Kurkistan

We don't have a WoB on being able to heal back Spiked powers. We want a WoB on that because if we can then hello infinite every power for everyone! So there's no evidence either way that Hemalurgy damages things the same way that Shardblades do. One theory that Sats and I have been quietly espousing for awhile now is that Hemalurgy "rips" while Shardblades just "sever", and that the one kind isn't quite so easily healed as the other.

A cool idea for the store going forward, I suppose. I think the more basic glypth/oath combo might be more classy, though.

@Peter I agree (for what it's worth). Why not include everything, really. It's not exactly like plain text is big data and we're already most of the way there. @Pech The Theoryland backend likely as a big fat database that they could scrape for the content. You might have to ask Joe very politely, though even then there are concerns that their hard-won data could potentially be misused (we all know what a monster you are, Pech ).

@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.

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.

Ah yes, I forgot to throw that quote (source) in here when I say it. Thanks.

Regarding Sel: Elantris Spoilers: Regarding Cognitive Shadows: Shadows of Silence/Mistborn Spoilers:

A bit necro, but I use this thread as a place to see all the pool-related quotes, so here's another.

I don't know, it is a very exclusive list... I'll take it under advisement.

Not until just now... Welcome to the forums!

I doubt it would increase the power of the bond. I get the impression that its more "now the magic can get in because there are some cracks" rather than "OOOOOOH! More holes in his soul to fill!!!!" It's not like more powerful allomancers... need... more nasty snappings... after... all... Huh. I'll think on it.

I imagine it's fudged by the magic system in one way or another. We already have the army going from the relatively low-lying Shattered Plains to so high in the mountains they're above highstorms with no ill effects.

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.

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:

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: 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.

Yup. It's highly abundant, but the purification process is... not pleasant until you really get the science down.

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.

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

I may simply be getting hung up on this, but it's not so much the term as the concept (which I'm still having trouble getting a grasp on here) which I take issue with. I don't see much reason to think that we ought to start treating Cognitive anythings as "bridges". But as I said I'm probably just getting hung up, so let's move on. I'm not so sure that plausibility really has any place in talk about Awakening. How "plausible" is it really that a piece of straw act like a little man and fetch some keys? Or that a sword be empowered to "Destroy Evil?" or some tassels on a coat act as a second set of fingers? There's also the issue of how persistent these connection to "Command-Forms" need to be. This is delving into "I feel" territory, but Awakening as a whole seems much for self-contained than to need to keep up some stable, always-on link to an external Ideal. While Forging is end-positive and needs to constantly access the Dor to work—to the extent that taking a boat over to Arelon will make a stamp stop working—Awakening is end-neutral and seems overall much more self-contained. In that case, then, end-neutral Awakening doesn't seem like it should need to be relying constantly on external definitions, nor that it should need to (or be able to) expend the power to keep those connections up. Perhaps a better way to model the the interaction of Awakening and some theoretical "Command-Forms" is a bit more fleeting? So a single Command attempts to access some Form or set of Forms and copy it over to the object in question, but once the Command is said and the color is drained (recall that this color-draining is a unique and one-time effect of issuing commands) that's the end of interaction with these Forms. Under that model, even, it's still an interesting question as to how Command-Forms are accessed. Is it on the level of the Awakener? The object? The Breath, even? Is it the result of a direct spiritual connection between one of these objects and the Form(s) in question, or some spontaneous connection provoked by proper Cognitive keys—this last tying into (infamously hard to find the WoB on) claims that Commands are the "focus" of Awakening?

My problem is that, at this point, it seems like we're just saying "connection" for the heck of it, where we could just as easily say "claim" or "specification" or "attribute" or something. This in the face of the fact that we have never yet seen such a thing as a cognitive connection.

I generally don't see it as necessary to pull in quotes from stuff that's explicitly in the books. Though others obviously disagree (thus necessitating the WoB), I've always seen this particular fact as being such. That or I grew lazy for a moment. Also, while my tendency to over-WoB everything is mostly habit at this point, my principled reason is to make sure people have access to new (for them, at least) interviews and to provide the original WoB for everyone's interpretation rather than presenting my own (possibly incorrect) interpretation as gospel. In this case, the quote is in the interview database and is a straightforward "Yes Denth has the Royal Locks". That or I grew lazy.

Well yes, but the obvious thing to do here is to incorporate that "better understanding of how a thing is made" into the actual carving of a stamp. Someone who understands a car engine can make it run better by saying "the jiggly-thingy Y was tightened a week ago" while someone else would be reduced to trying to say "the car was fixed". Though I'm still not sure if I'm 100% sold on the concept that the kind of complexity evident in the mural contributes to plausibility in cases where it's not necessary. I'm sure that a Shai who was a master carpenter could have written a more detailed/thorough "fix the desk" stamp, but I'm not so sure that that would have been necessarily more plausible than the more generic one she came up with. Yeah, I got nothing here. Shallan herself tells us why the ship had more complex thoughts than the stick (because people had modeled it/seen it as that complex), but Soulcasting is beyond the scope of what I've been talking about. At this point, I wouldn't even say that I think that whether/how an object can be Soulcast relies on Forms at all. There is some interesting discussion to be had about the relationship between intent/instructions/visualization in Awakening Commands and Forms, but I'm not sure how you get "cognitive connections" out of that either.

Or they figured out their kinship because both had the Royal Locks.

First attempt: -Make a stamp to Forge the bedspread into appropriate clothing for escaping through the grounds. -Make a stamp to turn part of the exterior wall into a door or window. Failing that, murder the mortar between the cobblestones so that the wall can be disassembled with relative ease. -Given infinite time, spend a year or two developing a woodsman/outdoor survival and escape persona. ---- In the short-term case, wait until a less chatty/nosy pair of guards is at the door at night, then Forge the wall and bedspread and be on my merry way off the estate. In the long term, do the above and apply the woodsman soulstamp to myself as I leave.

I think it worthwhile to get the line just before that quote: Given that context, I think you may be making a leap here. We're told that there's a lot of technical detail, then Shai tells us you need some degree of technical skill as an explanation/reply. I don't think it warranted to build up some greater assumption about implicit understanding being embedded in the stamp from that line, then. Any such interpretation is somewhat non-intuitive. Outside the text, Brandon is in the habit of emphasizing the "computer programming" nature of Selian magics, another reason why anything so "squishy" is suspect. I see now. This is strongly similar to arguments I made in the aforementioned mondo-death thread. In particular, the nature of the spirit web was thoroughly expounded upon after the OP. The involvement of cognitive aspects seems somewhat tacked on in your model, though. There's no mention until that last sentence. What role do they play, exactly? In my own model, they serve as the the implicit means by which "plausibility" actually matters, by throwing off implausible stamps that don't get enough juice from the Dor to keep up the fight. I would be open to a slightly more Cognitive-centric model of plausibility calculation, but you have to give me a bit more to work with in regards to how exactly the Cognitive is involved.