Awakened Projectiles

[Faceless Mist-Wraith he/him]

Can commands influence the behavior of a projectile? If you took an arrow or a spear, and gave it the command "Hit targets that I choose" or something similar would you get an arrow that will always hit its target? 

If this did work, would the Breath be influencing the arrow itself or the air around the arrow?

[Oversleep]

Awakening makes things move (except for Type IV: Nightblood which instead does make people move him).

Arrow is rigid and therefore cannot move. I doubt Awakening it would do anything.

[Calderis he/him]

4 minutes ago, Oversleep said:

Awakening makes things move (except for Type IV: Nightblood which instead does make people move him).

Arrow is rigid and therefore cannot move. I doubt Awakening it would do anything.

Kalad's Phantoms were metal. I don't think the rigidity is prohibitive. 

@Faceless Mist-Wraith the flights may be able to move the arrow like you want, but arrows aren't human shaped so would probably be expensive to Awaken. Combine this with the likelihood of them being lost in a battle, and even assuming it works like you want it may be too expensive to be really game changing. 

[Faceless Mist-Wraith he/him]

8 minutes ago, Oversleep said:

Arrow is rigid and therefore cannot move. I doubt Awakening it would do anything.

That's the part that I was wondering about. Since an arrow is fairly rigid it wouldn't be moving, and even if the wood did bend it wouldn't have much affect on its accuracy. However, the fletchings of the arrows would potentially be able to move, so I was both wondering if this would have a useful affect on its trajectory.

Edited July 6, 2017 by Faceless Mist-Wraith

[+Extesian he/him]

Just now, Calderis said:

Kalad's Phantoms were metal. I don't think the rigidity is prohibitive. 

@Faceless Mist-Wraith the flights may be able to move the arrow like you want, but arrows aren't human shaped so would probably be expensive to Awaken. Combine this with the likelihood of them being lost in a battle, and even assuming it works like you want it may be too expensive to be really game changing. 

The phantoms were bones encased by stone but with gaps, the investiture acted as muscles and ligaments to move the bones and make the phantoms mobile. Rigidity does matter, Vasher just found a way to make stone flexible:)

[Calderis he/him]

Just now, Extesian said:

The phantoms were bones encased by stone but with gaps, the investiture acted as muscles and ligaments to move the bones and make the phantoms mobile. Rigidity does matter, Vasher just found a way to make stone flexible:)

I stand corrected, and obviously remembered multiple parts wrong. Sorry @Oversleep

[Faceless Mist-Wraith he/him]

Quote

@Faceless Mist-Wraith the flights may be able to move the arrow like you want, but arrows aren't human shaped so would probably be expensive to Awaken. Combine this with the likelihood of them being lost in a battle, and even assuming it works like you want it may be too expensive to be really game changing. 

I believe it would have a similar cost as awakening a cloth or carpet, which I think was around fifty Breaths. I was mostly thinking of this as something that could be used by small teams of snipers, since if it was implemented over a large army it would be very expensive and likely not worth the effort.

[DocHoliday he/him]

16 hours ago, Oversleep said:

Awakening makes things move (except for Type IV: Nightblood which instead does make people move him).

Arrow is rigid and therefore cannot move. I doubt Awakening it would do anything.

Wood does flex, glue can give away, fletchings sway in a breeze. There's no reason an arrow couldn't bend a bit mid-flight. Take Vasher teaching Vivienne Awakening with cloths/ropes. It's the same principal in play (though the aforementioned are much more flexible).

[Weltall]

The big problem is how you'd Awaken an arrow in a way that would effectively give it some level of homing ability. There are lots of variables involved in the flight of an arrow (wind speed and direction, gravity, just how much force was imparted to the arrow when it was shot, the angle it was shot at...) such that even if you could design an arrow with the 'flexibility' needed to give it some sort of control over its trajectory, the complexity of the required Command and mental visualisation would be staggering. And I very much doubt that Awakening is able to tell gravity to storm off so at best you'd end up with a weapon that had some minimal ability to change direction in flight but it would still be pulled down at the same rate as any other arrow.

It's probably telling that our stories of the Manywar that do involve projectile weapons talk about using Awakening to make better missile-throwers rather than better missiles.

[teknopathetic he/him]

2 hours ago, Weltall said:

The big problem is how you'd Awaken an arrow in a way that would effectively give it some level of homing ability. There are lots of variables involved in the flight of an arrow (wind speed and direction, gravity, just how much force was imparted to the arrow when it was shot, the angle it was shot at...) such that even if you could design an arrow with the 'flexibility' needed to give it some sort of control over its trajectory, the complexity of the required Command and mental visualisation would be staggering. And I very much doubt that Awakening is able to tell gravity to storm off so at best you'd end up with a weapon that had some minimal ability to change direction in flight but it would still be pulled down at the same rate as any other arrow.

It's probably telling that our stories of the Manywar that do involve projectile weapons talk about using Awakening to make better missile-throwers rather than better missiles.

Arrows made of bone whittled into the shape of a bird might be rather effective. 

[Farnsworth]

Or an arrow shaped like a human. Maybe a guy with a pointy head, and his arms flared out for stability?

[Faceless Mist-Wraith he/him]

On July 7, 2017 at 6:06 PM, teknopathetic said:

Arrows made of bone whittled into the shape of a bird might be rather effective. 

This would probably help lower the breath cost.

[Farnsworth]

I don't know that it would lower the breath cost significantly. While birds are more similar to humans than sticks, they are still fairly different. You would probably have to made it humanoid to significantly lower the cost.

