Yet Another Allomantic FTL Theory

[Shaggai]

So I was thinking about Allomantic nicrosil, the theorized Southern Scadrian mist-fabrials, and the use of them with bendalloy. Per WoB, we haven't seen the methods through which Allomantic FTL will be achieved. Most people assume it'll be something with the techno-Allomancy, which seems reasonable. We haven't seen that yet. But we also haven't seen Allomantic nicrosil. So there are a few ways this could play out.

Basically, I theorize that Allomantic FTL will be based on what I call nCompounding, short for numerical compounding. Theoretically, a nicrosil Misting could use their power on another nicrosil Misting, giving them a short, extra-powerful burst. The second Misting could then Nicroburst a different Misting, who would get an extraordinarily massive but extremely short burst of Investiture. This could be repeated several times, numerically compounding the effects of the main Allomancer. The timing would be extremely difficult to get right, however, and it would use up metal at an extraordinary rate. That's where the techno-Allomancy comes in.

Given the state of advancement that future Scadrial will be at, they will certainly be able to time things. If the techno-Allomancy has survived, they will be able to create mechanisms that replicate the effects of nCompounding. When applied to a bendalloy bubble, it will be able to speed up time so drastically that FTL will be possible.

The bubbles are fixed, of course, so that poses a bit of a problem, but having multiple bubble machines that turn on and off in sync will allow the ship to move in a continuous bendalloy bubble. If you have, say, one at the front, one in the middle, and one in the back, each flashing extremely rapidly, they will be able to cover the ship while not exposing it to real time. And depending on how much nCompounding you use, they won't need to flash particularly fast because the ship won't have to move very fast within the bubble to reach FTL speeds.

 

Thoughts? Criticisms?

[Tempus]

This may produce an external FTL - as in, time inside the bubble passes so slowly that they are moving faster than light just because even walking would be faster than light outside the bubble. But, it wouldn't be terribly useful - the ship would still take FOR EVER to reach its destination, and anyone aboard would either be long dead or an extremely bored Atium compounder by the time they reached their destination.

[Shaggai]

This may produce an external FTL - as in, time inside the bubble passes so slowly that they are moving faster than light just because even walking would be faster than light outside the bubble. But, it wouldn't be terribly useful - the ship would still take FOR EVER to reach its destination, and anyone aboard would either be long dead or an extremely bored Atium compounder by the time they reached their destination.

Yeah, that is a bit of a problem. I wonder if cadmium and bendalloy bubbles can be nested. Cadmium is normally larger than bendalloy, but it might be possible to artificially shrink that. Then you could have the crew area be moving much slower and the ship moving faster.

[Kurkistan]

Ah, someone else mad enough to venture into FTL territory. Welcome!!!!

 

Some comments:

 

First of all, I was a bit surprised when I saw the name of your thread. It was familiar for some reason...

 

That theory of mine, incidentally, answers the "the crew will die of old age" problem by using Cadmium bubbles, as you suggest. From how AoL and the MAG discuss it, I think it a fair to say that bubblers have a fair degree of control over how big their bubbles are.

 

Second, some comments on "nCompounding": Eldest had a similar thought on "chaining" Allomantic nicrosil awhile back, and Shardlet eventually got that question answered.

 

Source:

 

Q: When burning duralumin to enhance another metal’s burn, does a mistborn get only the sum total of the power of the other metal in a single burst or does he get more than just the sum?

 

A: I would have to make sure and look, but my original intention was the sum.

 

Q: Ok, because the thing I was wondering about is Elend with the duralumin atium burn because it seemed more than just the sum of a bead of atium.

 

A: Right, but the thing you have to keep in mind is the thing I’m kind of looking at having it all happen in a moment.  So let’s say you have enough steel to burn for an hour.  If you reduce a plane to a point it’s infinite, does that make sense.   And so it’s very hard to say is it the sum when you are going from a defined amount into a point, I mean a point is infinitely small.  Does that make sense?

