Fabrial weapons

[Elend Venture]

So, if I am correct (though I am probably not) there are fabrials that can change the direction of gravity on an object. If they can "bind" an object several times in one direction, then it could move extremeley fast. My Idea being to bind a bullet down a rifled barrel, fast enough to make it spin stabilize. This seems like it would be an excellent device for warfare and hunting things like whitespines wnd greatshells (with fabrial cannons in the last case). Adding a feed system would instantley make a weapon powered this way fully automatic as long as the fabrial is turned up. Of course all of this relies on a fabrial that can change and multiply gravitation on other objects. I would be curious of the ideas of others upon this subject. If anyone has any ideas about other forms of fabrial weapon (like using a spanreed as a tactical pen) I would also be happy to hear them. 

Edited January 27, 2019 by ElendVenture

[Weltall]

We've discussed the idea of Fabrial Railguns before, but they require more knowledge than the Rosharans have about using 'mechanical' Surgebinding. We know a fabrial can theoretically replicate the effects of any Surge so it's possible but nobody knows how to do it right now. They've got the fabrial Soulcasters that replicate Transformation (albeit in more limited form) but they don't know how to make more of them right now, so they'd need to either find a surviving Gravitation fabrial (assuming one exists) and advance their knowledge enough to reverse-engineer it and then apply it to weapons, or develop the entire thing from the ground up.

Normal Soulcasters of course could be terrifying at close range if they can replicate what Jasnah does, but we know that even for her it generally requires a lot of effort to transform anything sapient and a fabrial might not have the flexibility or the power needed to manage something like that. But if they do, you've got someone who can kill you as long as they can touch you, which is pretty scary.

Division obviously can damage or break things quite well but we don't know enough about how the Surge works to guess how exactly you could weaponize it.

Navani's painrial can be weaponized by reversing the settings and she also came up with what's essentially a fabrial taser, so we know those exist.

In theory, you could stab someone with a spanreed (assuming it's sturdy enough) since you have a rough idea where the other party is located relative to you. Of course, it's not exactly a subtle assassination tool since by definition they'll know who's supposed to be on the other end and you could only attack the person actually doing the writing on the other side, since you can't predict the locations of anyone else who might be present. And if you wanted to stab the scribe, you'd basically have to stab yourself to put the spanreed in the right position to stab the other person. Interesting thought experiment but not terribly practical.

Fabrials that increase heat could probably be used as a triggering device for explosives, with a bit of creativity.

[Elend Venture]

Thank you for your thoughts on the idea! I was thinking of tasrial as I wrote earlier. If you could direct the heat fabrial into a thin line then you would have somthing like a laser-gun. If you bound a spanreed to a dagger and connected them at a short distance (about seven meters) you would have an interesting weapon, though it's practicality would, as you were saying, be limited.

Edited January 27, 2019 by ElendVenture

[RShara]

This should probably be moved into Cosmere discussion

[Elend Venture]

1 minute ago, RShara said:

This should probably be moved into Cosmere discussion

Indeed. Sorry.

[Turtle373]

5 hours ago, Weltall said:

In theory, you could stab someone with a spanreed (assuming it's sturdy enough) since you have a rough idea where the other party is located relative to you. Of course, it's not exactly a subtle assassination tool since by definition they'll know who's supposed to be on the other end and you could only attack the person actually doing the writing on the other side, since you can't predict the locations of anyone else who might be present. And if you wanted to stab the scribe, you'd basically have to stab yourself to put the spanreed in the right position to stab the other person. Interesting thought experiment but not terribly practical.

I've always loved the idea of weaponized spanreeds, because you could, in a very limited way, do something similar to Vasher awakening the clothing to fight with him

[Gasper]

What about a soulcasting mine that either soulcasts the person stepping on it into fire, or soulcasts a bunch of metal spikes into the area around the mine? A division powered bomb, effectively the Rosharian equivalent of a nuke. Or bullets with a small division powered fabrial on the tip to punch through armor. 

[Weltall]

Division splits at the molecular level, not the atomic level so you can't make nuclear explosions with it.

[Gasper]

8 hours ago, Weltall said:

Division splits at the molecular level, not the atomic level so you can't make nuclear explosions with it.

I know, but it would the Rosharian equivalent, I was thinking more along the lines of the Little Doctor weapon from Ender's Game, I should have specified that.

[Quantus]

We wandered into this recently in another topic.  Im confident that Gravitation isnt going to be particularly useful for most weapon purposes (short of orbital ballistics) because the number of bindings necessary to move it into the realm of most firearms (let alone Railguns, which was the topic in that other thread) would be in the tens of thousands and an inefficient use of Stormlight for effect gained. 

