The Measurement of Feruchemy

[The Technovore]

Alright I've been wanting to post this for a while so here we go.

I've been thinking lately about Era 3, and how magic is going to turn into a science as technology advances. 

Attempting to create an objective measure for Allomancy would be extremely difficult, as there are many, many, many, many factors. 

Different metals burn at different speeds, Allomancers have varying amounts of power, how are you going to measure tin? You would have to figure out a way to measure things like taste and touch.

Similar problems arise when attempting to create an objective measure for Feruchemy, if 2 people are storing pewter at half their capacity, you would find different charges in each metalmind, because everyone has different capacities.

However, you can create a personal measure for Feruchemy, something that each individual Feruchemist can use to measure their own power. 

(I realize this is super pretentious but...) I give you, the Feril. Pronounced like the last name of Will Ferrell, a Feril can be used for all metalminds, and is equivalent of a person storing an attribute at 9/10 (%90) of their normal capacity, for a single second. If you store speed at %90 percent for 2 minutes, you just got yourself 120 ferils, congratulations. If you store strength at %10 for 10 seconds, you got yourself 90 ferils (because you're storing at 9 ferils/second).

Tapping power is also measured in Ferils, where when you tap an attribute at 1 feril/second, you've set that attribute to %110 of your normal capacity.

This is also extremely useful at knowing how quickly you are consuming power. Say you tap steel at 10 ferils/second (or a decaferil, ferils are metric), since a feril is equal to %10 of your power, 10 ferils will give you an extra %100 of your power, doubling your speed. Your speed in creases to 3x normal at 20 ferils/second, and it continues linearly.

At 100 Fps (ferils per second), you've added %1000 of your power to your normal %100, boosting that attribute to 11x normal.

And at 1 kiloferil/second, you've boosted capacity to 101x normal.

 

So yea, there's my idea. Please let me know if I'm basing this off of any misconceptions I may have, and just give thoughts in general. I think it's cool, but then I'm the guy that came up with it.  (Also tell me if that made any sense at all, or if I just confused you to no end)

 

As a completely un-related thing, do we have confirmation on how nicrosil works? Because I always had the idea that when you store it, you become less magic, and then later you can tap it to become a super-wizard, do we have an WoB's on that?

(also how the heck do I make spoiler-square-text-thingys?)

 

 

Edited February 15, 2017 by The Technovore
Fixing something stupid that Autocorrect did, may it burn Braize.

[+hwiles]

Questions regarding the operation of Nicrosil are being rafo'd for the time being unfortunately so we don't know for sure how it works.  People have some very interesting and complicated theories but I'm not well-versed enough to delve too deep into that rabbit hole.

In general, I like your approach.  There is one glaring problem though and that is the fact that tapping a metalmind at high speeds grants diminishing returns IE: there is some inefficiency and non-linearity to metalmind tapping.  To use your example, tapping 100 Fps would give you a theoretical maximum increase of 11x in an attribute, but in reality, the increase you experienced would be somewhat less than this.  The specifics of this phenomenon haven't been canonized yet.  I suspect that future generations of ferrings will be subject to greater inefficiency similar to how mistings are becoming weaker, but this is speculative.

The reason for this mechanism, as I understand it, is primarily to keep feruchemy from being unreasonably powerful (though it is still a potent magic system).  Sadly, without access to the equations or relationships relating feruchemical storage rate, tapping rate, and efficiency, defining a useful unit system may be beyond our reach.

To create spoiler tags click on the "eye" icon above the post box.

[Erandeni]

That´s very cool, but I would use a universal measure of feruchemical charge instead of a personal one, How? well,as Sazed says in WoA:

Quote

They were small, for metalminds, but storing up Feruchemical attributes took time. It would take weeks to fill even a ring's worth of metal and he barely had days.

 We can assume that the feruchemical charge a metal can hold depends of the volume so we use 1cm^3 of a ferruchemical metal as the universal unit of measurement, I mean, 1cm^3 full of charge would be a Feril, as you had call it.

That way you can sell unkeyed metalminds and everyone know how much charge it has(and an inspector would visit you if the actual and nominal charge doesn´t correspond), also it solve the problem of the lost of charge when tapping as you measure the charge inside the metal instead of the charge you tap/store.