 

So, just to be clear (though I read you as assuming this), Allomantic nicrosil/Allomantic duralumin don't really add anything to the equation, they just squash down the time frame. That still works for your/my theory, though.

 

Third:

 

Cadmium and Bendalloy bubbles can, in fact, be nested. It works multiplicatively like a Venn diagram. Any "extra" energy produced by this goes to some place we don't know about at the moment.

 

So far as energy being lost/gained by overlapping Sliders within slow bubbles, it's possible we may actually luck out here and get "free" extra time if the Slider is burning at a slower rate, subjective, than usual. That's just speculation at this point, though.

 

Four:

 

You may well be right to look at Allomantic bendalloy and/or Allomantic nicrosil as a component to FTL.

Edited May 23, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Tempus]

Tempus bows before the bubble master

[Shaggai]

 

Ah, someone else mad enough to venture into FTL territory. Welcome!!!!

 

Some comments:

 

First of all, I was a bit surprised when I saw the name of your thread. It was familiar for some reason...

 

That theory of mine, incidentally, answers the "the crew will die of old age" problem by using Cadmium bubbles, as you suggest. From how AoL and the MAG discuss it, I think it a fair to say that bubblers have a fair degree of control over how big their bubbles are.

 

Second, some comments on "nCompounding": Eldest had a similar thought on "chaining" Allomantic nicrosil awhile back, and Shardlet eventually got that question answered.

 

Source:

 

So, just to be clear (though I read you as assuming this), Allomantic nicrosil/Allomantic duralumin don't really add anything to the equation, they just squash down the time frame. That still works for your/my theory, though.

 

Third:

 

Cadmium and Bendalloy bubbles can, in fact, be nested. It works multiplicatively like a Venn diagram. Any "extra" energy produced by this goes to some place we don't know about at the moment.

 

So far as energy being lost/gained by overlapping Sliders within slow bubbles, it's possible we may actually luck out here and get "free" extra time if the Slider is burning at a slower rate, subjective, than usual. That's just speculation at this point, though.

 

Four:

 

You may well be right to look at Allomantic bendalloy and/or Allomantic nicrosil as a component to FTL.

 

Yes, it doesn't add anything to the amount of it, but if you squash it down twice as short a time you get twice the output for the time you have. Depending on how much Investiture can be stored in a given amount of space with the techno-Allomancy, this can be all that really matters for FTL.

[Kurkistan]

Could you expand on how this squashing down is so important?

[Cstryon]

10 psi in a gallon jug, that same volume squashed into a half gallon jug?

I don't know how it multiplies, but the pressure inside is much higher.

So assuming this is similar. aNecrosil -> aDuralimin -> Allomantic bendalloy = all the speed bubble, to a point, (zoom in on this point to make a duration), to a point?

[Tempus]

Halve the volume, double the pressure. Note that halving the dimensions of a container reduces it by a factor of eight, not two, because volume is cubed.

If you could reduce ten hours of Cadmium dilation into one second, all other variables being equal, you should gain 36000 times the normal time dilation. This is what he's getting at.

Let's number crunch! And... I can't get the info I need here. Well, for a vehicle travelling 100 km/s in a bubble, you'd need a time dilation of 1 079 252 850 times normal speed. If someone could find an estimate of how much dilation (as a multiplier) a normal cadmium bubble gives, and divide that number by it, then divide that number by 60, it would take that many minutes of Cadmium burning compressed into one second to reach equivalence with the speed of light.

Edit: Under a random assumption that a normal bubble dilates time by fifteen, and that you could chain a metric cremton of Nicrosil users, you would need an Allomancer capable of burning the bubble metal for 832.75 consecutive days without need for more metal for this theory to work.

Edited May 27, 2014 by Tempus

[Kurkistan]

There's no need to be quite that extreme, Tempus. This is space after all, and even basic Iron Feruchemy gives infinite free mechanical energy. Accelerating up to a few thousandths or hundredths of c should be simple enough, then the math becomes less daunting.

