[OB] Engineering solutions to Rosharan problems.

[Gasper he/him]

The drawing of flying ships in Navani's notebook got me thinking about flying ships on Roshar. Then I got thinking about perfect gemstones and their ability to hold stormlight and not let it leak. Add a few windrunners, a soulcaster, earth engineering, and an overactive imagination, let it stew for a few days and out came this idea: Aluminum plated shardships.  

 

Using the czochralski process, or crystal pulling(wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_process) Rosharians could produce large sapphires. facet those gems and turn them into a lifting fabrial. place those gems into a harness inside an aluminum hulled vessel and you have a Fused proof, flying ship that can be used for trade, troop transport, and other missions. Keep a stock of perfect gems on had to fuel the ship and you no longer have to rely on a windrunner or oathgate to get you around the planet in a hurry. Also, you could mount artillery to it and use it to take out ground forces or go toe to toe with the flying Fused.

Any thoughts? 

[Yata he/him]

There is something I could not understand.

When you talk of lifting Fabrial. Do you mean the paired One used in the Shattered plains ( I think not as you mentioned Shappire while those need amethys) or a Gravitation Fabrial (that modern artifabrian can't make) ?

Anyway regardless of the Aluminium. That Vessel is not impervious to damage. It's at best impervious to direct use of Investiture. But stuffs could be' lashed aganist It and a bunch of indirect methods could be' employed aganist.

[Gasper he/him]

Gravitation, which I do not think is impossible, just undiscovered as of yet.

[Barbarian AL he/him]

Don't know about this but ...

Spoiler

“       

What a gift you gave them! Time to recover, for once, between Desolations. Time to progress. They never had a chance before. But this time . . . yes, maybe they do”

—Taln to Ash

Taken from here.

[MountainKing]

I think they can already create of gravitational fabrial using modern fabrial techniques because of Navini's jounral

[Patrick Star]

Free electricity. 

Build a nuclear reactor. 

Soulcast the nuclear waste back into enriched uranium. 

Repeat.

Edited May 10, 2018 by Patrick Star

[Yata he/him]

3 hours ago, MountainKing said:

I think they can already create of gravitational fabrial using modern fabrial techniques because of Navini's jounral

The Surge Fabrials work with Sapient Spren at work (probably bound by promises/ Oaths) like the Oathgates showed.

The Spren isn't even in the gemstones for those.... It's nothing the Artifabrian are even near to discover. Artifabrian didn't even know Sapient Spren's races exist.

Probably the Journal refers to One of the already 5 knowed types of Fabrials

[MountainKing]

1 hour ago, Yata said:

The Surge Fabrials work with Sapient Spren at work (probably bound by promises/ Oaths) like the Oathgates showed.

The Spren isn't even in the gemstones for those.... It's nothing the Artifabrian are even near to discover. Artifabrian didn't even know Sapient Spren's races exist.

Probably the Journal refers to One of the already 5 knowed types of Fabrials

Yes, but in one of the past visions in Oathbringer there was a fabrial that appeared to be able to store stormlight tied to a certain surger(Progression), and allow it to be used without a spren, this shows that different types of fabrials can use the same affect. And in the journal the fabrials being described were augmenters fabrials, so using a gravityspren,a non-sentient spren, would increase the gravity of the object or increse the gravity pulling on the object and that's it.

[Yata he/him]

22 hours ago, MountainKing said:

Yes, but in one of the past visions in Oathbringer there was a fabrial that appeared to be able to store stormlight tied to a certain surger(Progression), and allow it to be used without a spren, this shows that different types of fabrials can use the same affect. And in the journal the fabrials being described were augmenters fabrials, so using a gravityspren,a non-sentient spren, would increase the gravity of the object or increse the gravity pulling on the object and that's it.

Dalinar's Visions are Desolations old. Pre Heralds' flee....at that time Surges Fabrials were know and fabricated (It's the timeframe where the Soulcasters are from).

I am not sure what do you mean with Fabrial without Spren...All' the Fabrials have Spren, no One excluded

Edited May 11, 2018 by Yata

[Gasper he/him]

I have another idea for taking out thunderclast. How many people have seen Pacific Rim? Giant, Fabrial powered mech suits. I am thinking what are basically massive shardplate that is 50 feet tall.

 

[Patrick Star]

9 hours ago, Gasper said:

I have another idea for taking out thunderclast. How many people have seen Pacific Rim? Giant, Fabrial powered mech suits. I am thinking what are basically massive shardplate that is 50 feet tall.

Or just make a giant bomb.

Singers are powerful and all, but they still lose to gigantic explosions.

[Gasper he/him]

A destruction spren and heat fabrail powered nuke.

[Patrick Star]

1 hour ago, Gasper said:

A destruction spren and heat fabrail powered nuke.

Why go through all that effort though?  Bombs are way cheaper and easier to produce than fabrials.

[Gasper he/him]

I am thinking something more along the line of a weapon you fire once and nothing is left that needs another bomb.

[teknopathetic he/him]

On 2018-05-10 at 8:01 AM, Patrick Star said:

Free electricity. 

Build a nuclear reactor. 

Soulcast the nuclear waste back into enriched uranium. 

Repeat.

It would be interesting to see what electricity does to investiture. The broadsheets in the 2nd Mistbron Trilogy talk of sentient appliances, and I've always wondered if that's electricity moving with metalminds (as opposed to awakening because who would leave behind so much breath?

 

[Leyrann]

One Elsecaller should be enough: Get into the base of the singers, soulcast something into supercritical uranium, plutonium or whatever else you want to base your nuclear bomb on, make sure it reacts slightly delayed, get it ready, move back to shadesmar, run.

