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The difference (and maybe this wasnt exactly what you were asking, sorry) is wielding Nightblood vs fighting him. As a defense against Nightblood Aluminum is basically the only game in town (since even an honorblade isnt Invested enough to resist completely) so gauntlets would be great for that. For the person drawing and wielding him though, I could be wrong but I dont think it would be enough to get you around Nighblood's intrinsic need to drain it's wielder Investiture (seemingly as fuel). When you wield him there is a Bond happening at a spiritual level (as part of his Test and that later lets him speak telepathically to them), and aluminum doesnt always block realmic effects (like Soulcasting inside a box, for example). For that reason and also for the doylist/narrative reason of never bypassing the double-edged Cost of Nightblood, I dont think physical gloves would block the Feeding aspect of Nightblood if you were the one to "unleash" him.

I dont think it would protect the wielder much at all. His unsheathing is more than a physical thing, its the Intent of "unleashing" him, after which he even weaponizes the aluminum sheath. If if can incorporate the sheath I think it would not be stopped by aluminum gaunlets. Maaaybe a full aluminum suit, but I think even then it's more likely the tendrils will start eating/converting matter to feed itself before it would be foiled or depowered, etc.

The way I see it, it's most likely a cultural perversion of old references to the UnMade, rather than some secret lore hidden in plain sight. Rosharan pop culture is not particularly accurate in any other instance, so it seems likely that their lore about the UnMade simply got thematically revised to fit their overriding theme of Ten in everything (even if Braize/Odium's rosharan representation is actually Nine).

If Honor represents "Honor is the sense of being bound by rules, even when those rules, you wouldn't have to be bound by." then I entirely think Mercy is the antithesis of that where one is disregarding those same rules, with a (perhaps unearned) cultural connotation that makes it seem innately good or bad at first glance.

Short Answer is it's the same reason people like Lord of the Rings: It broke new ground and set a lot of the standards of the genre, even if it may not always hold up against things that have stood on its shoulders and come along since then. (PS. I do agree with basically all your points on Wheel of Time. On #2 I recall it feeling less like an author insert fantasy and more like he'd written himself in a corner and couldn't decide which romantic interest to go with, so he tried to semi-magically dodge the problem. But I was very young at the time, so I could easily have missed subtext.)

Yup, confirmed to be workable as small as Dental Fillings, but since the amount of actual investiture in Hemalurgy is relatively small. It could probably be as tiny as the literal depth of the skin-to-blood, or its possible that it would work as tiny as you could make it and still interact enough to be cognizant of the actual Insertion like tiny surgical needle size or less under a microscope. Blood contact isnt apparently required to receive a spike but might be required for the initial Charge, but even then the minimum practical length might have a lot of circumstantial/mechanical factors.

I think folks are mixing bits of the Basic Lashing and the Reverse Lashing, and the distinction as that I see is what is actually getting Invested. Basic Lashings let you redirect the direction of a Person or Object's Gravitational Pull (relative to it's original Down). Reverse Lashings, which the WoR arcanum called a specialized Basic Lashing but also a Resonance of Gravitation and Adhesion, will Pull anything toward itself (with the caveat that it works a lot less on things actively touching the ground and thus more Connected to it). In Other words, Gravitation can only Redirect the "Down" vector of the person/object Invested, relative to Objective Gravity, and the lashing needs to be moved/reapplied to change direction. A combination of Adhesion and Gravitation is required (per Ars Arcanum) is required to create an actual gravity well that pull things toward the Invested object. It might be possible that an Elscaller could help too (though a Bondsmith would need to Connect things), since Elscallers apparently have some sort of realmic tracking capability No details, but Jasnah mentions it wasnt managing to locate the Heralds when she thought it should. I like it! A similar one that Diminishes emotions to cause a stupor might be effective as well (or perhaps useful to Counter Nergoul and the Thrill). Honestly I wonder if other Surges can be directly affixed to a Gem the way Lightweavers can with Illusions, so they wouldnt need a true independent Fabrial. Anything from Reverse Lashing grenades to ranged Division could be a hell of a tactical advantage.

He'd have a harder time Pushing on that item, but it would not have the sort of field effect that aluminum does to disrupt/shield nearby Investiture effects. Im less clear on whether they could do it through an aluminum chest-plate; on one hand the effect going to the center of mass is more a perception illusion that can be trained past, on the other hand Perception and Intent are cornerstones of cosmere magics. It is possible that he'd be able to push on his own Metalminds easier than on somebody else's on account of matching their Identity coding,

Intent and divine intervention notwithstanding, Yes. Assuming all shardpools operate similarly, they would be so heavily invested when they died that they'd become a Cognitive Shadow and be able to resist the pull of The Beyond. I dont think that guarantees anything about how long they would last as a Cognitive Shadow, how far they could travel from the Shardpool, or if they'd be able to persist without some ongoing source of Investiture, which can be far more dependent on external circumstances.