 

Still, I'm not sure as to the utility of all of this. The name of the game is making the bubbles big more so than making them mess with time more. We can already stack bubbles on top of each other for multiplicative increases in their awesomeness. What we can't do is make a speed bubble that you can't spit the circumference of.

 

Once we can (massively) increase bubble sizes, that's all she wrote. You'll be "teleporting" all over the cosmere. Perhaps massively compressed bursts of Investiture gained from "compounded" Allomantic nicrosil are the way to get there, but I don't see such an effect as necessarily unique from just using a single Nicroburst. An "instant" is already a pretty small time frame.

Edited May 27, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Tempus]

Has anyone discussed having the rider outside of a bubble? Okay, so we are assuming that we can make speed bubbles anchor to something else than the planet. So, we a single spaceship, bigger than the bubble, and make sure it counts as being within the multiplied bubble space cognitively. Then, the passengers sit on top. Things are either in or out. Spaceship is in, passengers are out. Spaceship moves really fast (relatively) thanks to time dilation effects, but the passengers don't get affected by the dilation and end up old.

I'm getting more and more sure I read this somewhere already, probably in one of Kurk's threads.

[Kurkistan]

That sounds somewhat similar to my first FTL theory (which, coincidentally, was wrong in nearly all it's particulars).

 

However, this is a tad less impossible—because of our current understanding of bubble border mechanics—than it has been historically. We know now that bubble surfaces don't "distend" around objects they encompass, so don't run into any daisy-chain effects with people touching the surfaces of encompassed objects. So it's possible for a person to be sitting on top of an object where the object is in the bubble and person isn't.

 

There are some fairly insurmountable problems with that, though:

 

This has objects in normal space exceeding c in their own subjective frame of reference. This is bad. We do not want this. If we can violate c just by pouring on a lot of extra energy, that's what Iron Feruchemy is for. And besides that we know that we can't violate c without explicit and direct magical shenanigans because cosmere laws of physics are ours unless changed by Spiritual influence. Strapping a person to a thing that happens to be moving impossibly fast doesn't seem to cut it for that qualification.

 

Within that problem, then, what can we expect to happen if a person is tied with a rope to a ship that's using time bubbles to exceed c? My guess? BAD THINGS. First intuition is that both the person and the ship explode into explody bits, as the person is accelerated to a point infinitely close to c (during which acceleration they'd certainly die and/or be torn apart) and then, if they somehow survive the acceleration, are torn apart in a several-terameter-wide hyperexplosion the next time they see a hydrogen atom.

 

On the ship's end, the drag from the rope is probably enough to tear it apart too, or it least yank a big hole out of the hull before it's torn lose.

 

---

 

A second problem is how exactly to manage it so that the ship is included and the people aren't (especially since, barring mechallomancy, we need at least once person in there to make the bubbles). Recall from my previous ramblings that we won't get any useful movement-accelerating effects unless the ship is moving through space relative to the bubble. So your model needs to make sure that this sphere both includes the ship for a useful period of time/space and excludes the passengers as well.

 

That or your tiny-bubble within the ship needs to be sure to keep the ship-wide-but-exclude-people effect as it traverses the length of the ship. And then we have the problem of this not really getting us very far with each bubble. Instead of the thousands or millions of kilometers we need, we get just the length of the ship for each bubble.

 

---

 

I'm not so sure as to your basic premise about being able to be (effectively) within a ship that's bubbled but not yourself being bubbled.

 

Source:

 

Q: If you are standing inside of a time bubble, and throw a spear out of the bubble, what happens to that spear as it traverses the border of the bubble? Are different parts of the spear ever in different "time zones," going fundamentally different speeds?

 

On that line of reasoning, what would happen to a train and its occupants if Marisi stood next to railroad tracks holding up a Cadmium bubble while that train sped by?

