Kaymyth

Oh, there's definitely a risk; there's a WoB that states that a charged metalmind is on the "medium" part of the spectrum of "hard to push/pull". But if you're going to carry a gun anyway, then it makes sense to use every tool in your chest to make it just a little bit safer for you. Well, sure, if you have the resources to afford an aluminum gun. Most people aren't going to, and I think the only reason The Set pulled it off is because they stole the aluminum.

I suddenly have this notion that a Steelrunner might commission custom-designed guns made with feruchemical quality steel specifically so that they can charge the things to make them harder to push and pull....

It gets even more sad *and* more happy on a rewatch after watching River's arc. So many feels!

Eh, you could have an embedded steel plate or something to Push on. But the majority of the body would need to be an aluminum alloy for weight.

For an AoL-era ultralight craft, it'd pretty much have to be made of wood and fabric. The only metals that I know of that are light enough for that sort of thing are aluminum (which still needs electrolysis technology to be developed before mass production can happen) or titanium (which is pretty scarce).

Because, as any good chef knows, presentation is everything. Gotta make 'em look pretty before the omnomnomming begins.

There's definite story potential there. Crisis on Infinite Equestrias, anyone?

I think that Marsh is more on the Good end of the spectrum than Neutral. The impression that I got was that he and Harmony were more or less on the same side, it's just that they disagree slightly with the methods. Harmony wants people to make their own choices, and Marsh wants to take a more active role. Thing is, Marsh is a people, too, so Harmony lets him do his thing because free will is for everybody.

I kind of want to upvote this because of the entertaining mental image of an elbow nailed to a forehead, but that would break your Scadrian Waffle Cook reputation level.

And giggle to himself every time he thought about it for at least the next 500 years.

Well, yeah. You can squeeze it out of some, but it consumes a bunch of pretty expensive materials in and of itself. Which is why before Hall-Heroult, people were putting bars of the stuff into their crown jewel displays.

It isn't so much that there are tiny deposits as aluminum is highly chemically reactive. This means that it's near-impossible to find pure aluminum naturally; it's all bound up in various oxidized forms. There's LOTS of aluminum out there, but part of the joy of its high chemical reactiveness is that it binds to other things really, really hard. That makes it extremely difficult and expensive to separate it from the other elements without the addition of the Hall-Heroult electrolysis process.

This...might very well be the best thing ever. Excuse me, I'm about to sink way too many hours of my life into designing AoL cutie marks...

I play the oboe (quite well, actually, which is relatively rare), flute, and alto saxophone, as well as Irish whistle and recorder. I play piano, too, but that particular skill is awfully rusty. Double reeds represent!

Oooh. And so, like with a Mistborn you can only steal one of their powers, with a pony you could either, say, steal a pegasus's ability to fly OR their special cutie mark-linked talent! So it would take one spike for wings, and one for a talent. Though for unicorns, that would mean that you'd need one spike for even getting a unicorn horn and the very "basic level" unicorn abilities (unless, of course, the recipient is already a unicorn), and another for a particular type of magic speciality.

So, I just plowed my way through this thread at work. I know, but it's Christmas Eve, so it's slow, so what else am I gonna do but poke the internet until it spits something entertaining at me? I can't believe that nobody's asked this in the entirety of the thread, though: So if you drive a hemalurgical spike into a pony, do they spontaneously generate extra cutie marks?

We know they'll have to figure it out sooner or later. I mean, even setting aside inevitability of technological progress, aluminum alloys are sort of integral to the development of an aerospace industry. No aluminum, no airplanes!

Hall-Heroult is dependent on electricity, which is still in its early stages. We know that TLR suppressed the knowledge of gunpowder to keep control of people; I suspect that the many uses of electricity were also something he didn't want known.

