Glamdring804

10 minutes ago, lacrossedeamon said:

Technically she was also bitten on the first day as revealed in chapter 44 but chapter 57 is from Dusk's perspective so it moots and this should be stung.

Yes, and she specifically started following in his footsteps after that first sting. 

Page 418, Chapter 57. 

Starling was not bitten on the first day, she was stung by a wasp. 

I noticed on my last reread of WoK that the Devotary of Scincerity has the motto "there is always something more to discover." To me, that struck me as awfully similar to "there is always another secret," with some wording shifts due to translation. Similar enough that I don't think it's a coincidence. I got the chance to ask Brandon about it, and I predictably got a RAFO. 

18 hours ago, Lunarhade said:

First of all, thank you very much for taking the time to respond,

This is kind of what I was worried about, energy is too intangible to treat the way I want to treat it with the magitech. I wanted to stray away from manipulating forces as not to stride too close to Stormlight, but I recognize Brandon chose them for a reason. I imagine things would be easier if I changed the scope of the nanotech to manipulate forces directly, but perhaps not. As I understand it you are saying it is not the combination of potential and kinetic that makes things fall, those are just the properties we label things being acted upon forces that do make things fall. For the thought experiment (assuming we ignore the weirdness of a force being transformed into light) could I justifiable say the force of gravity on the system is being siphoned away, thus weightlessness? 

What you said about matter requiring energy. With this system, I imagined also that I could transform light into kinetic energy. For example, a gun which works by transferring absorbed light from a ring on the outside of the gun into the base of the bullet made of the same magical material, thus allowing for it to be propelled? If true, then this could potentially be the solution to levitation, as the thing that counters gravity like drag does on planes.

PS
For context magitech's source stems from an interdimensional species who for all intents and purposes are gods. The people of this universe stole and then forgot much of what that species could do. So basically a lot of the time they are hijacking technology they don't understand and that's how I balance the fact it is God-like.

PSS

Thank you again, I have been starved for people willing to have conversations like these, its why I finally took the plunge and joined on here.

The way I would do it is say that the magitech manipulates the properties of space-time in the region the object occupies, and fiddles with the fundamental constants, causing the force of gravity to go away. You're mostly correct in your interpretation of forces and potential energy. The best way I've had it described to me, is that energy is an object's capacity to do damage. There are a lot of different ways something can do damage. An object can have the capacity to deal damage based on its position, like a boulder at the top of a cliff, or two magnets with their north poles held close together. We call this "potential energy" because the object doesn't directly manifest its energy, but it has the potential to do so, given the proper nudge. Things can also directly have energy, most commonly because of their movement. i.e. a bullet has the capacity to do damage via moving really fast, and a hot poker has the capacity to do damage because its individual atoms are moving really fast.

The light-into-kinetic energy thing is actually really easy. We already see a similar effect in the real world. Photons have momentum, which means they can push on objects and impart their energy into them, a process that usually involves the absorption and/or re-emission of the photon. Solar sails are a proposed interplanetary propulsion method. This could also very much be used to levitate objects. Your proposed method doesn't immediately break anything in the way your other idea did.

In fact, by sourcing the magic from a place that's outside our universe, you have leave to do pretty much anything you want with it. If it's outside our universe, then it's not constrained by our conventional laws of physics. So yeah, that totally works.

Glad I could help.

9 hours ago, Lunarhade said:

Hi, very new, not sure at all if I'm doing this right, but reading through some of the questions and responses on here I realized these are the kind of conversations I've been craving but lack science people in my life.

So  @Glamdring804 I have a question I would love to get a physics perspective on if it's not too much trouble.

In one of my stories, there is a kind of magical nanotechnology capable of synthesizing any one kind of energy from light and also the inverse (produce light by siphoning any one kind of energy). This material is so efficient that for all intents and purposes it breaks the laws of thermodynamics (very slow entropy).