[Yata he/him]

On 14/5/2018 at 3:11 PM, Leyrann said:

One Elsecaller should be enough: Get into the base of the singers, soulcast something into supercritical uranium, plutonium or whatever else you want to base your nuclear bomb on, make sure it reacts slightly delayed, get it ready, move back to shadesmar, run.

The Elsecaller will need to know those stuffs to soulcast them and of course can't work because Nuclear bombs are more complex than that.

Much more the Elsecaller would need to move his way in the CR to arrive in the willing destination, the CR's movement could be impaired and the CR itself could contain Enemy's forces to avoid stuff like that (because the Fused know of Elsecalling more than the modern Knights themself )

Edited May 16, 2018 by Yata

[Gasper he/him]

To deal with the fused, we need something like a giant nightblood-esque weapon that would suck up their cognitive form and destroy it. The downside to that is that it would most likely kill all of the spren in the area as well.

[Szmit]

4 hours ago, Yata said:

The Elsecaller will need to know those stuffs to soulcast those stuffs to soulcast them and of course can't work because Nuclear bombs are more complex than that.

Much more the Elsecaller would need to move his way in the CR to arrive in the willing destination, the CR's movement could be impaired and the CR itself could contain Enemy's forces to avoid stuff like that (because the Fused know of Elsecalling more than the modern Knights themself )

Nuclear bombs are complex because you want them to blow up when you want them, and not in your hands. Enough of right isotope of uranium in one place will just naturally explode.

And Cultivation - the smart god that likes change might have been on nuclear phisics.

[The One Who Connects he/him]

Spoiler

Phantine
At the risk of getting too technical, is there anything besides lack of knowledge preventing a soulcaster from turning some rocks into a bunch of plutonium and exploding?

I know you've got some rules attached to time bubbles to avoid those going nuclear so I wouldn't be surprised if there was something or another.

Brandon Sanderson
Well, Soulcasting isn't fission or fusion. It's a spiritual transformation process, not a physical one, and so you don't have to worry about some of these issues. There IS historical precedent of accidentally setting off fission reactions in the cosmere using the magic, but that was a different process. Soulcasting is actually pretty safe. (Well, on a grand scale.)

You could end up irradiating yourself, though, which wouldn't be very fun.

If you know what you were doing, making plutonium or uranium on Roshar wouldn't be difficult. The problem is more a matter of knowledge, and room for scientific exploration. They're unlikely to make atom bombs for the same reason they haven't made gunpowder. Once they figure out that some substances are important, they can learn to make them with Soulcasting (assuming they have Radiants) but some substances just don't occur naturally--so discovering them in the first place is difficult, and would require more modern scientific process.

Phantine
Okay, just to clarify here (since I'm not sure how up you are on early nuke designs)

A big enough chunk of uranium or plutonium will explode regardless of whether it's in a bomb or not. Early bomb designs just slammed two smaller chunks together so they'd be one big chunk.

For plutonium 'big enough' is about 35 pounds in one place - a chunk somewhere between the size of baseball and volleyball.

If I understand properly, people can soulcast from the cognitive realm into the physical, which implies once we get into a more modern stormlight setting soulcasters will make nuclear submarines look like small potatoes.

Brandon Sanderson
Slamming two chunks together so they became one big chunk seems an understatement, from what I remember. I'm under the impression that you had to use a great deal of explosive force to ram them together in order to set off a viable fission reaction. Doesn't it have to be compressed somewhat in order to react with itself?

I'll admit, it's been a long time since I've looked at this, but I remember glancing it over, and deciding that you'd need more than just soulcasting to get it to happen. Though it's not outside of reason that a soulcaster could learn to create super-dense plutonium. The problem is one of understanding, however.

Just like it's totally possible that we, with our current technology, could figure out some huge breakthrough in science allowing FTL or other incredible discoveries. But we don't have the understanding to pull it off yet.

In a modern setting, however, a lot of these complaints go out the window. Let's just say that this isn't the only reason a modern society that can instantly transmute one substance to another is potentially a very interesting place.

Phantine
You're totally right that everyone currently uses an 'implosion' style compression design. It's a lot more bang for your buck, and you need less radioactive material to work with. They're also a lot safer, because just sitting around they're well below critical mass - without the power-boosting tricks they basically can't go off.

The old "nobody uses these anymore" designs were 'Gun-Type'. Very simple - shoot a uranium bullet into the center of a uranium ring (or vice versa). Inefficient as heck (the Hiroshima bomb only fissioned 1.4% of its uranium), but also super simple to put together.

Despite being simple to build, gun-types were also super unsafe relative to modern implosion devices (among other worries, dropping a gun-type device into the ocean could potentially set it off because of how neutrons react with water). Also, getting the timing perfect on the fissile 'bullet' was a problem, so practically speaking it could only be done with uranium.

After WWII, the only use the US ever had for gun-types was in bunker busters and nuclear artillery (because of course that was a good idea).

Darn, that post turned out longer than I expected it to.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see you make something really cool out of a post-scarcity transmutropolis setting (especially since the liespren would be in charge of nuclear treaties), and also my roommate just pointed out all the laying out of nuclear bomb details is pointless if they could just make antimatter instead. D'oh.

Brandon Sanderson
This is useful information for me, but my gut says that Rosharans couldn't get this working with their current tech level. That said, the REAL issue (as you mentioned in your original question) is knowledge, not feasibility. They'd have to know how to make the right kind of Uranium or Plutonium--and would need to be able to get this across to a soulcaster in a way that works, then THEY would need to get this across to spren. Cross that hurdle, and I suppose it's not at all implausible to imagine Alethi during Dalinar's era with nukes. I suspect the right kind of fabrial could make a trigger device to match ring and bullet at the right time. Depends on how quickly it needs to be going, though.

Source.