Why/How does Compounding Work?

[HoidvsVoid]

Compounding works by burning your feruchemical storages with allomancy to get more power out of them. My question is that while feruchemy works while just wearing them, allomancy needs to be burned in your body. So how can someone burn their feruchemical storages with allomancy if the bracers (or other jewelry) are not in their body? Am I missing something obvious? 

[Spoolofwhool]

They do have to either swallow the metalmind, though preferably by grinding it down first, or they can burn their piercings directly, if those are their metalminds.

[HoidvsVoid]

So they can only burn pierced metal? So a regular allomancer is able to burn metal just by piercing himself? That doesn't make sense.

Edited February 2, 2017 by HoidvsVoid

[The One Who Connects]

16 minutes ago, HoidvsVoid said:

So they can only burn pierced metal? So a regular Allomancer is able to burn metal just by piercing himself? That doesn't make sense.

They'd have to overcome their own cognitive perception that the metal is not in a burnable position, but in essence they could technically do this. There's a WoB floating around somewhere that if a Leecher were to drain someone it would burn out a metal piercing so it has been extrapolated that, since it is inside the body, any other Allomancer could do the same.

Vin lacked the cognitive understanding that the metal could be affected, and as such it did not burn out when she used Aluminum/Duralumin. The fact that it was a Hemalurgic Spike might also have something to do with this, but I'm not sure that alone would work against something like Aluminum.

Edit: Since I didn't technically answer your question, only piercings work because they are partly inside the body which is what matters for Allomancy.

Edited February 2, 2017 by The One Who Connects

[Jofwu]

The metal for Allomancy just has to be "in your body". Not necessarily in your stomach. Most of the characters don't realize this, however, as far as I can tell. There's some element of having to "know what you're doing" involved.

Edited February 2, 2017 by jofwu

[HoidvsVoid]

What about if the metal is in your mouth? Because we know from zane that that is considered to be in your body. It just does not click together in my opinion.

[Spoolofwhool]

It's probably cognitive to some degree. I don't think "I'm your mouth" is considered to be in your body by most people.

Also, in the mouth to prevent allomancy due to spiritual interference is not the same as in the body for allomancy.

Edited February 2, 2017 by Spoolofwhool

[HoidvsVoid]

Where is it confirmed that feruchemical stores need to actually need to pierce the body?

[Spoolofwhool]

16 minutes ago, HoidvsVoid said:

Where is it confirmed that feruchemical stores need to actually need to pierce the body?

Nowhere because they don't need to be.

[HoidvsVoid]

I meant for compounding.

Edited February 2, 2017 by HoidvsVoid

[The One Who Connects]

21 minutes ago, HoidvsVoid said:

Where is it confirmed that feruchemical stores need to actually need to pierce the body?

3 minutes ago, HoidvsVoid said:

I meant for compounding.

You are misinterpreting the various "only" used on this thread. Of metals not in the stomach, only a piercing would count as in the body, otherwise you'd burn the iron in your blood. A compounder can only burn a metalmind that is piercing their body unless they somehow break/melt it down into swallowable chunks for the same reason: inside the body

Edited February 2, 2017 by The One Who Connects

[HoidvsVoid]

What is the difference between piercings and iron in your blood?

[DeTess]

A real biologist or chemist might correct me, but the iron in your blood isn't in the form of pure iron. It's in the form of hemoglobin which is a rather complicated molecule. So it most likely doesn't register as a pure metal for allomantic purposes.

[HoidvsVoid]

Let me rephrase? The difference between a steel ring and a steel pin in your head from surgery completely buried, not noticeable.

Edited February 2, 2017 by HoidvsVoid

[Spoolofwhool]

14 minutes ago, HoidvsVoid said:

What is the difference between piercings and iron in your blood?

My opinion is that you can't burn metabolized metals as that would hurt you. It's a safe guard which preserves the allomancer.  

Also, as @randuir has said, iron in the blood is not elemental iron, but an ionic variant (Fe 2+) bound into heme groups. 

Edit: @HoidvsVoid You can burn that steel pin if it's allomantic steel. WoB is that you can also burn a copper IUD.

Edited February 2, 2017 by Spoolofwhool

[HoidvsVoid]

Thanks. That clears it up. It isn't explained in the books (not that i recall).

 

[Spoolofwhool]

A lot of technical information isn't known from the books.

[Yata]

54 minutes ago, HoidvsVoid said:

Thanks. That clears it up. It isn't explained in the books (not that i recall).

It isn't deeply explained in the books because nobody in the books knows the detail of the Compound...Compounder are quite rare and until we have some Southern scientist's POV (or in a few years also the Northern one) we can't have an explicit in-world explaination

[Yezrien]

5 hours ago, HoidvsVoid said:

Compounding works by burning your feruchemical storages with allomancy to get more power out of them. 

Strictly speaking, this isn't really how it works.

When you burn metals in your stomach, you're drawing on the power of Preservation. That power passes through the metal, which encodes a specific effect. When it passes through zinc, for instance, it's encoded to riot people's emotions.

