theoryftl Two possibilities for Scadrian FTL

[Rasarr]

As the topic implies, I've been thinking on how Scadrial is going to achieve faster-than-light travel, and I belive I have an idea how to do so with our current knowledge of Metallic Arts. Keep in mind that's it's a very rough-around-the-edges, probably-assuming-too-much and unsupported-by-WoBs (my computer doesn't let me access Theoryland for some reason) theory, but hear me out.

 

Basically, I belive there are two ways to go faster than light: Allomantic one and Feuruchemical one. First off, Allomancy. We know two facts from Bands of Mourning:

1. Large objects, such as trains or planets, will "drag" bendalloy bubbles with them.
2. Southern Scadrians' cubes take Allomantic abilities (at least external ones) and later display them

Now imagine a very large SoScad cube, roughly the size of a train, placed in the very centre of a somewhat bigger spaceship. The cube is charged and the spaceship, which is inside the bubble, begins to move (I know a typical bendalloy bubble is much smaller than a spaceship, but I'm guessing that the size is proportional to the size of Allomancer). While usually a Slider can't carry his bendalloy bubble with him, the spaceship - and the cube - is large enough for the "dragging" effect to occur, therefore the ship cheats the system and carries the bubble while moving with in-bubble speed.

 

Going by numbers Coppermind gives, (1:8 time compression), if the ship reaches 0.5c while inside the bubble, it would appear to the outside observer as moving with 4c, which means it moves, objectively speaking, four times faster than light. Herein lies the problem with this theory, of course: even if the ship inside the bubble doesn't break the laws of physics, the bubble itself does. Still, I think this is something that could be used (going 0.1c in the bubble, 0.8c objectively, is surely fuel-saving), if only because bendalloy bubble would be a kickass sci-fi deflector shield.

 

Now, the second method, which is harder, less proveable with our current knowledge, but also less physics-breaking: Feuruchemy. More specifically, nicrosil. What do we know in this case:

1. Nicrosil Ferring can store and tap Investiture.
2. Ascension is, basically, having a ton of Investiture (this may be my misinterpretation of facts, but see: Vin and mists; Shards being basically pure Investiture and Ascending involving taking it; and I'm fairly certain there was a WoB to this effect, though as I said, I can't search for it)
3. Ascension into a Shard involves jumping into Congitive Realm, as this is where non-dead Shards reside.
4. There exists a mechanism for giving machines Feuruchemical properties and making a machine utilize it (see: the scene of the Set investigating downed SoScad ship near the end of BoM. The ship can somehow store weight.)

So, how would this work: a Nicrosil ferring (it could be that you'd actually need Nicrosil compounder for this) stores Investiture for days upon days until he/she collects it in absurd quantities, then "gives" it to the ship, which then taps all of it in a fraction of second. The amount of Investiture this realeases basically flings the ship to the CogRealm the way perpendicularity (or Ascension) would, but because of Investiture requirement runs out before the ship can Ascend, however this would look like. Voila - you are now in CogRealm and can worldhop with a ship. Of course, I have no idea how you'd return to PhysRealm. Perhaps by storing all the Investiture and leaving the nicrosilmind behind like some space junk?

 

TL;DR: Use giant bendalloy cubes in ships to travel in Slider bubbles; use nicrosil to emulate Elsecalling. 

 

So there it is. I'm curious about your opinion. Of course, feel free to poke giant logic-, WoB- and textual-evidence-shaped holes in this. I'm sure there are plenty, and I'm pretty certain someone will immediately point out something that will render this entire theory moot.

Edited April 5, 2016 by Rasarr

[Bowiespoon]

That second theory sounds very interesting, I like the idea of going into the cognitive realm to travel fast.

[Your3rdShadow]

I remember a WoB somewhere saying that someone had a good theory about how the FTL would work, but it wasn't correct because they were missing something that hadn't been shown in the books yet. Not sure if that quote was before or after BoM though. But it's worth considering that we may not have all the pieces of the puzzle. Other than that, I agree with Bowiespoon, I think the second theory has merit, at least in terms of using the coqnitive realm to travel.

[AliasSheep]

even if the ship inside the bubble doesn't break the laws of physics, the bubble itself does. 

I'm not certain that this would be the case.  From what I can tell, the bubble is just the boundaries of the effect of bendalloy rather than being an actual physical object, in which case there would be no limit to how fast it could travel.

 

(Unless of course you meant something else by this?)

[Hemalurgist]

The quote about not having enough info was before BoM if that helps.

 

Here it is:

Nov 6th, 2012

QUESTION

I think I remember hearing you say before that Mistborn was going to be three trilogies?

BRANDON SANDERSON

It'll be three trilogies, yes.