The Best Bang for your Buck that I can see is Soulcasting as the surge, leveraged in firearm designs to provide the chemical fuel (and even the ballistic slugs) infinitely.  We are limited in the chemical we can use because they have to be volatile enough to give the sudden volume expansion needed to accelerate the slug, without being so volatile that they will explode in our pockets.  A soulcaster would entirely bypass that and be able to skip to maximum chemical energy.  I imagine a rifle (or hollow staff if you want to stick with Sword&Board fantasy designs) that is loaded with a layered rod that has alternating layers of a slug material and a different donor material to be soulcast.  A soulcaster is arranged on an incrementing slider beside it.  The Soulcaster is restricted to transforming just the non-slug material when it comes in contact to an extremely volatile explosive. So by indexing the thing down the rod, you fire each layer of the slug-rod by transforming and instantly firing off the top-most slug, then index down and fire the next one.  If you want to get fancy you can add a Fabrial to the end of the barrel that reshapes it into a more ballistically useful spinning bullet shape as it leaves, use Abrasion to reduce friction losses, etc. 

Alternatively you could use far more stormlight to just dynamically Soulcast both the slug and the fuel simultaneously from the air into a gun barrel,  making an infinite ammo automatic weapon.  You'd probably need a multibarrel setup like a classic mini-gun to mitigate all the thermal effects it would see (just like said mini-guns) however the fact that soulcasting from air would actively cool the thing while firing the fuel would heat it might just balance out, though I assume it would be finicky. 

 

EDIT:  Other surge possibilities include high-energy beam weapons via Lightweaving, actual nukes utilizing gravitation to create the necessary Implosion (loooots of lashings, using explosives like we do would probably be easier), antimatter via Soulcasting, and lots of wonky mechanical devices via cyclic Tension. 

Edited January 28, 2019 by Quantus

[Timothy]

I wonder if lightweaving can really be used to creat high frequency waves. Those require quite a bit of energy, maybe the level of investiture required would be absurdly high. I wonder if shallash or palliah could do it.

[Quantus]

4 hours ago, Timothy said:

I wonder if lightweaving can really be used to create high frequency waves. Those require quite a bit of energy, maybe the level of investiture required would be absurdly high. I wonder if shallash or palliah could do it.

There was a WOB about it being possible at one point, but Im having trouble finding it now.  Lightweaving has power over all kinds of frequency effects.  In terms of actual physics it's not actually all that hard to accomplish in terms of raw energy requirements, it has more to do with getting the correct oscillators to reach the high-frequencies (though there are ways to cheat, like making x-rays via the natural resonance of certain metals when hit with electrons).  The real catch with the higher energy electromagnetic radiations is the that many of them (like gamma rays, for example) are actually accelerated particles with real mass. But then we've already seen that it's possible for lightweavers to fake that, Shallan can make solid holograms. 

[Scion of the Mists]

Here's what Brandon has said about Lightweavers and lasers/high-frequency EM:

Quote

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

[Discussion of Lightweavers manipulating other forms of electromagnetic radiation]

But the ultimate form (That Brandon said would be too much to be practical both in needed stormlight and application) would be the control of Gamma Radiation. If this could be harnessed, Lightweavers could literally become mini nukes, or death guns. The biggest downside to making Gamma radiation would be the damage the lightweaver would most likely suffer. So gamma radiation is impractical but its a fun thought experiment. 

The best part of this whole speculation was how excited Brandon was about my train of thought. I don't know if anyone had brought up this train of thought before. But he was happy to remind me that things will get pretty interesting when Lightweavers discover lasers and start using them in combat.

Miscellaneous 2016 (July 3, 2016)

 

Quote

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

Lightweavers are radios, aren't they? Lightwaves are radio waves? Light and..they're the same thing, aren't they?

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

They can do sound too, yeah. So you're saying lightweaving with illusion... can it?

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

Can transmit radio waves? As in, communicate over long distances, it's one of the most important things in battles, right? In war.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

[At the same time]Yeah I actually...right right right, yep, yep, yep.

I had someone in one of my very early books irradiate someone with Lightweaving, I think.

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

Oh that's right you've got multiple kinds of Lightweaving.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Yeah.

Emerald City Comic Con 2018 (March 1, 2018)

[Timothy]

40 minutes ago, Quantus said:

There was a WOB about it being possible at one point, but Im having trouble finding it now.  Lightweaving has power over all kinds of frequency effects.  In terms of actual physics it's not actually all that hard to accomplish in terms of raw energy requirements, it has more to do with getting the correct oscillators to reach the high-frequencies (though there are ways to cheat, like making x-rays via the natural resonance of certain metals when hit with electrons).  The real catch with the higher energy electromagnetic radiations is the that many of them (like gamma rays, for example) are actually accelerated particles with real mass. But then we've already seen that it's possible for lightweavers to fake that, Shallan can make solid holograms. 

