Feruchemical Steel; Steelrunning, a Comprehensive Conglomeration.

[Djarskublar]

I got you guys. Here's the deal, say you have a feruchemical ability that you can store 100% of. You store it for an hour. Now you tap it over an hour and have 200% for that hour. Here's where ratios come in. Say you want 300%, well you might think that since you are adding 200%, you would get a half hour of tap time. This isn't quite the case. You would get that time, but in reality, once you start pushing a tap past 200ish, you lose power. You are spending some of the power just to be able to push that high. So instead you get 25 minutes of 300%. There is some power loss.

Now say you want 500%. You are adding 400% to your standard ability, so that would be 1/4 of the stored time, or 15 minutes. Now you are compressing it even further, though, so in reality you get maybe 8-10 minutes. Capiche?

Now does my bit about losing time make sense? You lose some of the stored time if you compress it into a big burst of speed. Hence you actually age slower.

It gets more complex once you consider only storing at, say, 60%. It's easier to get if you convert that to 100% hours equivalent, then do some more math.

And that is the totality of feruchemy.

[Spoolofwhool]

Right. Thing is though, it has been stated that in Alloy of Law by Wax that you can halve your weight to double it later on for the same time, which doesn't work with what you're saying. What you're talking about is subtractive/additive. We understand it when it's additive/subtractive. The confusion arose when it became multipliers.  Also, I found some contradicting WoBs. First WoB says feruchemy is additive/substractive. Second WoB say that feruchemy is about multipliers, like what Wax was talking about. Checking the dates, it seems the one about addition/subtraction was said well before at HoA release, with the others all being around AoL release. This indicates to me that between those points, Brandon changed his mind about how it works. 

I do understand how time is being lost. I didn't know about the loss at compounding, but understood once I was informed earlier. However, this does still beg the slight question of how it can be still considered end-neutral with the multipliers, but I think my last post explained it. The confusion about losing time is long past. The current confusion is about multipliers.

Edited August 26, 2016 by Spoolofwhool

[Djarskublar]

Those aren't contradictory. The first one is correct. The second one makes sense once you understand the person's question is flawed. You don't get 5 times slower, you get 80% slower. And while you perceive it as 5 (20/100 or 1/5 left) times slower, if you jack it up to 100 times slower, you are really only storing 99% (1/100 left), so only 19% difference in power storage. That is what the second one is explaining. That help?

Edit: oh and you must have that Wax quote off. 50% off for an hour is +50% for an hour.

And also, just seeing your edit now. It didn't load that for the previous post, so yeah. By the way, it is truly end neutral up to where you hit around a 200% tap. You don't get 20% stronger for 6 hours with a 100% one hour store. It's 20% for 5 hours like the math predicts. The power loss from compressing your tap isn't end negative. The tap is spending some energy to tap that high. It strains you a lot, so some energy is spent countering the strain. It's like bending a metal bar, sorta. If you bend it a little, it's just how far do you move the bar. If you try moving it a lot, you are also expending effort counteracting how springy the bar is. You are still using the same amount of energy, it just doesn't all go into moving the bar.

Edited August 26, 2016 by Djarskublar

[Spoolofwhool]

No it doesn't, because you are ignoring two major points, one of which was inadvertently lost when I posted without me realizing so I'll say it again. First, according to Wax, he can store half his weight (50%), to double his weight (200%) for the same amount of time. This indicates that it is a multiplier, not an additive, or Wax just can't tell his weight accurately. However, more important is this WoB which I meant to post, which says that feruchemy is about multipliers. 

Edited August 26, 2016 by Spoolofwhool

[Djarskublar]

Yeah multipliers like 1/5. We are talking ratios and percents, not multipliers like you are talking about. You must be misreading the wax quote.

The TLR thing is kinda misleading. He was saying he needs multiplicatively (pretend for a minute he said exponents) more stored age to keep himself young. This means TLR has to compound more and more age to keep himself young as time goes on. The fact that the feruchemy is additive, while TLR's needs are multiplicative means there is a hard upper bound to how long he can live. Eventually he would spend literally all day compounding just to stay alive. Then that wouldn't be enough and he would die. That's what that quote is talking about. I refer you to the first quote in your previous post. It says 50% strength for one hour is 150% str for one hour. There you have it. I know what I'm talking about. I had the same understanding struggle you are, and eventually worked through it in my brain. You just must be misreading things, so it's perceived contradiction is adding to your confusion.

[Ari]

12 hours ago, Spoolofwhool said:

That's what I used to think to, that it was subtractive/additive, since that made the most sense end-neutralwise and based on the descriptions on how feruchemy works in-book. Then there was WoB and AoL which said they were multiplicative and I got confused.

The only one truly end-neutral is copper. Also, think in terms of multiplication screws with my understanding of Atium as well, though I think I just need to think about it more

EDIT. I just realized that you could qualify that feruchemy is end-neutral when you take into account the lesser returns when you amplify the tapping. Consider. As I point out, at lower tap rate, there is a net increase in how much attribute you are taking out versus how much you put in. This means that you are gaining an end-positive effect. However, at higher tap rates, you end up losing a bit, and I imagine once you really amplify it, it becomes end-negative. Now when you put its end-positive aspect and its end-negative aspect together, you get end-neutral. I still don't like it though. 

I'm pretty sure Feruchemy is end-neutral if you tap at up to the rate at which you can store, and you could argue it becomes "end-negative" when you're effectively withdrawing more than your normal feruchemical strength would allow for. (as the speed of storing is variable based on the strength of the feruchemist with their power, so a feruchemist tapping a feruchemical power from a Nicrosilmind will increase their speed at storing the relevant Feruchemical attribute, and presumably also the maximum amount they can tap before losing charge faster than normal)

Although I think Brandon would probably argue that even tapping something extra-fast is end-neutral, it's just that some of the power is used up in the process of expanding your body's (or mind's or spirit's) capacity to absorb the feruchemical charge.