QUESTION

With the technology advancing and going faster than light...?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Yes, the FTL is built into the magic systems and so there will be something where they figure out how to do that with the magic and spaceships will be propelled using that.

QUESTION

Okay, awesome, just wanted to double check that.

JOSH

Expanding bubbles around the engines and around the ships?

BRANDON SANDERSON

You will see, you will see.

JOSH

Someone on the site actually has-

BRANDON SANDERSON

Actually figured it out?

QUESTION

Has a very convincing theory.

BRANDON SANDERSON

They're missing a very big important piece of the puzzle that you won't get for a few more books.

Edited April 6, 2016 by Hemalurgist

[Your3rdShadow]

That was indeed the quote I was thinking of. Since it's before BoM, I'd think then, that the second theory is even more plausible now.

[Kurkistan]

The problem I've always had with "the ship drags the bubble while the bubble speeds the ship" is frame of reference. So far as the bubble/ship are concerned, the ship really isn't moving, so there's no need to speed the ships movement up while it's in a bubble that's moving just as fast as it is.

 

Now this is potentially invalid analysis given new WoP showing that relativity isn't king, but I think whatever mechanism judges what's "still" will probably still be enough to stop a bubble anchored to the ship from accelerating the ship's movement.

 

For reference:

-All bubble WoBs we have pre-SoS (spoiler at the end of the OP has them)

-All the post-SoS WoBs I've yet to incorporate into the first link because I'm a bad/lazy/busy person

--Plus that WoP I linked to earlier.

[Rasarr]

I'm not certain that this would be the case.  From what I can tell, the bubble is just the boundaries of the effect of bendalloy rather than being an actual physical object, in which case there would be no limit to how fast it could travel.

 

(Unless of course you meant something else by this?)

 

You are right that bubble isn't a physical object, but at any rate, it is something - I suspect waves (there's a theory here on Shard that I'd agree with, which proposes that Investiture is wave-like in behaviour). At any rate, waves also don't travel faster-than-light - unless, of course, we assume that the medium of Investiture waves is CogRealm, in which case my objection is moot.

 

For reference:

-All bubble WoBs we have pre-SoS (spoiler at the end of the OP has them)

-All the post-SoS WoBs I've yet to incorporate into the first link because I'm a bad/lazy/busy person

--Plus that WoP I linked to earlier.

 

Thank you! I admit I only had time to skim through this briefly, but I'll certainly look through it more closely later. As for the frame of reference problem - how about the ship accelerating, then switching the bubble on? The bubble "reads" the ship as a moving mass similar to a train and thus moves accordingly, with the ship in it, and thus ship's "native" speed (the speed with which it's been moving before setting up the bubble) is increased.

...which likely leads to a whole lot of effects I'm probably unable to properly explain or deal with.

 

Anyway, thanks everyone for their opinions.

[DeadFencer]

In addition, it's possible that whatever mass/weight thing feruchemical iron stores could be used to give the spaceship a mass of zero, allowing it to go "at least" the speed of light. That would be very potent when combined with bendalloy.

[natc]

Going to need a lot of iron though . . .

Emptying it out is probably a lesser issue since you can always do it in space.

[Argel]

One thing BoM gives us is the ability to power something without needing a person to do it (recall how the airship worked). Could that be the missing piece?

[Torrieltar]

So, pulling together ideas from this thread and other things we know, and throwing in a whole bunch of conjecture and assumption:

 

Using Southern technology, a field of dilated time could be generated around a ship. Because the ship is sufficiently large, the bubble will move with the ship, effectively multiplying the ship's velocity. I wasn't able to find that 1:8 statistic the OP is referring to, but it seems to me that Bendalloy dilates time a lot more than that. People become blurs, and bullets hang in the air. Here's a description courtesy of Wax in AoL:

 

Wax fired.
   The bullet shot out of the bubble in an instant, then hit slower time. It deflected, as bullets always did when fired from within a speed bubble. He watched it go, judging its new trajectory. It moved forward sluggishly, spinning as it cut through the air.
   Wax took careful aim, waited several excruciating moments.

 

It's pretty safe to ballpark the bullet at the speed of sound (340 m/s). From Wax's perspective, the bullet was almost certainly going slower than 1 m/s, so we'll use that to get a low end estimate. That means that time was flowing at least 340x faster inside of Wayne's ordinary speed bubble.

 

That's pretty cool, but this is even better:

Question

So what happens if you have a Bendalloy bubble, and then another Bendalloy bubble inside of it?

Brandon Sanderson

It will compound and double, and it will multiply. Bendalloy is one of the metals from Alloy of Law if you haven’t read it, as this person obviously has, or has read the Ars Arcanum, you’ll find out what it does.