Oh no, not off the table at all: any of these systems could probably benefit from the extra Burst effect of duralumin, especially assuming you can bypass heat transfer limits and just directly, magically flash the temperature at duralumin superspeed. It's just that with the same overall fabrial mechanism you could see significantly more efficient energy use with water/Steam as your working fluid instead of just air, to take advantage of the phase change (over just air volume heating that is much smaller per unit energy). And with or without Steam as the fluid, the pressure storage tank design gives you the option of multiple shots per tank recharge, so you would have to swap out your investiture power supply every single shot.

It's specifically not those, this is a general conversation of how somebody might make a practical gun using contemporary magic knowledge with RL science. In point of fact, every mention of what you are concerned with so far has been behind a spoiler tag (other than yours...)

Fun! I too have been thinking about this one a lot. Breaking it down to it's most fundamental, a gun is a solid projectile being accelerated in one direction, by gas or other "soft contact" energy to draw a line between a Gun and the crossbow & slingshot space. That still leaves two broad categories to my mind: Gas acceleration (air pressure, steam, chemical, etc) and direct energy to the slug (coil guns, rail guns, Gravity Lashings, etc). The rest of the process is figuring out where to plug the magic elements into the physics. For simplicity Im assuming the Investiture power is worked out separately with Gems, medallions, breaths etc. and "reasonable" fabrial/tech functions. To get it out of the way, a Soulcaster Gun would be able to do anything easily: since it can change materials directly and doesnt always have to obey conservation of mass, there are near infinite physics loopholes to exploit. For gas acceleration, thermal energy in a burst is going to be difficult, it is fundamentally a more sluggish energy than most, it's why we usually have to jump to an adjacent energy (pressure changes, electricity, radiation, etc) to move it faster than the normal Convection/Conduction/Radiation pathways will allow. For a gun you'd need a storage means, so most likely a hot air tank to build pressure and a release mechanism to fire. This can be surprisingly effective (see below about a real historic Air Rifle that Im a big fan of). At a physics level you will always get more volume bang for your energy buck if you can engage a phase change in your cycle, because the expansion from a solid/liquid to a gas is will nearly always take way less energy than the equivalent expansion of air by heating alone. For these purposes that really just translates into a steam pressure gun that would be essentially the same design with little water in the tank (and a few additional safety features for explosion and implosion dangers). In a modern world there might be more optimal chemicals (the refrigerant gas industry has been developing more and more for decades) but for roshar simple steam & a thermal Fabrial is going to be one of the more ideal and easy to mass produce. A tangent option that I've been looking at recently for a proper zombie apocalypse firearm) is an HHO gas gun. If you do an electrolysis reaction on water to split the oxygen and hydrogen but you let the gasses mix directly into their perfect ratio, it becomes a lot more explosive than it would be at a different mix. Ignite that and all the energy is released in a superheated steam explosion (See Here for a decent experimentation video with some explosions shown) which is why it's considered too dangerous to store. It also will produce one of the hotter has torches you can make. All it takes is water, a few volts of electricity, and the right electrolyte catalyst, so any Stormform, lightning capable radiant (dustbringers and Skybreakers Im guessing), or electric Fabrial should be able to drive it from Stormlight supplies (and water). Similarly for pure energy weapons, any any Division surge user, Stormform, or equivalent electric Fabrial should be able to drive a magnetic Coil gun or at larger scales actual Railguns (which operate on an electric field/charge mechanism instead of the magnetic one of Coil-guns). We've done the math a few times on gratitational Lashing Guns and I think the consensus is that there's no hard reason they couldnt work but they require a lot of lashings on top of each other to reach a useful ballistic acceleration, so they would likely prove energy inefficient compared to other options. Probably the very best option for large artillery's guns though, since it scales up better than any of the others. I dont mean to be contrary but yes it very much does, it was literally the first known chemical explosive. Fuel plus oxidizer driving an explosively fast chemical reaction with a phase change. Are you perhaps thinking of the distinction between "explosion" and "detonation" where there's more rate & wave subtlety involved? It's less effective but there is some pretty cool historical precedent. The Lewis & Clark expedition had hunting rifle that was purely compressed air (with an external compressor) that was too expensive and complex for mass market but was pretty clever and effective without needing manufactured cartridges (just the actual slug). The stock was a detachable compressed air tank so it was essentially a glorified BB gun, but in many ways it was superiors to the muskets of the day. The biggest restriction there is that those

To manifest in the Physical Realm, Investiture is either invested in a person/object, or it manifest a "pure" form as it's own form of matter. Barring shenanigans and specific circumstances (which can always exist in the cosmere) every shard should have a solid form that for thematic reasons is usually a Metal, the Liquid of the Shardpools (which is the most potent and versatile form), and a Gaseous form. Rosharan Lights, Breaths, and both Mists are different/known forms of gaseous Investiture, so they are theoretically equivalent and without significant effort I dont think a Light of Endowment or Preservation, etc would exist since they already have a gaseous form. The Tones and Rhythms are more of a realmic thing ultimately emanating from the Spiritual realm; each Shard will most likely have a Pure Tone cosmere-wide, and then all sorts of lesser and/or more complex mixed Rhythms might manifest for those with ties to their investiture, like the rhythms of the Singers or of Scadrian Seekers.