 

Q: In general, a large object going through a time bubble is not going to notice. An object is either in or out, and it depends in part on how the object views itself. People inside the train would be inside of its influence, and wouldn't notice the bubble. The spear would go from one to the other, but would never be in both.

 

So people inside the train are inside of of that trains influence and so excluded from the bubble. It seems, then, that anyone inside an object that was within a bubble would necessarily also be included.

-I say this because even people "sitting on top" are obviously within their own life-supporting environment that's fairly firmly attached to the ship. So they might get included against their will here. That or rope-man happens.

 

---

 

Beyond that, even if you manage all this, the ship and its systems aren't exactly going to be in great shape after experiencing a few centuries of time subjective. Metal fatigue, high-energy collisions (even 0.01c is nothing to sniff at after centuries of hitting stuff), damage done by vacuum on the external hull... And that's just the hull, before we get into computer systems and the like.

 

---

 

And, in the end, there's really no need for all that if you can manage to anchor cadmium bubbles to the ship while the bendalloy bubbles are anchored elsewhere. Any bubble anchored to the ship should not (by my reckoning) do anything to affect its movement, so you can put on as many as you want without worrying about negatively impacting travel speeds.

 

---

 

...and now I look like a monster. To sum: That is an interesting idea that I myself toyed with in the past but, upon due reflection, came to realize the inadequacies of.

Edited May 27, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Shaggai]

There's no need to be quite that extreme, Tempus. This is space after all, and even basic Iron Feruchemy gives infinite free mechanical energy. Accelerating up to a few thousandths or hundredths of c should be simple enough, then the math becomes less daunting.

 

Still, I'm not sure as to the utility of all of this. The name of the game is making the bubbles big more so than making them mess with time more. We can already stack bubbles on top of each other for multiplicative increases in their awesomeness. What we can't do is make a speed bubble that you can't spit the circumference of.

 

Once we can (massively) increase bubble sizes, that's all she wrote. You'll be "teleporting" all over the cosmere. Perhaps massively compressed bursts of Investiture gained from "compounded" Allomantic nicrosil are the way to get there, but I don't see such an effect as necessarily unique from just using a single Nicroburst. An "instant" is already a pretty small time frame.

Using multiple bubbles should allow for a ship to work. It would just have to be small. Since hemalurgic spikes can contain enough Investiture that size isn't the limiting factor for ability transfer, technallomancy should be able to put vast amounts of investiture into a small space. Certainly it should be smaller than a bendalloy bubble. Attach a bunch of capsules to each other, each containing a speeder-upper and a person in a cadmium suspended-animation bubble, then send that off into space. Or just send them all off individually.

 

As for the collisions and whatnot, there are probably ways of dealing with that. A steel bubble would help against metallic objects. I wonder what would happen if you used technallomancy to apply Allomantic pewter to a ship? If it reinforced the ship (which seems like the most likely outcome), nCompounded Allomantic pewter could basically make the ship unbreakable, as long as it didn't run into anything too big. And anything that big would probably have metal in it.

 

There would have to be some way to make course corrections, in case the ship runs into anything larger than itself. If they're heading towards a Shardworld, nCompounded Allomantic bronze might help choose the destination. They'll probably have AI, since hemalurgic spikes can store the ability to think, as we've seen with kandra. If they have AI, of course, there's little point in sending people, but this is fiction so of course they're going to send people.

Edited May 27, 2014 by Shaggai

[Kurkistan]

So you want a stack of spheres flying through space? While this, as well, is not an unfamiliar concept, it won't work.

 

Thought-experiment with me, if you will:

 

There are two spheres in an otherwise empty universe. These spheres are not moving relative to one another. You put up a speed bubble around one for a few minutes, then let it down. Have the relative positions of the spheres changes?

