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Huh, yes I read BoM but I must have missed it (or forgotten, it's been years). I guess I can offer myself as a single datapoint that her sexual orientation didnt seem a particularly central aspect of her characterization, for whatever that is worth.

Well, TIL that she was a lesbian. I thought she was just a dedicated craftsman with no patience for Wayne's shenanigans, and with we engineer's common tendency to ignore social...everything.

I entirely think it's similar principles, but not literally Hemalurgy (unless or until we see actual Spikes in one of them). I see it as the same category as Heralds being a whole lot Like a Returned, but not literally having a Divine Breath of Endowment. In the case of Roshar, My best guess is that they are similar in concept to the Fused where he took something preexisting (probably Living PR entity rather than a spren) and used them as Raw materials to create something new. In the case of the Fused they are spren-like ghosts with varying but specific Modifications to grant Powers (the Thundercasts are probably the largest amount of rework), and my guess it that the UnMade were simply taken apart and reconfigured to a much greater degree.

In my head it will look like this: But in reality it will be more like these. Assuming I can work out some proper power limiting adjustment, the basic glove will work as a taser, arc generator, maaayabe a windproof lighter, and the least useful light source ever. With the HV contacts on the fingertips, I'll be able to build contacts into the grip of those other devices like the Marx Baton, so it will be the primary power source for that 2nd stage gizmo Corona Discharge around the fingertip hardware will look something like this: Electric arcs between fingertips will be a lot like a jacobs ladder but Ill just have to play with the gap distances between fingers instead of letting it rise on wires. And the Marx Stack baton will be almost precisely this thing, just portable and more linear:

"Need" is a really strong word It's primary purpose is to make my inner child giggle and clap like it's a magic show. It's the same reason I have a back-burner project to incorporate a Wimshurst Machine into a double blades battle axe. I enjoy taking things that sound like ridiculous fantasy and making functional versionS (If I could find a real mechanism that somehow needed a Pyramid for energy harvesting, hooo boy!). Bur beyond that it's just so I can tell myself Im ready to be a Supervi- ahh... SuperHero

I think it depends on which example you are looking at. When the surge is used specifically for Adhesion then I would agree with you, its all about preventing any volume from entering the Invested zone and thus "stick" with a maintained vacuum. While that is a) the most common application of the surge (at least from a Radiant) and b) the reason I think the surge can be used to make "bottle" effects, Im looking to Kaladin's Parting of the Storm usage as indication that it doenst have to be a purely rigid container expression. So long as at least one side can "float" even a little, the equalization forces should come into play and be able to Push on a surface. Which are literal Entropy forces, if we really want to chase the white rabbit...

Ah, gotcha. I think you can chalk a lot of that up to development momentum itself. For example, Spanreeds are basically the rosharan equivalent of the internet or telegraph, the first real continental telecommunications. That alone makes collaborating with distant experts possible in a way that never could before, which will wildly accelerate development all on it's own. And the more Artifabrians manage to develop new useful Fabrials, the more useful he overall pursuit appears to those with the Funding, and thus more support is given to the development, and on and on the cycle continues. In that light, Taln's response to their level of development makes more and more sense to me, now that you mention it. Imagine expecting the Stone Age and arriving in a pre-industrial Renaissance instead.

Friends! I am now building a Fabrial! And I stand by that description because, Comrades...Crystal Power! I recently learned that Piezoelectric Transformers are a thing. This means that I can make my power glove design work with a literal Crystal Power Module, rather that the (much bulkier) magnetic flyback transformer I was planning to use. This makes my inner child so incredibly happy, you dont even know. So Im going to come around and ramble about the progress of my designs every now and then, mostly to keep project momentum. Im also going to randomly describe it in cosmere/realmic terms wherever possible, because reasons. For the uninitiated, piezoelectric crystals are everywhere, they are a really cool bit of physics where you can apply physical stress and get a burst of electric current (seen in those sparking furnace or grill starters), or conversely they will emit a very regular mechanical movement when an electric current is applied. Nearly every modern clock and computer uses these for precise timekeeping. That was the limit of their usefulness as far as I knew, but it turns out you can use these for real Power distribution. The concept is similar to any other transformer (or lever or pulley system, for that matter) where you put energy in one side of an imbalanced structure and get a step-up or step-down version of that energy out the other side. In traditional magnetic transformers, you have to run an electric current though a coil, and if the current is constantly changing (ie AC power) that energy will move into a Magnetic Field. If you hold another coil within that field, the energy will come out the other end. Much like levers that trade distance for force, the relative number of tuns in the two coils will trade Voltage for Current. Piezoelectric Transformers work in much the same way, except instead of moving the energy through the Magnetic domain to affect the change, it stores it as a physical force (vibration). One side of the piezo electric transformer is layered while the other is not, arranged in such they same mechanical vibration will yield different voltages and currents. Now, my goal is all about high voltages to get visible electric arcs as long and showy as possible, but with relatively low currents (for safety as much as anything else). This is the ideal application for PZT transformers, as the give a dramatic step-up in voltage (100:1) but doesnt scale up well for high current applications. My general plan is to have a bank of deep draw batteries (chemistry TBD) providing anywhere from 12-30 volts, feed those to a resonant inverter circuit to drive the PZT, and feed the resulting output (~1200VAC @55khz) into a Cockcroft–Walton voltage multiplier to get me somewhere north of 20kv DC. That will be the electricity available at the fingertips for basic arc fun. I also intend to design the physical hardware to maximize corona discharge so I get a proper blue glow from the energized bits, but only time will tell how well that's going to work out. Secondary phase of this design will be to build a proper Marx Stack pulse generator into a baton, which should be capable of throwing over 100 kV. Which is also why I want the business end a solid foot or two away from me (this was the fundamental flaw in my old Marx Blade design). Ive done smaller scale versions of this, they arent all that complicated and they utilize a satisfying number of spark gaps in the core function. Looking into it, I should be able to also feed the glove power into several other fun things, including a coil gun or even a hand-held EMP (which of course I wont actually do because the FCC hates them). That's it for now, I will return with preliminary pictures. Next step, reverse engineer the circuit on a laptop backlight power driver I found on ebay, or at least enough of it to cut into the right part of the circuit. This is basically how I image Hemalurgy: a plan, a pile of unrelated circuit boards, and a hacksaw...