You'd need a huge amount of high energy radiation to actually hurt someone though, it'd likely take more than what she used in the Thaylen battle. Do you mean alpha or beta radiation? Gamma has no mass and is the lesses in terms of biological damage of the three.

I guess that with their powers they could easily create a laser beam though, amplificating and collimsting a beam seems like it'd be no big deal for them.

[Quantus]

1 hour ago, Timothy said:

You'd need a huge amount of high energy radiation to actually hurt someone though, it'd likely take more than what she used in the Thaylen battle. Do you mean alpha or beta radiation? Gamma has no mass and is the lesses in terms of biological damage of the three.

I guess that with their powers they could easily create a laser beam though, amplificating and collimsting a beam seems like it'd be no big deal for them.

No, you're right I was conflating Gamma radiation with the neutron decay that is often involved.  In terms of Lightweaver beam weapons I was imagining things more on the order of cutting lasers. 

[Timothy]

14 minutes ago, Quantus said:

No, you're right I was conflating Gamma radiation with the neutron decay that is often involved.  In terms of Lightweaver beam weapons I was imagining things more on the order of cutting lasers. 

Maybe the'd be able to start chain reactions of a material they prepared beforehand with their soulcasting?

[+Oltux72]

On 1/28/2019 at 4:29 PM, Quantus said:

We wandered into this recently in another topic.  Im confident that Gravitation isnt going to be particularly useful for most weapon purposes (short of orbital ballistics) because the number of bindings necessary to move it into the realm of most firearms (let alone Railguns, which was the topic in that other thread) would be in the tens of thousands and an inefficient use of Stormlight for effect gained.

I don't think so. Or rather this is because you are limiting yourself to exact equivalents of guns, being weapons that kill by accelerating a small mass to very high speeds in a very short time. Surgebinding cannot do the high acceleration in a very short time, but a relatively high mass at medium speeds or a very long acceleration is possible. The key difference to a gun is that there is no reason you would need to limit your acceleration to the time in the tube.

Let's assume you can do 10 lashings. That gives you 100 m/s^2. Apply that for 1 s and you get to the speed of an arrow. We have seen objects weighing tons being accelerated. The arrow would travel 50m in that time. That is a weapon albeit a bad one. If you can manage 20 lashings you can go down to 0.5s, for example, of acceleration, you get the same speed but with a much smaller minimum distance of 25m.
You can certainly build an automatic ballista or an automatic crossbow that way (with full size war arrows).

If you are ready to go for a steep trajectory you can go to high subsonic speeds at least. A mortar is possible. And if you can build an automatic soulcaster and a fuse, you have shells. Turning an object inside an airtight shell into air will certainly burst it apart.. We would have to determine how fast soulcasting actually works to determine whether the shell would rupture or be torn apart.

[Quantus]

9 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

I don't think so. Or rather this is because you are limiting yourself to exact equivalents of guns, being weapons that kill by accelerating a small mass to very high speeds in a very short time. Surgebinding cannot do the high acceleration in a very short time, but a relatively high mass at medium speeds or a very long acceleration is possible. The key difference to a gun is that there is no reason you would need to limit your acceleration to the time in the tube.

Let's assume you can do 10 lashings. That gives you 100 m/s^2. Apply that for 1 s and you get to the speed of an arrow. We have seen objects weighing tons being accelerated. The arrow would travel 50m in that time. That is a weapon albeit a bad one. If you can manage 20 lashings you can go down to 0.5s, for example, of acceleration, you get the same speed but with a much smaller minimum distance of 25m.
You can certainly build an automatic ballista or an automatic crossbow that way (with full size war arrows).

If you are ready to go for a steep trajectory you can go to high subsonic speeds at least. A mortar is possible. And if you can build an automatic soulcaster and a fuse, you have shells. Turning an object inside an airtight shell into air will certainly burst it apart.. We would have to determine how fast soulcasting actually works to determine whether the shell would rupture or be torn apart.

It's not that it's impossible to use gravitation, it's just that I believe it to be an inefficient use of the stormlight compared to the other options available. I agree that if you gave yourself enough time/distance, mass, and/or significantly increased number of lashings you can still do some decent damage (which is what I was referring to with the Orbital ballistics comment) but distance make s aiming very difficult, and both significantly increasing mass or lashings require significantly increased amounts of stormlight.  Whereas Soulcasting just plain bypasses so very many physical restraints by convincing the spirit of an object to become something more useful and/or dangerous.  It doesnt even have to always obey mass conservation which is presumably why you can soulcast a corpse into much denser materials without shrinking it. 