But when you fill a zincmind with mental speed, you're altering the zinc. So if you burn that zincmind, the Preservation-investiture that passes through it will be encoded with the feruchemical effect, not the standard allomantic one. You'll be drawing mental speed directly from preservation.

Compounders don't use metalminds to "fuel" allomancy. It's actually more like the opposite. The feruchemical attribute in the metalmind is supercharged with the raw power of allomancy. 

Edited February 2, 2017 by Belzedar

[nervousnerd]

2 hours ago, Belzedar said:

Strictly speaking, this isn't really how it works.

When you burn metals in your stomach, you're drawing on the power of Preservation. That power passes through the metal, which encodes a specific effect. When it passes through zinc, for instance, it's encoded to riot people's emotions.

But when you fill a zincmind with mental speed, you're altering the zinc. So if you burn that zincmind, the Preservation-investiture that passes through it will be encoded with the feruchemical effect, not the standard allomantic one. You'll be drawing mental speed directly from preservation.

Compounders don't use metalminds to "fuel" allomancy. It's actually more like the opposite. The feruchemical attribute in the metalmind is supercharged with the raw power of allomancy. 

Exactly. They allomantically burn their feruchemical metalminds to produce a large burst of that feruchemical power. That confused me a lot at first too. Also if they are smart, they will then use that burst of power to fill a new metalmind and repeat until they have near unlimited power (not really but sort of).

[Erinzard]

Wait, hold on a second. I thought that so far, compounding has only been considered to be Allomancy fueling Feruchemy. Meaning for example instead of getting weak eyesight to fill your metalmind up with amazing eyesight to use later, you burn tin as an allomancer and use that explosion of enhanced eyesight to dump directly into your metalmind so you don't need to spend any time with weak eyesight. Then, when you tap this energy some strange things can occur (resonances) because of the way you combined the two. Have I been thinking about it backwards the entire time? This is blowing my mind. So if that's the case, for Miles Hundredlives to burn allomantic gold by itself, he'd have to make sure he burned the right gold sitting in his stomach, not the gold metalmind he'd burn if someone shoots him in the face. 

That brings up the question of how to feel the difference, because metal reserves are always described as a whole, not in chunks. So unless allomantically fueled metalminds feel different to someone trying to burn them, you would only feel like your reserves had become massive, right?

[nervousnerd]

1 hour ago, Erinzard said:

Wait, hold on a second. I thought that so far, compounding has only been considered to be Allomancy fueling Feruchemy. Meaning for example instead of getting weak eyesight to fill your metalmind up with amazing eyesight to use later, you burn tin as an allomancer and use that explosion of enhanced eyesight to dump directly into your metalmind so you don't need to spend any time with weak eyesight. Then, when you tap this energy some strange things can occur (resonances) because of the way you combined the two. Have I been thinking about it backwards the entire time? This is blowing my mind. So if that's the case, for Miles Hundredlives to burn allomantic gold by itself, he'd have to make sure he burned the right gold sitting in his stomach, not the gold metalmind he'd burn if someone shoots him in the face. 

That brings up the question of how to feel the difference, because metal reserves are always described as a whole, not in chunks. So unless allomantically fueled metalminds feel different to someone trying to burn them, you would only feel like your reserves had become massive, right?

No. Like I said, the best use is to use compounding to fill metalminds before you even have need of them. It works like normal feruchemy but is just easier to store power. Instead of having to spend weeks sick to save up as much as Wayne, Miles cold just spend days. You store 1 day of power in a metalmind then burn it to get about 10 days of power back. 

It is only really pewter and tin that have any compatible powers in that sense. That is a good point though. I wonder if tin allomancy affects your metalmind stored vision or if pewter affects your strength metal mind. 

[The One Who Connects]

2 hours ago, nervousnerd said:

It is only really pewter and tin that have any compatible powers in that sense. That is a good point though. I wonder if tin allomancy affects your metalmind stored vision or if pewter affects your strength metal mind. 

Brandon has said that you can store A-Pewter strength in a Metalmind, but at that point you may as well compound, so hopefully that helps answer your question

[nervousnerd]

55 minutes ago, The One Who Connects said:

Brandon has said that you can store A-Pewter strength in a Metalmind, but at that point you may as well compound, so hopefully that helps answer your question

Yeah. I guess that makes sense. Strength is strength. A compounding pewter ferring wouldn't be able to store anything but the strength component of allomantic pewter I suppose.

[Yata]

9 minutes ago, nervousnerd said:

Yeah. I guess that makes sense. Strength is strength. A compounding pewter ferring wouldn't be able to store anything but the strength component of allomantic pewter I suppose.

Yes probably you may use A-Pewter to store some extra Speed (F-Steel), Healing (F-gold) and maybe Mental Speed (F-Zinc).

Of course this kind of "fast storage" is linear (depend by your ability to burn metals) while the standard Compound become exponential until you reach your limit.