[The One Who Connects he/him]

57 minutes ago, Figberts said:

I don't know that it would lower the breath cost significantly. While birds are more similar to humans than sticks, they are still fairly different. You would probably have to made it humanoid to significantly lower the cost.

Come to think of it, I don't think Brandon has ever addressed this. I think he RAFO'd whether Vasher's lifeless Squirrel actually got a breath discount for being "close to life"

I think there might be a small redux b/c people associate animals with life, but either way, much of the cost reduction this time was b/c the arrow-bird was made from bone.

[Oversleep]

14 hours ago, The One Who Connects said:

Come to think of it, I don't think Brandon has ever addressed this. I think he RAFO'd whether Vasher's lifeless Squirrel actually got a breath discount for being "close to life"

It only needed one Breath:

Quote

One Breath was leached from his body, going down into the small rodent’s corpse. The thing began to twitch. That was a Breath Vasher would never be able to recover, for creating a Lifeless was a permanent act. The squirrel lost all color, bleeding to grey, the Awakening feeding off the body’s own colors to help fuel the transformation. The squirrel had been grey in the first place, so the difference was tough to see. That’s why Vasher liked to use them.

So I assume it's about "similar to life", not "similar to human".

[The One Who Connects he/him]

4 hours ago, Oversleep said:

It only needed one Breath:

So I assume it's about "similar to life", not "similar to human".

Fair enough. Was a bit uncertain because of this WoB.

Quote

Q: In Warbreaker, the closer an inanimate object is to a humanoid shape, the easier it is to awaken it. Hypothetically, say a race of sentient quadrupedal canines had access to BioChromatic Breath. Would they have an easier time awakening objects if they were closer to a canine shape, or is the rule still that it needs to be more humanoid?
 
A: Closer to canine.

[Calderis he/him]

42 minutes ago, The One Who Connects said:

Fair enough. Was a bit uncertain because of this WoB.

Makes sense. Since the breath is keyed to the person holding it, animating something that mimics the shape that it sourced from should require a less of a cost in the transfer. The more divergent the object, from the entity the breath is keyed to, the higher the cost. 

Edit: for a lifeless I think any animal will take a single breath, as the formerly living being, in taking the breath so it's not recoverable, rekeys that breath to its own form, rather than the shape of the entity that held the breath in Awakening it. 

Edited July 10, 2017 by Calderis

[+Extesian he/him]

I see you out it in the edit Calderis but yeah the difference should be awakening vs lifeless no? A human lifeless takes one. A squirrel lifeless takes one.  Awakening, because it is encoded to your identity, takes more. Lifeless ease relates to it having once been living. Awakening ease depends on how similar a shape is to the awakener (and any formerly living parts, like cloth or bones).

Edited July 10, 2017 by Extesian

[Pattern he/him]

On 10.7.2017 at 11:50 PM, Calderis said:

Edit: for a lifeless I think any animal will take a single breath, as the formerly living being, in taking the breath so it's not recoverable, rekeys that breath to its own form, rather than the shape of the entity that held the breath in Awakening it. 

That is true. But keep in mind that Vasher is the most able Awakener at the time and in the annotations Brandon emphasizes this: The fact that the squirrel took only one Breath and executed its task so well shows that.

Your standard trained awakener probably would need much more than one Breath to awaken a squirrel.

The one-Breath command to awaken Lifeless was also a game changer during the Manywar, before its discovery more than a single Breath (I think about 50) were needed to create Lifeless. So it is more a sign of ability and practice how many Breaths a certain task takes. Similarity to humanoid shape helps though, since Awakening was concepted as sympathetic magic with a touch of Voodoo.

Giving away Breath should go with a change of Identity of the Breath, as long as a human is on the receiving end (otherwise the receiver couldn't use the Breath). If the receiver is an object (that is awakened in the process), the Identity does not change: The Awakener can take back the Breath and the awakened object cannot use the Breath to awaken something else itself. Lifeless can be either one of the cases, though I tend to believe there is an Identity change, since the Breath cannot be taken back anymore ("It is too sticky" is not a realmatic explanation). The lifeless of course cannot use their single Breath to awaken without dying (analogous to the Returned with their single divine Breath).

So the breath of the awakened squirrel would be keyed to the form of a squirrel. Who knows the Lore of Wonders amongst the Returned Squirrels, where whole squirrel populations are safed by their Returned Squirrel gods sacrificing their life in action loaded adventures?

Edit: Oh, to the original topic: I think awakened arrows would be as useful as shardarrows. We don't see them because the bonus they would give compared to the normal weapons would be only very small.

Edited July 15, 2017 by Pattern

[The One Who Connects he/him]

15 hours ago, Pattern said:

The one-Breath command to awaken Lifeless was also a game changer during the Manywar, before its discovery more than a single Breath (I think about 50) were needed to create Lifeless.

The Ichor-Alcohol method also contributes to the single breath cost. From Chapter 58:

Quote

“We didn’t always have ichor-alcohol,” Vasher said. “It makes the Awakening easier and cheaper, but it isn’t the only way. And, in the minds of many, I believe it has become a crutch.”

[DrakeMarshall he/him]

Hmmm if you really wanted to make a powerful ranged weapon with magic, I'd say awakening a metal boomerang as a type IV would be pretty scary

But I'd guess changing an arrow's path is pretty difficult. I think the best bet for something that steers itself mid-air would be some sort of glider made of bones and cloth. Bonus points if it's actually bird bones, since those are hollow and better for flight.