Dunkum

Yea, I think the speed is the real problem, especially if you are reacting to the sound of the gunshot. You have a fraction of a second to react, and part of that is spent just in the neurological processes so I think you need steel/zinc in order to have the mental capacity to react in time. As someone mentioned upthread, you have a far better chance to avoid the bullet by pushing on the gun before they pull the trigger than you do by actually deflecting the bullet.

I was going to say something along these lines. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to talk about a bullet having force. a force was applied to the bullet, but after it has been shot, the only forces acting on it are air resistance and gravity, and neither of those is propelling it forward (unless it was shot directly down, I guess), I suppose it will cause a force to act on the target, but to say it has a force doesnt really sound right. Momentum, speed, acceleration and mass are the important figures. A little back of the envelope calculation (with a lot of rounding) using the numbers for a Colt .45 suggests that for a shooter within 30 ft (about 10 meters) you would need to generate something like 2100N of force to slow the bullet enough to stop it, which seems a bit high for your average coinshot. you could slow it down enough to reduce injury with less force, but the other limiting factor here is time. You have to react within a tenth (closer to one hundredth, in fact) of a second. And, if you are reacting to the sound of the gunshot, you have even less time, since sound doesn't travel that much faster than a bullet (a difference of about 60 m/s), so in the time it takes the sound to reach you, the bullet is only a little bit behind (for 10 m, that means the bullet is about 1/200th of a second away).

Assuming you could apply cosmere rules to westeros (and I guess this whole exercise requires that) then yes, I would say it is safe to assume that valyrian steel is at least slightly invested. But again, yes, not nearly so much as a shardblade, I'd assume, since they are up near the top in terms of investment among objects we have seen(I think the godking and nightblood are the only things that beat them, give or take the honorblades)

I think there might be a way to come up with a use for it, but I think it would be a lot harder to do vs the bendalloy example.

It occurred to me, but I didn't feel like actually thinking about it at the time, so I ignored it. that said, the shardblade would presumably still work just fine even without stormlight, and that alone would give you an enormous advantage, since normal armor and weapons would be basically useless against it. Even valyrian steel would presumably get sliced apart with basically no resistance against a shardblade.

Thanks. This is about what I would expect. moving a bit back onto the topic then, most roads, you might be able to push the metal into the dirt a little bit, and get more traction that way. even asphat roads you could theoretically do that, but I think a normal steelpush wouldn't be sufficient for it. maybe Wax could, if he tapped his ironmind during the initial push to force it down further.

I think early automobiles ran on dirt roads, since that is what they had. I don't recall seeing a description of the roads in AoL, but I assume only the biggest, most traveled roads in the city would be paved at that point in their history (roughly equivalent to late 19th century America)

that seems like it would be really useful, actually. if you did it right, youd be reacting/moving at the same rate as the rest of the world, while at the same time storing up a fair amount of mental and physical speed. basically, you'd be storing the speed without the downsides. now doing it the other way: burning cadmium, then tapping physical and mental speed seems like it is more likely to just be a waste of the stored attributes

Well, bear in mind that I don't think we've seen paved roads in mistborn as yet, so for the most part, the steelpush also pushes the metal into the ground some, which would help to anchor it. that said, yea, I had that problem any time I thought to hard about it while reading any of the mistborn books: anything that small would probably slide a bit more than Brandon was accounting for, which would completely throw off the jumps.

Charge a hemalurgic spike with the speed attribute of a sloth or tortoise. Make an inquisitor, but replace the iron/steel eye-spikes with hemalurgic spikes charged with someone's eyesight attribute. (not actually sure if this is a legitimate hemalurgic attribute that can be charged, but going to assume so for now) for that matter, try to charge a hemalurgic spike with eyesight by spiking a blind man. and not so much useless as downright cruel: go through a local pharmacy soulstamping pregnancy tests and various birth control devices to be defective

Heh. Looking through this, I think your magical items (shards, fabrials, etc) might be a bit underpriced. a single full shardbearer (plate and blade) can demolish regular armies on Roshar, and they at least are familiar enough with those items to have ways to deal with them. On Westeros? Dany and the Others are pretty much the only people who might stand a chance against you. and that's just if you spent the 25 points for a blade and plate and nothing else. get together some armies, a couple extra shards/shardbearers, and some of the more useful fabrials (I think you underestimate just how damnation useful spanreeds would be when everyone else is using ravens) and you are basically set. as long as you don't set yourself down in the middle of Blackwater bay during the attack on the red keep or something, anyway.

I can definitely get behind the People as Face cards and other things as Pips, though I would consider aces as face cards for this purpose. It is easy to imagine something like that for Spren, where the pip cards are just generic spren types (rotspren, flamespren etc) and the faces are the more charismatic ones, syl, wyndle, pattern, stormfather at Ace. Radiants, Alethi nobility, and Parshendi probably work for other suits, more or less.