In your example I think you're numbers are off in a couple places, the ten lashings get you to 6.86 m/s^2 (since rosharan gravity is 0.7 G's) which gets you a traveled distance of 3.43 meters in 1 second, reaching a velocity of only 6.86 m/s.  To hit a target at 50m would take ~3.8 seconds and reach 26.2 m/s discounting any drag effects, which isnt great even by bow standards, let alone firearms.  Bows (at least modern compound bows from quick google search) typically hit the 70-90m/s firing velocity range. 

Side note, here is a great WOB on the feasibility of rosharan Nukes

[+Oltux72]

6 minutes ago, Quantus said:

In your example I think you're numbers are off in a couple places, the ten lashings get you to 6.86 m/s^2 (since rosharan gravity is 0.7 G's) which gets you a traveled

You are right. I used an approximation of Earth's gravity by accident.

6 minutes ago, Quantus said:

distance of 3.43 meters in 1 second, reaching a velocity of only 6.86 m/s.  To hit a target at 50m would take ~3.8 seconds and reach 26.2 m/s discounting any drag effects, which isnt great even by bow standards, let alone firearms.  Bows (at least modern compound bows from quick google search) typically hit the 70-90m/s firing velocity range.

You are off by a factor of magnitude. Rosharian surface acceleration is about 6.9 m/s^2, so ten lashings give you 69m/s. Sucks for a bow but is viable. 15 to 20 lashings would give you a good weapon.

Soulcasting is better if you can manage it. There is the question of countermeasures though. If only one side has fabrial weapons or surgebinders, the other side will be massacred. However, I am sure that if both sides have soulcasting abilities, the other side will work hard on persuading stuff to stay as it is. And to dissolve or transport away projectiles. So aluminium darts with discarding magical sabots look like a possibility.

Which leads me to another more general point. It looks like purely kinetic weapons are not very effective nor efficient. So if you want ranged weapons at all, a solution with an active warhead looks like the way to go. And in that case the heavier fabrial probably wins and it can be built to withstand less acceleration. Hence you would go for heavy and slow warhead, rather magical javelins or arrows rather than bullets.

[Quantus]

5 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

You are right. I used an approximation of Earth's gravity by accident.

You are off by a factor of magnitude. Rosharian surface acceleration is about 6.9 m/s^2, so ten lashings give you 69m/s. Sucks for a bow but is viable. 15 to 20 lashings would give you a good weapon.

Bah, You're right, I missed the x10 factor and calculating on the one lashing. They'd be more reasonable than I was giving them credit for.  The general point I was focused on is that Rosharan Gravity itself is weaker, which makes Gravitation weaker by association. 

 

5 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

Soulcasting is better if you can manage it. There is the question of countermeasures though. If only one side has fabrial weapons or surgebinders, the other side will be massacred. However, I am sure that if both sides have soulcasting abilities, the other side will work hard on persuading stuff to stay as it is. And to dissolve or transport away projectiles. So aluminium darts with discarding magical sabots look like a possibility.

It may be more complicated than that for two reasons: First is that the Forms of Power seem to have a lot of options that are not readily availible to Radiant surgebinders, with Stormform's weaponization of Lightning being the most obvious so far, so while they may not be a direct equivalency there may be some balance and counter-balance to the arms race.  Second is that I fully expect both "sides" of the coming conflict to end up with access to all the different means of Power (Fabrials, Surgebinders, AND singer Forms of Power) before it's all said and done.  We already have humans and Singers on both sides, a radiant Singer with a Form of Power, and Surgebinders (even Heralds) siding with Odium, along with an Unmade willing to defect who would herself give access to the corrupted spren needed for the known Forms of Power (meaning she might give Team Honor Access to them).

 

5 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

Which leads me to another more general point. It looks like purely kinetic weapons are not very effective nor efficient. So if you want ranged weapons at all, a solution with an active warhead looks like the way to go. And in that case the heavier fabrial probably wins and it can be built to withstand less acceleration. Hence you would go for heavy and slow warhead, rather magical javelins or arrows rather than bullets.

Agreed, purely kinetic weapons are going to be restricted to Artillery bombardment sorts of things and even they would benefit from more active warheads, though non-fabrial explosives might still be possible if they figure out the chemistry (which I get the feeling is not a particular advanced science on Roshar).  Active warheads have the more social danger of harming the spren that would presumably need to be imprisoned in them to make it work (at least on the Radiant side, Big-O's forces may not care), but if not that would indeed be the ticket in my book.  We havent really seen the full extent of many of the surges, though I expect Division at least lends itself to weaponization pretty well.