 

The answer to this is dependent upon frame of reference. Whether those two spheres were both motionless or both moving at 0.9c along the same vector is entirely a matter of perspective. In the first case, then, it seems that the spheres' locations shouldn't be affected by the bubble. In the second case, the bubbled sphere should have shot ahead of the other one.

 

This is the issue we face when talking about motion and time bubbles. Time bubbles "not moving" on Scadrial are actually a case of them moving with the planet.

 

It follows, then, that how an object's motion is affected by a bubble is dependent on the frame of reference of that bubble. If you have a bunch of bubbles anchored to your ship-sections, then their frames of reference are all saying that the ship isn't moving. So you'll not be getting FTL with those bubbles, just some time effects.

 

EDIT:

 

Unless you're okay with the bubbles being tiny around the mini-spheres and the spheres only getting a few meters for each bubble you cast. That'll still give you a bit of utility, but it doesn't sound that effecient.

 

---

 

Kandra do not get spikes that "store the ability to think". The spikes serve as a bridge between the cognitive/physical, not as the entirety of the cognitive.

 

Source:

NinjaMeTimbers: How intelligent is a mistwraith? Could you raise and train mistwraiths like dogs or horses, controlling what forms they take by the bones you give them? Would you be able to train yourself a horsewraith steed by giving it only the bones of a horse?

 

Brandon: This is feasible. One thing to keep in mind is that mistwraiths are people who have a blockage between the physical and the cognitive realm, messing with their ability to think. Think of them as mentally-stunted people. There's enough there to train, but then you have to dig into the ethics of it...

 

 

Edited May 27, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Shaggai]

 

So you want a stack of spheres flying through space? While this, as well, is not an unfamiliar concept, it won't work.

 

Thought-experiment with me, if you will:

 

There are two spheres in an otherwise empty universe. These spheres are not moving relative to one another. You put up a speed bubble around one for a few minutes, then let it down. Have the relative positions of the spheres changes?

 

The answer to this is dependent upon frame of reference. Whether those two spheres were both motionless or both moving at 0.9c along the same vector is entirely a matter of perspective. In the first case, then, it seems that the spheres' locations shouldn't be affected by the bubble. In the second case, the bubbled sphere should have shot ahead of the other one.

 

This is the issue we face when talking about motion and time bubbles. Time bubbles "not moving" on Scadrial are actually a case of them moving with the planet.

 

It follows, then, that how an object's motion is affected by a bubble is dependent on the frame of reference of that bubble. If you have a bunch of bubbles anchored to your ship-sections, then their frames of reference are all saying that the ship isn't moving. So you'll not be getting FTL with those bubbles, just some time effects.

 

EDIT:

 

Unless you're okay with the bubbles being tiny around the mini-spheres and the spheres only getting a few meters for each bubble you cast. That'll still give you a bit of utility, but it doesn't sound that effecient.

 

---

 

Kandra do not get spikes that "store the ability to think". The spikes serve as a bridge between the cognitive/physical, not as the entirety of the cognitive.

 

Source:

 

 

Thanks for the stuff about mistwraiths. So they may or may not have AI.

 

As for the stuff with frame of reference: 

That only applies if the bubble is anchored to the ship. Since time bubbles, presumably, can be created in midair, one can anchor them to Scadrial without being on Scadrial. Using a series of flashing bubbles, not anchored to the ship, the ship's frame of reference ends up being perfectly fine, since Scadrial is dragged in.

[Kurkistan]

Well yes, that's the idea, but you still have the problem of not having much efficiency if the bubbles are their normal, small size. I can't imagine we'll be getting that much work done if each bubble only gets you a meter. I suppose mechallomancy could somehow magically compensate for it by creating the bubbles in nigh-instantaneous sequence (though IIRC Wayne had to "cool down" between bubbles), but once again the efficiency of skipping a meter or two at a time across the cosmere seems to intuitively leave something to be desired.

 

Everyone being carted around in personal people-pods also doesn't exactly feel right (and isn't that good for character interaction or drama or the like), either, but that's a meta-textual concern.