 

So, stack enough speed bubbles and we could get things going at pretty ridiculous speeds. There are still a couple of problems, however. According to Wikipedia:

The fastest outward-bound spacecraft yet sent, Voyager 1, has covered 1/600th of a light-year in 30 years and is currently moving at 1/18,000th the speed of light.

Granted, sci-fi Scadrians will almost certainly be able to launch ships faster than that, but let's take this as a realistic minimum. Continuing our assumption of 340x speed bubbles, the Voyager would need 53 layered speed bubbles to crack the speed of light, which is probably an unrealistic number. Even then the nearest star to Earth, for example is more than 4 light-years away. If they don't want these journeys to take years, they'll need something more. The other problem is that a standard Bendalloy bubble is not going to surround the entirety of the ship.

 

Fortunately, we've already seen a solution to these problem - Allomantic Compounding! In general, there are two facets of Allomantic powers: range and potency. A more powerful Misting will increase both the range and the potency of their Allomancy. For example, the Lord Ruler's soothing was both able to affect more people, and affect those people more profoundly than any other Soother. It's fairly safe to assume that Bendalloy works similarly. With that in mind, it's a simple matter to create an unkeyed metalmind that would alloy a Bendalloy misting to compound his or her Allomancy. They could temporarily boost their Allomancy to incredible levels (100x normal, for example) and then use it to prime an ettmetal device. Presumably, the device would be similarly amped. If not, then perhaps they could burn through ettmetal faster to achieve a similar result, though this would force them to bring and use up a ton of the stuff.

 

Boom! We have a speed bubble large enough to cover the entire ship and which dilates time enough to get us moving at least 2x the speed of light. Improved propulsion technology, more layered speed bubbles and compounding Allomancy further would get this ship to go even faster. And as SafestPear mentioned, it might be possible to increase that even further by somehow using iron feruchemy to store the ships mass.

 

There's still one major problem left in this scenario - to the outside world, the ship is now moving faster than the speed of light, but time is still passing at an accelerated pace for those inside. If the ship travels just one day, assuming we have a 34,000x speed bubble, the passengers will have aged 93 years. Interestingly, no matter how much time is dilated, the journey will take the exact same amount of time for those inside. Here are two possible solutions:

1. Create localized Cadmium bubbles within the ship to cancel out the Bendalloy. I'm not very keen on this because it seems like it would be really hard to keep the Cadmium bubbles compact while simultaneously leaving them potent enough to exactly cancel the overlaying Bendalloy bubble.
2. Or, the ship's crew just wear aluminum-lined uniforms. Better yet, the ship itself would have a layer of aluminum in the exterior except for a small part which would contain the time dilation device.

Relevant WoBs:

 

Q [2:06:26]: (Heavily paraphrased for clarity) Can you drop a speed bubble whose border goes through a piece of aluminum?

A: I think you can’t do that, it would cause the bubble to collapse. Verbatim: It’s probably going to act like you are trying to set up speed bubble on something that’s too small and moving

Note: Alternatively (obviously I can’t see any gestures going on), this could be interpreted as:

Q*: If you dropped a speed bubble whose border goes through an aluminum tube, is the inside of the tube affected by the time distortion?

A*: No, the bubble would go around the tube.

This was a Sharder questions, so a clarification would be very nice.

Note response: This is essentially correct, and Brandon understood what I meant. -- FS

 

 

 

Q [2:09:27]: Is aluminum shielding from emotional Allomancy strictly line of sight? So, can someone in the basement bypass somebody’s aluminum hat on the first floor

A: No, they could not. You just put enough aluminum there and it disrupts.

Q: So it disrupts like a field.

A: Yep.

Thanks to Kurkistan for posting the links!

 

So there we have it! Using what we know and some extrapolation, we have viable Allomantic FTL.

 

Knowing Brandon, I'm sure there's a lot more to it and my mind will be blown when he finally reveals his reasoning. And there's still so much we don't know, like what Harmonium does...

[Rasarr]

Using Southern technology, a field of dilated time could be generated around a ship. Because the ship is sufficiently large, the bubble will move with the ship, effectively multiplying the ship's velocity. I wasn't able to find that 1:8 statistic the OP is referring to, but it seems to me that Bendalloy dilates time a lot more than that. People become blurs, and bullets hang in the air. Here's a description courtesy of Wax in AoL:

 

 

It's pretty safe to ballpark the bullet at the speed of sound (340 m/s). From Wax's perspective, the bullet was almost certainly going slower than 1 m/s, so we'll use that to get a low end estimate. That means that time was flowing at least 340x faster inside of Wayne's ordinary speed bubble.

 

The 8:1 comes from Coppermind, which sources it to AoL:

 

One nugget of bendalloy can compress approximately two minutes into fifteen seconds.

 

Hence 8:1. Not certain how this corresponds with the scen you've quited - if it is 8:1 indeed, then Wayne should see the bullet moving with speed of 42,5 km/h - or 12 m/s.