This one's on me. Apologies my friends, I didnt mean to make a thing of it, or to derail the conversation. In the last fan-site I haunted with any regularity, zombie jokes were the common community response, but with no animosity intended. But then that fandom actually featured necromancers in the setting, so it probably fit better. Again, I am sorry. To the Topic: Since we have WOB that that it's not a Dawnshard, I tend to lean toward it being more of a basic mechanical Gem-Fabrial sort of thing. The WOB statement is that philosophically similar to Hemalurgy from a realmic POV, but distinct enough makes me think it's not literally a hemalurgic spike or Odium's Godmetal actually being hacked into the Metallic Arts. I think the similarity is that it's using a physical wound and the flowing blood to access the Spiritweb the same way spikes do. The rest I think is a more traditional Metal&Gem fabrial that traps a Cognitive shadow at the moment of death. I dont know if he was ripped out, of just killed and snatched on his way back to Braize, but the end result is a Cognitive Shadow trapped in what I assume is a specially prepared Gem. I tend to be in the camp that it's a Godmetal, but there are so many possibilities that I dont have any specific theory on what it might add functionally. I have to wonder if it's a voidspren in some sort of unique shardblade form, or just an honorblade equivalent in the sense of a Godmetal Fabrial. Clarifying Questions I think would illuminate: Did the knife wound kill him, or did the magical effect do it? The former means it was more just trapping him on his way back to Braize (possibly breaking the Oathpact cycle for him entirely), while the latter would indicate that it actively and magically ripped him out of the body more closely like Hemalurgy. Would the same process (if not the same knife) work against a Returned? Im thinking it all hinges on the fact that the target is a Cognitive Shadow and not a normal (living) person. Does that Yellow-white metal have a function in the Metallic Arts? Would confirm if it's literal Hemalurgy, and might imply that Odium had hacked into the Metallic arts, which would imply that it has an allomantic and feruchemical function as well.

It’s not two separated rigid containers stacked near each other, more like a piston with two pockets and a separating surface that they push on. Regardless, the underlying physics are all the same; they all rely on the same pressure/density differential mechanism to transmit the actual force, which is also the literal mechanism of buoyancy. They create it in varying ways, and how you describe it is more or less accurate for Wings specifically, but if you are able to manipulate the pressures directly you can bypass those mechanisms. Broadly speaking they are divided into AeroStats vs AeroDynes. Wings create the pressure difference using the geometry of the wing and the fact that the gas density is directly related to pressure, and pressure is directly related to Air velocity (ie Bernoulli's principle). Dirigibles accomplish the difference with a gas that is innately less dense at standard atmospheric conditions; while hot air balloons do the same by heating a trapped volume of air. In all cases they are utilizing various methods to create a relative pressure difference in the working fluid, which becomes the force acting on the foil, as the direct Force per Unit Area that is Pressure. EDIT: Sorry, my fluid dynamics professor had previously worked for Boeing, so he went straight to the aircraft examples whenever possible, and then go on and on way deeper than the example required (which I am often guilty of as well). The only thing he liked more was explaining how the dimples on a golf ball actually manage to make the ball fly further.

That's only because in tradition wing aeronautics the forward motion is what is creating and driving the pressure difference, through an otherwise static geometry. If you are magically creating the pressure difference directly then it will just be hanging from that bubble of low density, bypassing the need for the forward motion at all. it would end up behaving more along the lines of a Dirigible or helium balloon.

I was more picturing it having similar issues to pulsed explosion drives. Lashings give you a nice linear vector, this seems more along the lines of bouncing off a series of bubbles. But I could be wrong on that, I suppose it depends on how much shaping detail they'd be able to pull off. As an alternative design, all they need is some kind of air foil (they wouldnt even need real wing profiles) and they can apply basic vacuum to the top for traditional wing lift.

