kaiadam

I loved the profanity filter on David's mobile. Took a koala. Motivator dingo.

A mole of lithium releases 184 kj when reacting with water. Sodium has an atomic weight of ~23, so you're looking at 8 kj of energy. To put that in perspective, the energy given off when you toss a gram of sodium into water is roughly the same amount of energy required to boil a teaspoon of water, the energy given off by eating around a quarter of a single peanut, or the energy burned by doing around 10-15 jumping jacks. (All in all, hardly impressive.)

My personal theory is that surgebinding somehow speeds up or allows the next Desolation to take place. One of the more outstanding differences between the timeline of the current desolations and that of the previous ones is that there has been a far longer period of peace - likely purchased through the deaths of most spren that can form Nahel bonds. The KR collectively renouncing their vows - how could this happen unless they all believed it was for the greater good? There had to be a reason why they destroyed their spren. They probably discovered how the Odium cage worked and that surgebinding weakened the chains, or something like that. That would explain Darkness' intent on killing any surgebinder he can lay his hands on - the fewer who can surgebind the slower the next Desolation is.

I only dabbled in physics in college so I can't guarantee that this is correct, but in the absence of an event horizon, isn't it theoretically possible to plot a trajectory to anywhere you want in any given gravitational field, no matter how uneven/bumpy the space/time is? It'd be like a game of mini-golf but atium's pretty amazing at working around that ... I understand that you can't slingshot off of anything, I was just thinking of Kaladin's trick with the arrows -> shield, just making a massive pull on the shield right next to him makes a prime slingshot target. But if he were to try to pull the coins off to one side, the mistborn would be able to correct for the additional gravity field and keep the coin on track. Anyway, I'm just attempting to show that a mistborn vs windrunner fight isn't as one sided and cut and dried as the OP believes it to be.

Fair point on the windrunner/plate thing. On the other hand, any damage to plate similarly exhausts stormlight as we see Kaladin being drained in the arena with a cracked plate helm on his hand, so it's similar to healing - the idea isn't that you one shot the windrunner but wear him down enough that he's unable to use his powers anymore. And a powerless windrunner in plate that's exhausted of stormlight is effectively a sitting duck, right? I feel it'll just come down to a fight of attrition. Why wouldn't slingshotting coins work? Remember, we're talking an Atium user against a non-user, the mistborn would be able to predict the reaction of the windrunner to the slingshot and still up with the coin on target. If anything, it's the atium in the matchup that's overpowered as heck. The way I see the fight going is that the mistborn turtles while the windrunner can be either defensive or offensive. For the sake of discussion, I think we can agree on that normal metals will outlast stormlight which will in turn outlast atium. So the windrunner's goal is to outlast the atium and go on the offensive against the mistborn without atium which will most likely give him the win, or to bull through and count on plate/healing to keep him up against an atium mistborn. The latter will most likely result in a loss, and I'm not sure how you can force the mistborn to use up his atium without going on the offensive, however. Hovering and plinking away can be defeated by something as simple as a roof, imo.

Well, we have Szeth who mentions that plate hampers with his surge abilities so a windrunner isn't very likely to be wearing plate. But if he were, you'd just aim the coins at the visor slits. By higher endurance, I mean that a mistborn should be able to keep flying around as long as he has metals, whereas a windrunner's out of juice once stormlight is gone. From my impressions, stormlight is significantly scarcer than available metals that you carry around. And while default stormlight healing is very powerful, it has to take some time and/or have a limit to the amount of damage it can heal, otherwise all radiants must be functionally immortal. I claim that a mistborn with sufficient time would be able to do enough damage to either outpace the healing speed or exhaust the available stormlight. I concede that I forgot about reverse lashings, however, if all it does is give an object a large gravitational pull, a misborn burning atium would be able to see that effect in advance and be able to plot a course to slingshot the coins to the accurate location, just like Nasa did with several space probes, slingshotting them using the gravity of Jupiter to give them an even higher speed. Finally, regarding the windrunner lashing himself to the mistborn - I admit that proves a worry. The only solution I can come up with off the top of my head is to push various coins at the windrunner, resulting in either enough damage to stop the pursuit or it comes down to which is stronger, a lashing or a push. @Pathfinder the phrasing used was that he lashed him that direction: "Kaladin jumped to put his feet towards the Shardbearer and Lashed himself that direction many times in quick succession". Ultimately I guess my argument relies on the presence of Atium, which more or less grants the user invincibility and unerring accuracy, the limited availability of stormlight, and the abundance of metals. Edit: So I googled that it takes around 3000 newtons of force to crack ribs, so maybe 5000 newtons to crack leg bones. Given that Kaladin is probably around 80-100 kg, we're looking at 60 m/s^2 of acceleration using all the stormlight he could muster. On the other hand, Vin/Elend were able to ironpull several tons of metal in opening the lord ruler's caches. Even if we're just talking 1 ton of metal, they would be able to exert ~10k newtons worth of force, which is at least comparable if not straight up stronger than lashing.

How would a windrunner deflect 3 coins pushed at his head at the same time? Assume with Atium, these coins would all hit a vital part of the brain, and a shardblade is thick enough to parry only 2. The biggest issue I have with a mistborn vs windrunner fight is that windrunners have no ranged abilities (spren changes to crossbow form?) and they have more or less equal speeds while mistborn have higher endurance so even if the mistborn can't kill the windrunner, he can just kite away and wear the windrunner down with coins.