 

Edited February 15, 2017 by Idealistic Mistborn
Added some thoughts

[18th Shard]

I feel like we could measure a Feruchemical charge similarly to electricity. A particular metalmind's capacity for a fEnergy would be equivalent to capacitance, which would be easy to standardize as @Idealistic Mistborn suggested. Each person could find out their own personal "resistance" for fEnergy. If a Feril is a unit of feruchemical energy, it would be the feruchemical equivalent of voltage and electric charge, which makes it hard to define the current equivalent.

Conversely, Allomancy seems to more easily adapt to voltage (power provided by Preservation being the emf), with each person having a similar resistance value for this energy. Here, current would be somehow related to the burn rate of a metal.

In either, the energy outputed would be the equivalent of a joule, and the rate at which this occured would be a "Investiture watt". However I agree it is hard to standardize this between metals. Hmmm. I'll have to think on this more.

[swieczq]

I wonder if charging metalmind so its "fully-charged" becomes slower and slower (as in charging the capacitor) or there is just a limit where you can't store anymore?

Edited February 16, 2017 by swieczq

[Kaymyth]

5 hours ago, swieczq said:

I wonder if charging metalmind so its "fully-charged" becomes slower and slower (as in charging the capacitor) or there is just a limit where you can't store anymore?

I believe there's a hard limit.  Size definitely matters when it comes to metalminds (and metal purity and/or perfection in alloy mixes may also play a part to capacity), and there's definitely an upper limit to storage.  It's just very difficult to hit that limit on anything of substantial size if you're not Compounding.

[18th Shard]

So I was working on this last night, and I figure if you say a metalmind is a capacitor, electric charge is what you are storing, and the voltage source is yourself (the feruchemist) for charging (storing). Then when you discharge the metalmind, the feruchemist acts as the resistor, a variable one that decreases resistance as you tap more. [Perhaps deal with this by making the Feruchemist a generator/motor, which changes from emf to resistor]. As a side note, you might be able to account for loss for high tapping levels in the same way resistors drain energy as heat. As a suggestion, Metalminds should be rated in "Ferads" (b))and you store the above "Ferils" of fCharge in it. They should have a hard upper limit, but it should become logarithmically harder to store in a metalmind. Thus, current is the rate of power you are tapping/storing.

In Allomancy, Preservation is the voltage source, the Mistborn is the (again variable) resistor. I think that in between the two there should be some kind of conducting material (representing the metal) that deteriorates as current passes through it (perhaps similar to steel wool? I don't know of a real world analog here). Flaring metal is decreasing your resistance, however you can only decrease it so far. The size of the emf should relate to the strength of the Allomancer (i.e. Elend had a bigger battery than Kelsier), and perhaps savantism is the efficency of the resistor(?).

Compounding in my mind is hooking the capacitor up to the Allomantic circuit, then discharging the filled capcitor, creating a voltage spike (?). If anyone has a better analogy with the above ones for Compounding, go ahead and make it.

Resonances for Twinborn would be like a magnetic field created between the two circuits when they are close by each other. 

Standardization should probably use ettmetal, as that can be standardized more easily than most people. This will be easier for allomancy than feruchemy, at least from what we know. 

Hemalurgy is ripping the circuit free of another person (resistor) than attaching it to oneself.

Multiple powers should be treated as multiple circuits hooked up too the same source of voltage. I'm not sure how to treat duralumin/nicrosil/aluminum/chromium in the analogy. To be clear, when the Metalborn is the resistor, it is more specifically the part of their spiritweb that codes for that power that is the resistor.

If anyone wants to clear this up, feel free, I just kind of word vomited it here.

Edit: Voltage could be measured by relating relative uses of the same metal/charge to identify resistance and using V=IR perhaps.

Edited February 16, 2017 by 18th Shard
More thoughts.

[The Technovore]

Wow you guys really took to this topic. Thanks for the info on the diminishing returns, I was afraid that my idea would have a hole punched through it by something like that, but oh well.  

 

I do like the idea of a Feril being the equivalent of a cm^3 of metal that's full of charge, but then if there's some kind of degradation of power there too then that's kinda out the window until we can get an idea of the rate of degradation.

Honestly if I can just get the Feril to be used for SOMETHING in feruchemy, then my work is complete.  