I think both are possible and that it depends on what metal and Intent you are using. If you steal the ability to actually Chant the Dakhor (which I think would take two spikes for the power and for the Connection to the land of Fjorden), you'd get that ability but not any specific bone warpings that had actually been done. If you tried to steal the actual physical bone traits, you could get them but they'd be "dead" unless you Charged them with the appropriate Investiture (ie. supplement the Sacrifices and whatnot) which also might require multiple spikes. EDIT: A telling experiment would be to see if the bones of a Dakhor monk revert to normal when they leave Sel or if they'd remain warped but non-functional.

Short answer is no. Long answer is that there are several factors. The base lashing is always relative to the Object or Person being lashed, so the starting point is that weight. From there the efficiency of the lashings are scaled by the strength of the Bond that is providing access to the Surge. The least efficient means is probably a Fabrial followed by the Honorblades since they barely Bond. Most efficient is the 5th Ideal Radiant, and all the lesser radiants and squires fall somewhere in the middle. I have no idea if Squire strength is static or scales with the radiant's Ideals, but I suspect the latter.

It could also be as simple as the spren spent more time on Roshar in those days, when the Shards were more active in things. Radiants weren't around until after the Fused were created, but Bonds and some proto Surges were kickign about. Between that and the Shardpools there could have been a decent amount of contact with Shadesmar and/or a means to bring sapient spren to the Physical realm without loosing their minds.

The issue at play is Identity, and as far as we know (he's RAFO'd msot questions) it works more or less the same as with Metalminds, just with the Identity being a bit more pliable during transfer. Assuming that is the case, I think it would "Muddy" the Identity enough that the hemalurgist would not be able to access them unless and until he restored the Identity Spike, IF Stored in an Object. When they are just held by the Awakener they are actively Investing and Augmenting the person (granting Heightenings and such), and so I dont think they are Separate from the person enough to have a different Identity and would "Update" with the person themselves when the Spike was removed, or perhaps just be in the blended "both work" encoding as if it were spike-donor's metalmind.

Im thinking they are Fused-style Cognitive Shadows that are getting stapled into Mistwraiths (rather than Singers) to make new bodies.

Feruchemy = "Have you considered a Layaway plan?" The Court of the Gods = "Look! Tall, Pretty Vampires! If we feed them the Souls of enough Children, one of them might grant us a wish someday!"

Entirely possible. We dont know anything, but we do know the rules enough to make some guesses: Options: It Shattered along with the rest of the Power and is no more. It moved Beyond Immediately. It stuck around for a while but is gone now. .It's still kicking around in some form It lives in Lasting Integrity and comes out once every 16 days... It Bonded with Something and still exist in one or more fragments, independant of the Shards.

That it may or may not exist.

You would struggle with it quite a bit, depending on how heavily Invested the metalmind is. Assuming you could make it work (both a skill and a Power issue), it would likely work the same way as if you melt one down and try to alloy it: the investiture remains but becomes inaccessible until you changed it back. But when asked directly he effectively RAFO'd it:

By the shared realmics of the Cosmere, any and every object is at least a little self-aware (at minimum it's confirmed relevant to both Speed bubbles and Soulcasting), though it takes specific magics/skills to interact with them directly (even for shadesmar natives like spren). On the other hand, everything on Roshar is at least a little more invested than most worlds, the highstorm ecosystem make it permeates everything and bleeds through the realms more. Even the people are a little more Invested, which is why they dont get sick much and thus didnt have any evolved resistance to the Common Cold that world-hoppers introduced recently. And the more Investiture an object has the further it is along the lines to sapience.

White streamers from the ceiling for the Mists, with black ones on the kids for Mistcloaks. Steel-pushing (iron-pulling?) Tug of War Coinshot shootouts (bonus points for drawing allomantic symbols on the foam disks) https://www.amazon.com/ArtCreativity-Launcher-Shooter-Activities-Backyard/dp/B08BTCGTRL Mistborn swag (they have decals, coins, t-shirts, etc) https://www.dragonsteelbooks.com/collections/the-mistborn®-saga

The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay I like the above better I think but these were the covers of my generation: