it to your ship.

Tell it that it will become fire unless it goes forward really fast.
Profit.

[iBambam]

I have one major problem with this theory. Aren't Bendalloy bubbles relatively small? Like only a few meters in width? Wayne specifically states he can't change the size of the bubble.

So are we assuming that rule is broken? Or are multiple bendalloy mistings burning at the same time to consume the whole ship?

I think Bendalloy and Cadmium are definitely part of the equation, but not the answer. Perhaps a twinborn bendalloy compounder can expand the size of his bubble, but we still have all of the same issues.

[Voidus]

I have one major problem with this theory. Aren't Bendalloy bubbles relatively small? Like only a few meters in width? Wayne specifically states he can't change the size of the bubble.

So are we assuming that rule is broken? Or are multiple bendalloy mistings burning at the same time to consume the whole ship?

I think Bendalloy and Cadmium are definitely part of the equation, but not the answer. Perhaps a twinborn bendalloy compounder can expand the size of his bubble, but we still have all of the same issues.

Mechanical Allomancy may be able to alter bubble size.

[iBambam]

Mechanical Allomancy meaning the ship would be burning the metal? I'd have to argue against that, UNLESS, it were awakened and that allowed it to spend/absorb investiture similar to nightblood.

However, how would Allomancy being mechanical allow for a larger Bendalloy bubble? Do larger people create a larger bubble? If that is the case there is merit to your argument.

[Moogle]

However, how would Allomancy being mechanical allow for a larger Bendalloy bubble? Do larger people create a larger bubble? If that is the case there is merit to your argument.

 

I'm not the one you were responding to, but have you read Sixth of Dusk?

 

The machine there is quite possibly an Allomantic bronze mistfabrial, and it has an absolutely absurd range. Even if it's not Allomacy, it still shows off absurd power - technology SHOULD outstrip mere mortals in the future of the Cosmere, which would be why Hoid being a protagonist is less absurd - without supertech, he's basically stronger than TLR and can't really be challenged by anything.

 

Fabrials will likely not be able to run off of burning metals (though they might) - what we HAVE heard of is a method to trap the mists in metal. If that is the case, then a mechanical mistfabrial should be capable of storing a large amount of mist and creating a huge effect relative to a regular Allomancer.

Edited December 7, 2015 by Moogle

[iBambam]

@moogle I will have to re-read Sixth of Dusk. I only read it once. But I've never thought of mistfabrials, that makes a LOT of sense. Although I still feel like we need to learn more about how Bendalloy bubbles work, because if their size can be altered, Wayne should be able to flair Bendalloy to increase his bubble size, correct?

If a mistfabrial was created to produce the effect of a Bendalloy bubble, wouldn't it be the same size, but last infinitely longer?

Unless it's a combination of windrunner/bendalloy hybrid fabrial, or something similar to move at FTL speeds with the bubble moving with you, but I'm still not convinced that alone would allow the ship to move faster. I think Cadmium must be involved somehow.

EDIT: We're overlooking a feruchemic ability here. Storing iron. In the first chapter of part 2 in WoA Sazed says;"the terris philosophers had much to say on using an ironmind. They explained that the power didn't actually change a person's bulk or size-it just somehow changed the way that the ground pulled against them."

What if ironmind's actually store the pull of gravity (relative to the weight of the person storing)? This, combined with Cadmium or Bendalloy could produce an effect that could allow for a ship using mistfabrials (brilliant find moogle, btw) and perhaps a windrunning fabrial to move at FTL speeds by making the ship lighter or heavier to create more/less friction, because even in weightless space friction will still slow one down. But the ships engines could propel the ship at a much faster rate of speed if the ship is "lighter".

Edited December 7, 2015 by iBambam

[Stormgate he/him]

What about nicrosil-bendalloy bubble? Big bubble for a short time, but maybe long enough to go FTL.

[iBambam]

But you would revert to your original speed once the metal is burned up. Once the bubble pops, everything shows back down. I guess you could theoretically travel a long distance in that short powerful burst, but we still have the issue of only the ship traveling at those speeds in the bubble, while outside the bubble still traveling slower.