One of the chief aims of this magitech is to allow for suspension. On cursory inspection, it makes sense to me that potential gravitational energy being converted almost instantly into light before it can become kinetic energy could create suspension. I want to know, does that make enough sense that it wouldn't nag at you? Does your brain do what my brain did and realize that potential gravitational energy is not as tangible let's say heat, which as I understand it is a result of particles bumping into one another. The problem arises when I see potential gravitational energy, in essense, as no different than the earth creating kinetic energy through gravity. And I want to have ships capable of flight with this magitech, which raises the question: if the kinetic energy (from the planet's gravity) of the system is being turned into light, then it would stand to reason that any other source of kinetic energy (engines, wind) would also be absorbed by the material before it can result in movement. A flying ship that can't move forward is a problem. 

Is there a loophole in physics? A different way to think of energy that could allow me to justify a suspended object's gravitational potential being canceled out but still being able to be propelled around?

Okay, so let me take a crack at this.

First off, I need to explain a fairly common physics misconception that you seem to have fallen into. Energy is not "stuff." There is no tangible quantity called energy that can be taken and isolated on its own. Rather, energy is a quality of matter. It's an intrinsic property that all objects have in some form or another, like color or mass. Things can have energy, but without that matter, the energy just isn't there. You can store energy by arranging matter into specific configurations, like chemicals in a battery, or raising the counterweight of a trebuchet.

In order to keep something levitated, you couldn't just suck the kinetic energy out of an object and convert it into light. Energy doesn't work that way. To hold the object up, you need to somehow push against it. However, if your magic system works by pushing energy around and such, there is another way you could cause something to levitate via energy alone. The concept is similar to how the surge of Gravitation works in Stormlight Archive: You would use energy to manipulate the curvature of spacetime. Objects, in general, tend to go from places of high potential energy to low potential energy. Something in far Earth orbit has way more potential energy via it's position, than something on Earth's surface. So, the Earth's gravity tends to pull it towards the planet. With advanced enough technology, you might be able to manipulate the fundamental constants of the universe, so that you create a barrier of extremely high potential between the object and the Earth, essentially making it so gravity no longer points down on the object. Doing so, however, would require you to somehow manipulate the constants that dictate the gravitational force for whatever is powering the levitation. And a civilization that's advanced enough to do that would basically be God.

Does this make any sense to you? This is some pretty difficult concepts here, including some stuff that's way above my current level. Energy is one of the most misunderstood physics concepts. It's difficult to learn eve with an entire semester of physics classes.

Hey, me too! I love those games, and I always wish they had done more with the franchise. @Silverblade5 is also a fan.

I don't suppose you're someone I knew on the old Infinity Blade forums?

5 hours ago, StrikerEZ said:

Okay, that makes more sense. There is a bit of external influence on the evolution of the sapient species, but I want to keep it as realistic as possible. I want it that, without the intervention, the species could've evolved there naturally.

Hmm...could you describe a bit more how that whole tidally locked thing works? How much of a planet that is roughly earth-sized would be habitable? How many people could possibly live in this habitable zone?

Thank you so much for your help!

Well, the basic concept is that one face always receives sunlight, and the other never does. Regarding specific numbers, I actually don't know exactly how large the habitable band would be. It would depend on a lot of things, like how much water the planet has, how thick the atmosphere is, where the mountains are, etc. For an earth-sized planet, it would probably contain at least a continent's worth of land, since the band goes all the way around the circumference of the planet.

4 hours ago, StrikerEZ said:

Okay, so what you're saying is that better scenario is for the aliens to see in infrared, I need them to evolve on a planet that revolves a dwarf star?

What other qualities would need the planet need to have in order to develop life? What qualities would the life there tend to have?

I'm saying it would be far easier for an infrared seeing civilization to evolve around a red dwarf without external intervention. The other direction would be difficult without some sort of head start.

Well for starters, any plant life would likely be very dark in coloration. It also might be red in hue, as it would have adapted to the redder sunlight. Also, the habitable zone around red dwarfs is small enough that any planet  in the habitable zone would likely be tidal locked (kinda like Taldain). So it wouldn't have days and nights. Instead, one side would be a scorching desert, the other would be a frozen wasteland, and in the twilight region in between would be a strip of habitable land. Such a planet also wouldn't have a moon, unless there was external intervention, as is the case with Taldain.

Other than that, I'm not really sure how life would evolve. Other traits would depend on other factors, like how large the planet is, etc.

Ah, hello, fellow physicist! Glad you could make it!