I imagine Feruchemy is never "end-positive," even temporarily.

Edited August 26, 2016 by Ari

[The One Who Connects]

9 hours ago, Spoolofwhool said:

First WoB says feruchemy is additive/substractive. Second WoB say that feruchemy is about multipliers, like what Wax was talking about. Checking the dates, it seems the one about addition/subtraction was said well before at HoA release, with the others all being around AoL release. This indicates to me that between those points, Brandon changed his mind about how it works. 

Ok, so here's my morning opinion on the discussion.

Additive: Store 50%/10min, tap 50%/10min. Basically this:

9 hours ago, Djarskublar said:

Here's the deal, say you have a feruchemical ability that you can store 100% of. You store it for an hour. Now you tap it over an hour and have 200% for that hour. Here's where ratios come in. Say you want 300%, well you might think that since you are adding 200%, you would get a half hour of tap time. This isn't quite the case. You would get that time, but in reality, once you start pushing a tap past 200ish, you lose power. You are spending some of the power just to be able to push that high. So instead you get 25 minutes of 300%. There is some power loss.

Multipliers: To me, I feel that multipliers has to do with how much you can store. The older you get, the less "natural age" you can store. A healthy person can store more natural health than a sick person, etc..

How does this sound to you?   Yes I ignored the Wax quote, I'd rather say my piece and let you guys discuss while I try and find the quote

[Spoolofwhool]

50 minutes ago, The One Who Connects said:

Ok, so here's my morning opinion on the discussion.

Additive: Store 50%/10min, tap 50%/10min. Basically this:

Multipliers: To me, I feel that multipliers has to do with how much you can store. The older you get, the less "natural age" you can store. A healthy person can store more natural health than a sick person, etc..

How does this sound to you?   Yes I ignored the Wax quote, I'd rather say my piece and let you guys discuss while I try and find the quote

Regarding the Wax quote, I'm going to try to pull it today, probably in about 9-10 hours. Regarding multipliers, it seems to me that Brandon is generally talking about feruchemy being about multipliers. Also, I found a reddit where Peter was talking about some theory regarding weight storage and how it was impossible. Someone asked whether it was wrong because feruchemy is about multipliers, and Peter agreed. I can pull that later if need be.

I'll be honest though, I do want it to be additive/subtractive since that makes more sense, it's just that I'm going with what we have been informed, or what I'm perceiving that we are being informed as it being.

Edited August 26, 2016 by Spoolofwhool

[Djarskublar]

At this point, I'm not sure what you mean by multiplicative. I feel like I've covered the normal definition for it fairly well, so I think you must think it is something really funky.

Are you saying you make yourself 1000 times slower and it fills really fast, then you can tap and make yourself 500 times faster for half the time? That is definitely not how it works. Brandon directly refutes that in the one WoB. With almost that exact example. You would perceive it as 1000 times slower, but you are really doing a 99.9% store, so if you did that for an hour, you might get one half second of 500 times speed. At best. Probably less since you would actually experience 250 seconds there. Maybe more like 100th of a second of real time.

What Peter is talking about may be more about how the power loss experienced in a compressed tap gets multiplicatively larger the more you compress things. The amount of time you actually get vs your prediction from pure math is something similar to a 1/x graph, but more complex.

[Spoolofwhool]

36 minutes ago, Djarskublar said:

At this point, I'm not sure what you mean by multiplicative. I feel like I've covered the normal definition for it fairly well, so I think you must think it is something really funky.

Are you saying you make yourself 1000 times slower and it fills really fast, then you can tap and make yourself 500 times faster for half the time? That is definitely not how it works. Brandon directly refutes that in the one WoB. With almost that exact example. You would perceive it as 1000 times slower, but you are really doing a 99.9% store, so if you did that for an hour, you might get one half second of 500 times speed. At best. Probably less since you would actually experience 250 seconds there. Maybe more like 100th of a second of real time.

What Peter is talking about may be more about how the power loss experienced in a compressed tap gets multiplicatively larger the more you compress things. The amount of time you actually get vs your prediction from pure math is something similar to a 1/x graph, but more complex.

I've already explained what I mean by multipliers, but I'll go over it again when I get the quote from Wax. Or I'll realize I was wrong as abandon this point altogether.

[Djarskublar]

Hmmm. Looking at what you said again, I think I see what you are saying, and yes, the amount you can store does work that way. If you are old, you can't store as much age, if you are well trained in strength, you can store more. If you are ill, you can't store health much at all. So both things apply. Taps are additive, but how much you can store is based on your state of being. I recommend searching the forum for a thread that deals with this more specifically to get some other perspectives on it, so that you see different wordings.

[Spoolofwhool]

Ignore everything I said about multipliers. I found the quote in Alloy of Laws I was looking for and it confirmed that it is additive/subtractive. I guess that all the multiplier things Brandon and Peter said were regarding feruchemical compounding. So yeah... Feruchemy makes sense as end-neutral, until you start amplifying the tap and it turns end-negative for reasons.

Here's the quote for anyone who wants to know:

Spoiler

Quote

Feruchemy was powered by a sort of cannabalism, where you consumed a part of yourself for later use. Make yourself weigh half as much for ten days, and you could make yourself one and a half times as heavy for a near-equal amount of time. Or you could make yourself twice as heavy for half the time. Or four times as heavy for a quarter of that time.