Jump to content
  • 0

Duralumin Pewter vs Stromlight


Zmaray

Question

10 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 1
54 minutes ago, Gudbrand said:

How much stronger is one burning pewter and duralumin than one burning regular pewter?

How does this compare to a radiant infused with maximum Stormlight?

Pewter Burn is 2x Strength, Pewter Flare is 3x, and they can't lift a car.

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

He imagines that baseline pewter doubles strength, flaring triples. He wouldn’t imagine someone burning pewter and lifting a car. Hasn’t thought about speed and healing.

We do not have something this succinct about Stormlight, so it's a bit of a toss-up until we get more definitive examples of Stormlight Strength in the books.


Duralumin is even less clearly defined, because it depends on a variable: How much Pewter you have.

If you only have 2 minutes worth of Pewter, it'll burn all of that and give 2 minutes worth of strength all at once because that's what Duralumin does. If you've got a half-hour's worth...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1

Stormlight would be stronger. As a Windrunner, if just 3/4 lash the car upward. :D

But seriously, @The One Who Connects is correct. Duralumin uses up the remaining amount of an alloy that one possesses. So a flake of pewter wouldn't do anything compared to a full supply.

Also, Duralumin would cause you to use the pewter up in one burst. So the best you probably could do would be to flip the car, not carry it or lift it without being crushed.

I'd still go with the upwards lashing!

Your humble servant...

Shadows4Silence

Edited by Shadows4Silence
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1

As has been stated, the power of burning pewter and duralumin simultaneously is a function of how much pewter one has available.  I suspect that, just like how a leecher can't remove another allomancer's reserves instantaneously, duralumin doesn't burn your reserves instantaneously, it just burns them as fast as is possible.  If you swallowed 1 kg of pewter, you could probably sustain burning pewter and duralumin for an appreciable amount of time, (at least a couple seconds) as opposed to it being burned up in the blink of an eye; during this time you would probably be as strong as is possible through pewter allomancy.  I believe that the greatest feat of strength we see on screen is Vin not suffering blindness or organ damage while steel pushing 20+ men and their horses and:

Quote

WoA Part One (near the end)

"Throwing them into the air like leaves in the wind."

She blasts about 22,000 kg of mass away from herself at a rate of at least a few meters per second.  The way the push is described, she doesn't have time to react to it, IE: she can't stop burning duralumin, before it's done and her reserves are depleted.  This means it probably happens over the course of approximately 0.1 seconds or less.  Momentum is generally conserved with steel pushing as near as I can tell.

I don't want to get into a bunch of vector math, so let's say that, on average, 1/2 of each horsemen's change in velocity is directed directly away from Vin and in-line with the center of mass of the group of horsemen, which seems pretty conservative whether they were in a line formation and chasing her, or some chaotic blob.  Let's say that immediately after the push ends she's accelerated them to 2 m/s, which is the slowest I can imagine as still being described as "thrown like leaves in the wind."  Her change in momentum is:

1/2 * 2 m/s * 22,000 kg = 22,000 kg m/s

Vin started at rest and let's suppose she is wearing some heavy clothes and has a total mass of 70 kg.  Her velocity after her duralumin push is:

22,000 kg m/s / 70 kg = 310 m/s (a bit below the speed of sound, so we're in the realm of plausibility because no sonic boom was reported)

Her acceleration during her push was:

310 m/s / 0.1 s = 3,100 m/s/s or about 315 g's

Given that she was facing her targets (had she been facing away from them her body would have been able to tolerate the acceleration much easier), had she not been burning pewter at all, the maximum acceleration she could reasonably expect to withstand without a serious risk of permanent injury would be 20 g's.  Let's suppose that similar to pewter's effect on muscle strength, it would normally double-triple a person's resistance to rapid accelerations; this is harder to justify, but we need some kind of baseline.  That would increase her expected maximum reliably tolerable horizontal back-facing acceleration to 40-60 g's.

If she had been at the limit of what she could tolerate, she would have been hurt and disoriented after her push, but she wasn't, and in fact was cognizant enough to drink another vial of metals and land more-or-less gracefully and return to sprinting back to Luthadel.  This implies she probably could've theoretically handled 2+x more force without suffering organ damage, with the caveat that doing so might've left her too hurt and disoriented to consume more metal and properly brace for landing.

So, just how strong is a person burning duralumin and pewter?  Well, Vin appears to have reached a strength of somewhere in the neighborhood of 20x the limit of a normal human.  This actually puts her in range of being able to pick up and toss a car, with the understanding that she would have to do it very quickly or have swallowed a lot of pewter.

TLDR; Buring duralumin and pewter, you should finally be able to throw a car.

Lower-bound for how much duralumin enhances a metal's power is approximately 10x

Edited by hwiles
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Another good question would be whether strength scales with the amount of stormlight, or whether it is a flat enhancement. Because then the amount is not that relevant (if we're just asking what the scouter says about their power level).

Edited by Crucible of Shards
Clarity
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
6 minutes ago, Crucible of Shards said:

Another good question would be whether strength scales with the amount of stormlight, or whether it is a flat enhancement. Because then the amount is not that relevant (if we're just asking what the scouter says about their power level).

I don't think so. It seems like when they hold Stormlight it is used at a steady rate unless applied towards something else (surgebinding/healing). 

I think that it's probably very similar to pewter baseline, and pewter would win out due to the ability to flare. 

That's all my gut feeling though. No real evidence. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

I think we're kind of saying the same thing. What I'm getting at is that the boost to physical ability you receive from holding stormlight is not proportional to the amount of stormlight being held. Like pewter (except for flaring), it seems to be a fixed physical boost. But maybe that's not relevant to the OP.

Edited by Crucible of Shards
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

IIRC stormlight is more of a speed boost than a strength one (hence why they have shardplate too). The biggest feat of strength a stormlight user has that i can remember is szeth easily disarming Adolin by smacking Adolin's blade with his own.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
2 minutes ago, asterion137 said:

IIRC stormlight is more of a speed boost than a strength one (hence why they have shardplate too). The biggest feat of strength a stormlight user has that i can remember is szeth easily disarming Adolin by smacking Adolin's blade with his own.

It's not as overt as pewter, but there's definitely a strength increase. Kaladin's Stormlight aided jump down the Chasm, and some of Szeth's "Stormlight enhanced kicks" in the tWoK Prologue and interludes definitely provide evidence towards it. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...