Alloyed Inert Aluminum

[Swimmingly he/him]

As stated in tAoL, alloying a metal changes its magical properties intrinsically. Sure, you have a bit of wiggle room with impurity vs. completely wrong, but the addition of silver turns tin into pewter, with the entirely different properties that entails. This applies to feruchemy and presumably hemalurgy as well - or it should intuitively, anyway. Aluminum, however, can be found in various different alloys which all exhibit allomantic inertness.

Does this rule out aluminum abilities as part of a new magic system?

[bartbug he/him]

That. Is. Brilliant. 

I believe that you should ask brandon, given the chance.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Not all alloys of aluminum are inert. That's why the new super-aluminum-alloy that Miles' guns/bullets are made of is so special.

[Claincy he/him]

Kurkistan is right. The trick seems to be adding enough to strengthen it without fundamentally changing it from being aluminium. Basically trying to turn it into an "impure" aluminum that is stronger but still close enough to be aluminium, not an alloy.

 

Well, that is my take on it, it could be wrong though.

[Shardlet he/him]

In AoL in the first Wax and Wayne scene, Wax thinks about aluminum bullets.  He muses that only a few alloys are allomantically inert and that none of those has stable ballistics (i.e., good properties for bullets).  So, to Wax's previous knowledge there was no known aluminum alloy which was allomantically inert and could be used to make reliably functional bullets.  That is why this new alloy is so special.

[Swimmingly he/him]

Still, it would be interesting to see whether those aluminum alloys work allomantically or feruchemically

[Pechvarry]

There's an extra layer of oddity here: "allomantically inert" aluminum isn't... allomantically inert.  It's anti-allomantic.  Presumably, any aluminum pure enough to not give off a metal line (for iron/steel), could be burnt by an Aluminum Gnat.  And so once it's impure enough that it couldn't be burnt, it would actually appear less "inert" to a Steelpusher like Wax, as he'd find he could interact with it.

 

A non-scadrian magic system could very easily make use of aluminum, but I wouldn't count on it.  And it seems pretty clearly set up that "shades" of metals don't result in all new powers, so I wouldn't count on anything crazy.

[Elementalist he/him]

Aluminum is weird. I think we can all agree on this.

Anyways, remember that most aluminum alloys are unburnable according to WoA. In it Vin tests multiple bad alloys of aluminum to try to find its complement, and none of them did anything but make her sick. According to Wax:

When you create an alloy of a metal, you don't just end up with a mixture of metals. You get an entirely new metal.

Or something like that. Entirely new metals may share some properties with aluminum, like being anti-allomantic, but this doesn't mean they'll have the same Allomantic and Feruchemical properties.

EDIT: I think some people get confused by Kelsier's statement that you can sometimes get a bit of power from a bad alloy. My belief is that he was referring to bad proportions in an alloy. He didn't mean that you could get a bit of power from an alloy made with the wrong metal, or from using an alloy when the Allomantic metal is supposed to be pure.

EDIT 2: Spelling.

Edited January 10, 2014 by Power