I feel like it was pretty in character for them not to talk to each other, though. Shallan is secretive, Kaladin doesn't trust anyone, except maybe Dalinar, and even that only goes so far. Basically between the three characters that really mattered there wasn't really any chance that they would talk to each other, at least not about anything serious, though Dalinar did try. That said, WoR for me. I'm a sucker for certain kinds of scenes, and Kaladin's climactic scenes do it for me every time.

Ah, got it. I'm using Chrome Beta, so that could be causing the hangup. And you're definitely right on the pardoning aspect, but does it cover a ruler pardoning themselves? Or hiring a hitman and then pardoning the hitman (kind of like what Richard Nixon did. That guy was a looney). and that doesn't quite get to someone doing something that was illegal then, but which is now legal. That is, they haven't been pardoned, but what they did is no longer a crime. another angle to consider: I wonder how Nalan/the skybreakers would deal with things like the 4th amendment, or any other law that limits what law enforcement is allowed to do. Evidence gathered under torture, or through illegal search and seizure are inadmissable in court, but to an objective observer could prove guilt. What would they do in a situation where they had access to that?

If you switch the posting box to the generic text editor version that shows you all the tags, it is easy to remove the inside quote tags and keep the outer ones, but it is a bit of a pain to do that every time you have a quote within a quote.

definitely seems like you could do a reasonable board game with it. Off the top of my head, I'm imagining a game where each player (up to 10, why not?) is a highprince with a war camp, and maybe a couple of nearby plateaus. There would be some sort of pseudo-random generation of gemhearts/locations, dice rolls to determine movement speed (so someone further away from the gemheart could still get there sooner with good rolls) plus some kinds of bonuses available based on either which highprince you choose (e.g. sebarial gets bonuses to speed/movement rolls, sebarial probably has lower upkeep costs or something, dalinar gets bonuses for combat) or based on how you run your camp (so you could choose to slack off on discipline for a cheaper but less effective army, or go sebarial's route and become a farmer/market hub for bonus money, but fewer soldiers). Maybe give everyone a turn in between gemhearts to do various stuff like purchase units or upgrade their camp. Depending on how you wanted to run it, you could add in the Parshendi (with some pseudo-random way to determine their strength on a given run) or just make it so that 2 players arriving at the same time (or a second player arriving before the first has finished harvesting) would fight each other over the gemheart; maybe also require a minimum strength required to take the gemheart so someone with huge losses to the parshendi/other player might not be able to capture it in the end. all that is just top of my head though, no idea how well most of it would actually work in practice edit to add: goes without sayign that the board would just be essentially a map of that portion of the plains, based on Nazh's map in SA

I enjoyed them well enough the first time I read through them, but I felt they just didn't hold up so well on reread, whereas WoT, though it has some problems, seems to hold up on reread much better.

Well, bear in mind that Nalan gave up (well temporarily anyway) when Lift was pardoned. not quite the same thing, but related. That said, one could argue (if one were a skybreaker) that no matter the law now, if something was illegal at the time it happened, then it deserves punishment, so even changing laws would only be protection if they were changed prior to the action

it might be related to chromium/aluminum too, from what I recall of Lift's interlude Agree on the anti-investiture point, though I'd note that the way silver works in shadows for silence seems to come closest to how I would imagine something with that name should; i.e. it cancels out the investiture (assuming thats what the shades are), but loses its own power in the process.

To me this seems like a reasonable starting point. Collect up the ars arcana (or however that should be pluralized) and then throw in some elaborations on things like history and culture &c. I also really like the idea of adding in some professional artwork. I am loving the shallan's notebook drawings from Stormlight so far

I liked the Recluse books, but the way they skip around in time can take some getting used to. Mostly I just liked the comparatively different chaos vs order magic system, as opposed to more familiar classical element ones.

The planned final book in the series (seventh book, which makes sense) is Master Alvin, no release date or anything yet though

I wasn't a fan of book 2, but this is partly for weird reasons: The first book I read was book 3 (long story behind why that is), which, as I mentioned, is one of my favorites in the series, and heavily features Mat and Perrin's perspectives. this is not a coincidence. So going back and reading books 1 and 2, they are a bit slower, and a bit lighter on the humor aspects. basically, the 3 books in the series that don't feature Mat's perspective (1, 2 and either 8 or 9 i think, cant remember which offhand) are pretty much my least favorite. I've read (and recently reread) the Belgariad, Mallorean, and whatever the other 2 series that eddings wrote were called, as well as a several of the Shannara books. I recommend WoT over all of them.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Eye of the World is the worst in the series. I always recommend that people try to make it through book 3 before they give up on the series. It's my personal favorite (well either that or one of the ones near the end when everything starts coming together) and If you aren't hooked by then, you never will be. That said it can be somewhat of a slog from about book 6ish through book 10 or 11 before it picks up again for the climax.

Think I made it through Riftwar, and the immediately following sequels about the royal family, and that pretty much exhausted what was available in the library at the time.