*splorfle* You officially win one internet today.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can Iron/Steel even "see" pure aluminum? I didn't think that they could. That's part of what makes it so dangerous. Also, a lot of its alloys have the same properties. The guns themselves may not even be pure aluminum, they might be an alloy. The bullets are definitely an alloy; Wax said something about how they had to be to pick up the weight and reduce abrasiveness to the barrel of the gun. The most common form of aluminum ore is bauxite, which basically looks and feels like rock until it's refined. Also, it's worth noting that a lot of precious gemstones like rubies and sapphires are primarily forms of aluminum oxide. Aluminum is *everywhere*, one of the most common elements to be found. It's just so blasted reactive that it binds to everything in sight.

That would make more sense. Scadrial hasn't really had much in the way of war in the last 300 years, so they sort of missed out on the militarized marching bands that launched bandmasters like John Philip Sousa.

Huh. OK, I'm putting on my music nerd hat here, but should it really be that odd to have brass added into an orchestra ensemble? Brass instruments are *old*; most major classical symphonies utilize both brass and woodwinds for their different timbres. It just seems strange, knowing that Scadrial's basic societal and cultural development is supposed to roughly parallel ours, that brass would be such a new addition. Or maybe Wax is just used to hearing things like string quartets at parties and I'm just overthinking this.

Hmm. We have to think more in terms of early 20th century economics, though. I'm sure Tekiel has a lot of assets, but it wouldn't be on a scale like Microsoft. We don't know the specifics of the full population of the Basin and the Roughs, but I doubt it comes close to the current US population. You could fit the entire Elendel Basin into the state of Texas and still have room for most of the explored areas of the Roughs. So billion-dollar companies with free capital in the tens of millions simply don't have the economic base to exist yet. Buying controlling interest in the Tekiel company would certainly give them some money to play with, but bear in mind that they are likely going to want to maintain the business for a steady flow of cash. I mean, they could sell it off later (after they've put in the time and effort to bring it back up to viability) for a chunk of cash, but they're going to have day-to-day expenses. After all, they have to feed and clothe and educate those Allomantic babies, not to mention keep the mothers healthy, housed, and guarded 24/7. That's an expensive endeavor in and of itself. Now, they could steal Bendalloy. They obviously already have the infrastructure for heists, the destruction of Miles's little cell notwithstanding. They could also get hold of a mine or two, though I doubt you'd be mining Bendalloy straight out; you'd mine cadmium and bismuth and then create the Bendalloy out of its component metals. It's a difficult and time-consuming alloy to make, which is why it's one of the more expensive Allomantic metals. So you'd have to have a metallurgist or two and all of the necessary equipment for making the stuff. I think Bendalloy creation is a much more likely route, if this is what they're pulling. Why buy up the stuff at retail when you can just steal it, or make it yourself at what is essentially wholesale cost? And sell off some extra for a bit more free capital while you're at it. And thank you. It is always good to know that my maths are approval-worthy.

OK, let's look at this from a strictly mathematical point of view. (This is, apparently, I thing I do now. Because nerd!) In Alloy of Law, Wax stated that a nugget of Bendalloy that would allow Wayne to compress 2 minutes into 15 external seconds costs around 500 notes. There are 1,440 minutes in a day. Assuming a 30-day month, that puts us at 43,200 minutes per month. Using the ratio given above, you can compress 2 months into about 7 1/2 days. Close enough for our purposes. We could take the 43,200 minutes x 2 to get two months' worth (86,400), but then we'd just want to divide it out again by 2 because it's 500 notes per 2 minutes. So we then take 43,200 x 500 and get a total of 21,600,000 notes per Bendalloy run. A savant might be able to cut that in half or so, but we're still talking about sinking millions per year into the scheme.

I think it's likely that the Set is playing the long game. Or, at the very least, is playing both long and short games. They want a Mistborn; they'll breed one if they can, but in the meantime, playing around with Hemalurgy could get them some results. And given the nature of the book that Marsh gave Marasi, someone somewhere is experimenting with Hemalurgy. The Bendalloy idea is nice on paper, but in practice it would actually be quite difficult. Bendalloy burns quickly and is godsawful expensive. It'd take a truckload of the stuff to make any significant reduction in the length of a pregnancy.