[The One Who Connects]

Something to consider with Feruchemy is that while some metals have storing limits due to health concerns (Gold, Pewter, etc..) As far as I can recall, we don't know if those limits are imposed at a set percentage by the magic system or if it is simply where that person would lose the ability to continue functioning (strength to make the heart pump blood for example)
We know that a heavier person stores more total "weight" if two people are storing at 100%, but that's not necessarily relevant at the moment.
If something like say Health is maxed out at a limit of storing 40% of total health, then having the healthier person is the better deal, as a sick person starts out at something like 80% instead of full health. But what if the limit isn't a hardline? Person A can store 40%, but Person B's constitution can handle being a little less healthy, so they could store 43-44% and feel no different than Person A does.
I imagine that since Wax can tell how much weight he is storing, other people should be able to tell how much they are storing right? That would simplify the standardization a fair bit, at least make one of the variables turn into a known variable.

1 hour ago, The Technovore said:

I do like the idea of a Feril being the equivalent of a cm^3 of metal that's full of charge, but then if there's some kind of degradation of power there too then that's kinda out the window until we can get an idea of the rate of degradation.

Honestly if I can just get the Feril to be used for SOMETHING in feruchemy, then my work is complete.

Attributes, while stored, have no degradation in Feruchemy. It only diminishes when you are tapping at an increased percentage rate to the one you stored at. 2 Hours at 50% should logically be 1 Hour at 100%, but some of the power is used(not lost) to increase the rate of tapping. So you would really have something like 100% for 52 minutes, or an Hour at 94% or something similar. Brandon hasn't saw fit to grant us the actual formula, just theoretical examples so don't take my example and build a formula around it, I made it up. Hemalurgy is where degradation happens, but that's also only when the spike is outside the body.
As a separate curiosity, where did the term "Feril" come from?

Edited February 16, 2017 by The One Who Connects
improper words

[The Technovore]

1 minute ago, The One Who Connects said:

As a separate curiosity, where did the term "Feril" come from?

No idea really, it just kinda popped into my head and I thought "Well it sounds like Feruchemy so let's run with it!"

(Also because I like Will Ferrell movies and I may have been thinking about one of said movie directly prior to coming up with this)

 

[Yata]

I think it's better to avoid to set the Feril with a relationship on the amount of charge to fill a specific metalmind's size.

First of all we don't know if different Feruchemist has different limits (a theory is that a stronger Feruchemist could fill a Metalmind more), lastly from a WoB seems that a Metalmind's capacity isn't linear with its mass/volume

[Spoolofwhool]

22 minutes ago, Yata said:

I think it's better to avoid to set the Feril with a relationship on the amount of charge to fill a specific metalmind's size.

First of all we don't know if different Feruchemist has different limits (a theory is that a stronger Feruchemist could fill a Metalmind more), lastly from a WoB seems that a Metalmind's capacity isn't linear with its mass/volume

Which WoB?

To the overall topic, I agree that creating a unit of measure which references a person is a poor idea, especially when point is reached where unkeyed and unsealed medallions are commonly used.

[Yata]

Just now, Spoolofwhool said:

Which WoB?

I can't remember the wording but someone asked about Metalmind's capacity and Bradon said it's more complex than you could think....So I think the "linear scaling with the mass or volume" isn't really an likely option.
I will try to find this WoB but I remember only the general sense and of course I store Informations in another language...this is the reason I have problem to find old WoB also if I remember them

[Erandeni]

37 minutes ago, Spoolofwhool said:

Which WoB?

I believe he is talking about this one:

Quote

Question

Does the size of a piece of metal determine the amount of Feruchemical charge that can be stored in it? So how does it scale, in terms of volume?

Brandon Sanderson

It does. So I’ve talked about this before. It does not scale as logically as people would think. There are certain thresholds.

It says that there are thresholds so it not scale as logically as we could think, but it does depend on volume, so I belive that we can use the volume of the metal full of charge as unit.

@18th Shard If we use a hidrodynamic equivalence for fcharge we can use this continuity equation(I belive it is used in electronics too)

where ρ is the amount of feruchemical charge per unit volume,j is the amount you store/tap per unit time and σ are the loss.

You just have to make the σ depends on the j when you are tapping(you lost more charge when you tap faster) and equal to zero when you are storing.

Then the equation just says that the fcharge has to be conserved, when you are storing the amount you let flow into the metalmind is the amount that exist into the metalmind, but when tapping the amount you tap is less os the amount in the metalmind because there are loss.

