Scadrian Shardblades

[Jace21 he/him]

36 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

Now shard plate is different. It cannot be pierced in a sense. The failure mode is shattering. Hence it is unclear to me whether the basic principle of a bullet, a lot of force on a small area, would work at all. You may need a lot of force, full stop.

I am of the opinion that 1 bullet can't pentrate Shardplate, like you say, its difficult, if not impossible to pierce. 

However I don't think it would take many shots to hit 1 piece before it shattered. 

There are sharders that disagree with me though, I have seen it effectively argued that bullets would be all but ineffective against Shardplate.

[Quantus he/him]

As a general statement I want to point out that the historic trends on Warfare overall arent the best measure of what works tactically on a one-on-one fight, there's a big difference between what is makes the most effective fighter and what gets rolled out to the entire army.  And it changes depending on the location.  Full-plate, as the example being cited, is top notch while mounted and in a moderate climate. On foot in the heat it's lethal (as we europeans learned during various crusades), as is it while out to sea.   Similarly, Longbows and later crossbows were widely considered to be vastly superior to the sword as a weapon, it was simply waaay too expensive to support an entire army built on it. 

 

 

But we are getting pretty far down the rabbit-hole of RL wartime history and tactics, which was not at all what the OP question was.  And on the OP, I think I want to revise my previous statement.  In general in the Cosmere, any large enough ball of investiture will (or at least can) gain sentience, which is what spren and aons/skaze are.  Nightblood in an example of using a magic system to fake it and/or give that process a helping hand.  While thinking about another topic I started to wonder: what happens if you Compound Copper? Would that empty all your memories into the metalmind, or would it imprint a more "complete" copy of your intellect?  If it's the latter, could that Imprint be given enough investiture to awaken it (to the robot level of Nightblood) perhaps if you also juiced it with supply of Compounded Identity?

[Ashertliden]

My current theory is that compounding copper imprints the memories stored in the coppermind back into your brain permanently.  

41 minutes ago, Quantus said:

Would that empty all your memories into the metalmind, or would it imprint a more "complete" copy of your intellect?

I don't believe that either of these things would occur when compounding, as when you compound you are burning/destorying the metalmind and releasing the stores, not adding new stores to the metalmind.

 

Edit: If you respond to this, do it in the topic you just made, not this one.

Edited September 26, 2018 by Kal-Eldin

[HSuperLee he/him]

I would guess the most likely way to make a Scadrian shardblade would have to involve some additional magic system. There just doesn't seem to be any way to bestow sentience with the metallic arts, and sentients seems to be an important component to shardblades. Yes, there's the argument that investiture has an inherent bias for obtaining sentience when there's a lot of it, but we also don't have a good way to measure how much investiture is a lot of investiture. For all we know, even the Bands of Mourning don't have anywhere near the amount of investiture that's in a shardblade.

[Tglassy]

The Honorblades don't have sentients, and they are considered Shardblades.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that a Metalmind sword may as well be a Shardblade.  Yeah, it won't cut through anything, but you could fight a Shardblade with one.  And if you could make the sword be like the Bands of Mourning, which is not out of the picture, then you essentially make a person a full Allomancer/Feruchemis, with a sword that can parry Shardblades, and enough potential power to be able to push metal MOLECULES.    Quite frankly, I may actually rather have that than be bonded with a Spren.  All the power of The Lord Ruler just by holding this knife?  Yes please!  

Edited September 27, 2018 by Tglassy

[HSuperLee he/him]

3 minutes ago, Tglassy said:

The Honorblades don't have sentients, and they are considered Shardblades.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that a Metalmind sword may as well be a Shardblade.  Yeah, it won't cut through anything, but you could fight a Shardblade with one.  And if you could make the sword be like the Bands of Mourning, which is not out of the picture, then you essentially make a person a full Allomancer/Feruchemis, with a sword that can parry Shardblades, and enough potential power to be able to push metal MOLECULES.    Quite frankly, I may actually rather have that than be bonded with a Spren.  All the power of The Lord Ruler just by holding this knife?  Yes please!  

Fair point, I forgot about the honorblades. I would still say an important part of a shardblade is being able to strike across realms. Maybe you could accomplish it with spiritual feruchemy + harmonium, but I don't know if that would be durable enough to make a sword.