Dalinar's visions providing a Rosetta Stone for the Dawnchant has a lot to do with it. They are suddenly able to decode all these ancient relics and texts. Also years of War with the Singers (and each other). That is always a big driver for tech development, unless you get blasted back to the stone age, as Desolations are want to do. .

Ire Elantrian, so I can travel and still Hack the Universe.

I didnt mean that they are forming whole like a shardblade, more just voluntarily entering the Fabrial/Gem. But that's an excellent point about the Gems being interchangeable...Hmm. So the coppermind entry mentions that they all have three gems, which correspond to the Essences that it can affect. But it then says that fabrials that can actually use all three are rare, and that the vast majority will only do one. That would imply that the vast majority would only be stressing, cracking, and replacing one of their gems, yes? So perhaps the spren can share or hop the gems, so they'd remain active so long as all three dont break at the same time? It would be one way to explain why the 3-essence fabrials are so rare, because they are easier to permanently destroy with simple use. That's all just spitballing a guess. Fabrials still bug me, I really dont understand their construction parameters yet.

Well, Thrust at least... Steering might still be a challenge.

[Tag, will return]

Im stating this as a lingering possibility, not a theory I honestly believe in, but I think there is every possibility that Soulcasters and/or Regrowth Fabrial's could be using Sapient spren. The argument that they are not hinges on the assumption that living spren would object to a Sapient spren in a fabiral the same way they object to wielding Dead Shardblades. But socially those are entirety different circumstances: shardblades are the equivalent of performing a marionette show with corpses and I think we can all agree that it's hideous on the face of it, but Fabrials are only objectionable if the Spren in question is a Slave and not a willing participant. Back in the day, when the Radiants actually knew what was going on and had regular diplomatic contact with the various Spren races, they could have very easily arranged for willing spren to participate and have reasonable protections so they could quit if or when they wanted to go home. The lesser spren that modern fabrials use seem more the equivalent of domesticated labor animals which is inevitably a slave-esk arrangement, but there's nothing that says Sapient spren couldnt Agree to it willingly. And I could easily see that being an attractive alternative to a spren that wants to travel to the Physical Realm and/or help the Desolation War Efforts, but doesnt want to go so far as actually Merging Souls with a Radiant.

The snapping provides the "cracks" in the spiritweb that allows the investiture to attach, and since it's also a nessesary part of the Nahel Bond process I doubt he could reduce it too much without reducing the allomamcy with it. Maybe he just made it so scadrians are born Pre-snapped? Maybe just more hereditary issues in the populace? He also made the koloss a breeding race, so he was fiddling with scadrial reproduction already.

True. The hint Im referring to is that the Nightwatcher offered Dalinar "a blade that bleeds darkness and cannot be defeated." She might have made an exception for a Returned, being their own kind of Odd, or she might have acquired it separately after they arrived.

We were talking about this very thing on reddit today. The guess (not mine) that I now LOVE is "Killer of Worlds". This feels thematically perfect for the Big Middle event of the Central "backbone" Cosmere series.

They cant do moving parts, for what it's worth, and they are a uniform material so many of the normal Gem&Wire fabrial designs wouldnt work. Personally I think the more powerful fabrials like the Oathgates are Soulcast that way; rather than trapping a spren and constructing a physical device, the idea is that Soulcasting convinces the Cognitive self to 100% Become the Fabrial, heart and soul.

As far as I know you can do that with any Twinborn compounding, not just gold and Aitum, you just store everything you get out of the burn. And since Metalminds that are broken can still be accessed per WOB, so the resulting mercury wouldnt need to stay together to keep it's charge. That being said, the actual usefulness of said Compounded Ferucehmcial Trait is entirely going to depend on what it actually Stores.

No, that's a good point, and something Ive long wondered about Wayne and his potentially reduced Lifetime. If he is swallowing Bendalloy every day (rather than at need only) and having to burn off the excess each day, he's going to lived a lot more hours and days than his chronological age would indicate (even if they new his actual birthday). Though Wayne might be able to burn it off with Gold instead. That's what I figured, though if the best use is compounding (like Gold) you may just chug it immediately.

True, but the same can be said for Chromium/Nicrosil and Cadmium/Bendalloy, they have to burn off their swallowed reserves before bed or risk poisoning. Actually, it turns out that the main danger with elemental Mercury is through vapor inhalation, but it has ridiculously low absorption through the skin or gastro-tract. Which validates an episode of CSI I saw years ago that Ive doubted this whole time. Regardless the canon solution to any of these is for the mistborn to be diligent about burning off all excesses. That fortunately sidesteps all the toxicity issues since the atoms themselves are obliterated and cannot accumulate (like lead does in your bones, for example). Spikes would certainly be hard, but I think it should work for a metalmind so long as it serves a "commodity" purpose (ie not like Copper) so there is nothing list by splitting up the metal.