 

Another problem we still have to solve, just so you know, is how to go about making sure the speed bubbles are anchored somewhere besides the ship while the slow bubbles we need for "stasis" are anchored to the ship.

[Kurkistan]

Double post:

 

I'd forgotten about this WoB (I think I was just to the point of internalizing it), but our mutual assumption that "chaining" nicrobursts will be more effective is in fact true.

[Aether]

How would this even work? I thought Duralumin/Nicrosil made you use up your metal(s) in a single burst. How does having a second Nicroburst in the picture amplify that (single) burst of Allomantic power?

[Satsuoni]

How would this even work? I thought Duralumin/Nicrosil made you use up your metal(s) in a single burst. How does having a second Nicroburst in the picture amplify that (single) burst of Allomantic power?

That is a good question, Kurk! According to your own quote above:

 

Right, but the thing you have to keep in mind is the thing I’m kind of looking at having it all happen in a moment.  So let’s say you have enough steel to burn for an hour.  If you reduce a plane to a point it’s infinite, does that make sense.   And so it’s very hard to say is it the sum when you are going from a defined amount into a point, I mean a point is infinitely small.  Does that make sense?

A point is an instant. How, then, to explain the apparent lasting effects exhibited in the books? Well, the answer is simple enough - all the energy goes through the metal in an instant, but it takes time for the body to channel that energy into something useful - it leaks over time at a body-fixed maximum rate (that can be stretched, probably), and then decays exponentially.

Ignoring the "i think" part of the answer above, let us assume another burst would help. If my minitheory above is correct, it would probably mean that Duralumin/Nicrosil would compress the Investiture inside the body even more, increasing the flow at the cost of time (and, presumably, body damage)

 

Now to the bubbles Please remember that Scadrial rotates, and that normal bubble rotates with it So bubble simply attached to Scadrial would go sideways... Very rapidly... After some distance, possibly even faster than light. And/or do Bad Things to the planet it is attached to, assuming connection goes both ways. Plus all other problems with bubbles and their interface that I listed in the post somewhere and am too lazy to find or repost

Edit: This should go into my sign, but, everything above that is conjecture is just IMO-type conjecture. I may change my mind if more evidence comes or I just think harder, etc,etc.

Edited May 29, 2014 by Satsuoni

[Kurkistan]

@Aether

 

What Sats said, to an extent. I'm not so definite about the mechanics of it as he is, but I'd imagine that if a normal super-Steelpush takes place over 0.5 seconds, a doubled one might take place over 0.25 seconds or the like. Despite what Brandon said, there's really no such thing as an "instant" in our interactions with space/time. And any non-zero amount of energy applied to a body in an infinitely small space of time would result in big boom-booms, I believe.

[Cstryon]

If necrosil chains work, could you make a circle, that actually goes back and increases the first necrosil burst?

A circle of five, one starts, and (with perfect timing and no moment wasted) leads to five bursting one? Would ones burst than doubly increase two's? With all of them only bursting once, could we have a nearly infinite gain? And than have five break the circle and touch the slider standing in the middle?

Making this mobile is going to be difficult, but assuming this works, that bubble would be multiplied like crazy.

[nightwatcher]

Will there be mistborn in the third trilogy? They've disappeared in AoL, according to Wax, but some form of Cosmic danger could , theoretically, convince Harmony to make more Leresium, no?

If they did, I feel like some of the problems discussed in this thread may disappear. What would happen if a Nicrosil ferret burned leresium? Could he gain the ability to compound nicrosil while simultaneously burning dulalumin, giving him access to a near infinite amount of investiture, then use that investiture to form a bendalloy bubble for an instant?

If you had several of these operating sequentially, could you get the bubblehop working?

BTW, this just musings. I'm not even going to try and theorize on this thread, where i'm obviously outclassed in terms of access to the cognitive realm- i'm just curious if that, or something similar, would work.