 

There's still one major problem left in this scenario - to the outside world, the ship is now moving faster than the speed of light, but time is still passing at an accelerated pace for those inside. If the ship travels just one day, assuming we have a 34,000x speed bubble, the passengers will have aged 93 years. Interestingly, no matter how much time is dilated, the journey will take the exact same amount of time for those inside. Here are two possible solutions:

 

I have not thought of that   But it makes sense. I think your idea with aluminium coating on the ship has potential, especially in the light of the WoB (good catch, by the way!). 

 

Regarding Harmonium, I admit I'm in the Harmonium=ettmetal camp, although something tells me I'll be proven wrong in the next book.

[Yata]

I already though about the "accelerate aging" problem, and as far as I know only the Cadmius will be capable of solving this issues (but I am still unsure about the outcome).

 

If you protect the crew with Alluminium (and the alluminium stops the Speed bubble effect) you will kill everybody in a moment. They will be accelerated to an high speed, killing them.

[Torrieltar]

The 8:1 comes from Coppermind, which sources it to AoL:

 

 

Hence 8:1. Not certain how this corresponds with the scen you've quited - if it is 8:1 indeed, then Wayne should see the bullet moving with speed of 42,5 km/h - or 12 m/s.

 

Interesting. Thanks!

[DrakeMarshall]

I would be inclined to guess that faster than light travel is definitely linked to entering the cognitive realm. This realm has less distance where people aren't thinking and more where they are, so massive expanses of essentially space between stars would be extremely easy to traverse this way. Much faster than light, possibly.

As for the bendalloy bubbles... The idea is interesting and that would be an incredible shielding device, but wouldn't containing the entire ship in a bubble just keep the ship moving at the same velocity but speed up everybody inside? I mean, making a bubble on a train doesn't make the car you are riding in try to leap forwards.

The idea of ascension as a mechanism to enter the cognitive realm is intriguing. It wouldn't be quite like ascension, but it could work. Seeing as it is an inanimate object... Stuffed with investiture... It would probably become a sentient ship a bit like how nightblood was created. If such a ship was created, it would probably be able to take its occupants in and out of the cognitive realm.

 

Also on a slightly unrelated tangent, if one could control a windrunner's powers in a fabrial, they could probably make an Alcubierre drive. Mind you, if they could control an elsecaller's powers in a fabrial than that would be unecessary, but it is still an interesting thought.

[Master_Moridin]

As for the bendalloy bubbles... The idea is interesting and that would be an incredible shielding device, but wouldn't containing the entire ship in a bubble just keep the ship moving at the same velocity but speed up everybody inside? I mean, making a bubble on a train doesn't make the car you are riding in try to leap forwards.

 

*snip*

 

Also on a slightly unrelated tangent, if one could control a windrunner's powers in a fabrial, they could probably make an Alcubierre drive

 

Kurkistan's Everything We Know About Time Bubbles thread actually contains a lot of discussion about using time bubbles to make an Alcubierre drive

[Rasarr]

If you protect the crew with Alluminium (and the alluminium stops the Speed bubble effect) you will kill everybody in a moment. They will be accelerated to an high speed, killing them.

 

Gaaah. You solve one problem, two others jump in its place! But yeah, I suppose Cadmium could be a better fit than aluminium, as to not kill the crew. Otherwise I don't know, although... consider: inertia is calculated as F = ma, where m is mass of body inertia works on and a is acceleration (of the ship, in this case). So if the entire crew uses ironminds to store as much of their weight as possible...?*

 

Also, while we're mentioning cadmium: you could use cadmium cubes as alternative to hibernation.

*disclaimer: Rasarr is not actually a physicist

 

As for the bendalloy bubbles... The idea is interesting and that would be an incredible shielding device, but wouldn't containing the entire ship in a bubble just keep the ship moving at the same velocity but speed up everybody inside? I mean, making a bubble on a train doesn't make the car you are riding in try to leap forwards.

 

That's because you don't actually contain the train, only part of it, the same way the planet doesn't leap forward under Wayne's feet when he's burning bendalloy on ground level. My idea assumes that the entire ship is contained in the bubble, like Wax's and Wayne's guns, which do work appropriately faster when in the bubble, and the bubble moves because the cube that sets up the bubble is heavy enough to drag it with it.

 

The idea of ascension as a mechanism to enter the cognitive realm is intriguing. It wouldn't be quite like ascension, but it could work. Seeing as it is an inanimate object... Stuffed with investiture... It would probably become a sentient ship a bit like how nightblood was created. If such a ship was created, it would probably be able to take its occupants in and out of the cognitive realm.

 

The idea of sentient ship is just so great, and the mechanism should work, too. Store Investiture to get out, tap it to get in.