PD:Sorry if I get too nerdy, but I love using models for explain the nature laws, or in this case magic laws.

 

[Spoolofwhool]

@Idealistic Mistborn Can you post a link to the source of that WoB?

[Erandeni]

4 minutes ago, Spoolofwhool said:

@Idealistic Mistborn Can you post a link to the source of that WoB?

http://www.theoryland.com/intvsresults.php?kw=feruchemical+charge

[Yata]

On 16/2/2017 at 10:02 PM, Idealistic Mistborn said:

I believe he is talking about this one:

Yeah it was that WoB, I tried to search with "metalmind" and "feruchemy" without success, thanks

On 16/2/2017 at 10:02 PM, Idealistic Mistborn said:

It says that there are thresholds so it not scale as logically as we could think, but it does depend on volume, so I belive that we can use the volume of the metal full of charge as unit.

I disagree, the no logical scale may mean a lot of things:

It is possible that you have two equal iron rings (I will use Iron for an easy access to the attribute) filled until their limits, then I forge the two rings together and their ability to hold charge is more than their previous capacities together.

This is probably the reason for some relative small objects to be able to keep an huge amount of charge (The Bands for example, but I will point to other high invested object in the Cosmere). As the metal's mass or volume become greater their Feruchemical's size grows faster than linear.

Edited February 18, 2017 by Yata

[18th Shard]

I'd like to restate the supposition that if a metalmind acts as a capacitor, then it should be increasingly hard to store charge in it as charge increases (or more technically, charge is stored at a lower rate the more filled the metalmind would be). Capacitors have a time constant that describes how long it takes to fill them to various percents of their capacity. It is calculated as RC, that is, the Resistance multiplied by the Capacitance. Capacitance would be dependent on the metalmind, but resistance relates solely to the Feruchemist and therefore could be considered the Feruchemical strength. A stronger feruchemist should fill faster and therefore reach a reasonable maximum to storing in one metalmind after a weaker one.

I would therefore suppose that it would be much easier for a Nicrosil compounder (such as the Sovereign) to fill a metalmind to a much higher storage level than another Feruchemist. This would explain the high level of Investiture in the Bands of Mourning.

@Idealistic Mistborn I have not done partial differentials (I think that is the math level required for that particular model), I've only done calculus so far. I am in a Calc-based Electricity and Magnetism class currently, so you'd have to explain that particular equation on a dumber level for me to get it.

Edited February 17, 2017 by 18th Shard

[Erandeni]

On 17/2/2017 at 0:46 PM, Yata said:

As the metal's mass or volume become greater their Feruchemical's size grows faster than linear.

That´s a good point, but even if the max fcharge doesn´t scale with the volume as we have assume we still can use that ferril as the equivalent max fcharge in a cm^3. If it doesnt scale linnearlly with the volumen two Ferril would be twice the max fcharge that a cm^3 can hold, wich would be different that the max fcharge that two cm^3 can hold, but it still can be use as a unit.

22 hours ago, 18th Shard said:

you'd have to explain that particular equation on a dumber level for me to get it.

That equation is just a way to present what we know about feruchemy, i´ll tried to explain it the best I can.

ρ is the feruchemical charge,J is the amount you store/tap and σ are the losses. 

So if you are not tapping/storing J and σ are both zero and the fcharge inside the metalmind doesnt change.

If you are storing J>0 and σ=0 so there are no losses, then the fcharge inside the metalmind would increase while you are storing, the same amount you store, the same amount it would be increased.

Finally if you are tapping J<0 and σ is prportional to J, so the fcharge inside the metalmind would decreased while you are tapping, but in this case the decreased od the fcharge would be bigger than the amount you are tapping because there are losses, and that losses depend on the J so if you tap faster you would lost more fcharge.

[18th Shard]

Ah, that makes sense.

[18th Shard]

"Spikes made from other metals steal Feruchemical abilities. For example, all of the original Inquisitors were given a pewter spike, which—after first being pounded through the body of a Feruchemist—gave the Inquisitor the ability to store up healing power. (Though they couldn't do so as quickly as a real Feruchemist, as per the law of Hemalurgic decay.) " from HOA. 

This seems to indicate to me that Feruchemical strength would indicate how fast a metalmind can be filled, i.e. the strength affects the time constant of the capacitor. This seems to me to indicate that in my Feruchemy circuit, strength would register as the motor's resistance.