9 hours ago, StrikerEZ said:

Okay, I need your help again guys @Silverblade5 @Glamdring804 @Eagle of the Forest Path @The One Who Connects

I'm coming up with an alien species, and I know that I want them to see in either UV light or infrared light. What type of star would be needed for each scenario, and how would that affect life on each version of the planet?

So if a species evolved in the starlight of a particular star, then their visible spectrum will naturally be centered on the most intense wavelengths produced by that star. Those wavelengths would be the most useful on their planet, since they would be the brightest, and contain the most visual information. Our sun emits light mostly in the visible spectrum, obviously. The brightest colors are yellow and green.

The color of a star's light is a function of its temperature, which is in turn a function of its size. Smaller, dimmer stars have a strong reddish hue, and bigger, brighter stars have a strong blue hue. So if you want aliens to see in infrared light, then they probably come from a planet orbiting a red dwarf. If you want aliens that see in ultraviolet, they probably come from a planet orbiting a blue or blue-white supergiant.

There is, however, an issue with the second scenario. A star's lifetime is inversely proportional to its size. Meaning, the larger the star is, the higher the internal pressure, and the exponentially faster it burns through its fuel source. Extremely large stars have lifespans of only a few million years (as opposed to our sun's lifespan of roughly 10 billion years). This isn't nearly enough time for life to evolve from scratch on the star's planets. Any life that arises there would have to have been seeded from somewhere else shortly after the planet was formed, in order to evolve eyesight before the star's death.

1 hour ago, hoiditthroughthegrapevine said:

Might have been RAFOED because he didn't want to have to think about the translation of 3 Dimensional coordinates across realms. Could get sticky.

 

 

I very much suspect it was RAFOed because we will see someone take a spanreed into Shadesmar in a future book. I remember a similar thing occurring with what a Highstorm looks like in Shadesmar. 

The personalization questions were actually my sorta throwaway questions. I expected the Nahel Bond one to get RAFOed. I have some better questions which should be up on Arcanum soon. 

Alright, WoBs from my signed book. For the first one (Elantris), the question was "Could you Soul Forge a Nahel Bond?" The last word is "circumstances." The second question was "What does the Ire's Investiture drink taste like?

@hoiditthroughthegrapevine: I managed to ask the first question on your list. It got me a RAFO card.

13 hours ago, hoiditthroughthegrapevine said:

If anyone at Miscon has the chance to ask a couple of extra questions, I think these would be awesome to hear the answers to:

1. Would a spanreed in Shadesmar be able to communicate with its conjoined spanreed in the physical realm? Irrespective of whether it works or not what would the spanreed look like in Shadesmar? (Possible follow-up, best would be to here Brandon's unprimed response. Would the trapped spren be fully encapsulated in the gem, or would just a piece of the spren be imprisoned in the gemstone?)
2. If a Dysian Aimian was an Elsecaller, would they be able to transition just a single Hordeling to Shadesmar?
3. What level of spren are the long legged Storm Striders that walk in the center of the highstorm?
4. Who would win a game of 3 Dimensional chess, Cultivation, Odium or Autonomy? Is there another shard that could beat the Victor?
5. Is the Haunted man in the Nicki Savage story, the ghastly gondola, using Selish Investiture to power his strange glowing rune covered devices? If he is, how is the haunted man able to access the Dor on Scadrial? Does he have access to liquid Selish Investiture like the Ire in Mistborn Secret History, or is there another means of accessing the Dor on a different planet?

I have a word document of questions. I'll throw these on, but be warned, he generally doesn't like people bringing questions from the Shard. He prefers that people bring their own questions.

I'm coming! I'll be camping in the family camper. I also have my own list of question, though it's a bit outdated, so I'll need to clean it up. I'm also trying to hurry up and finish my reread of Oathbringer before Friday.

35 minutes ago, StrikerEZ said:

Hmm...at least half a mile, probably.

Yeah. Any size or elevation of floating island would be pretty near impossible to happen naturally. Some sort of magic/geoengineering would have to be involved.

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Or through magic, I guess.

Well, the only difference between magic and science is one of understanding. So which ever you want to use in your universe.

On 5/7/2018 at 0:36 PM, StrikerEZ said:

@Glamdring804 @Silverblade5

This is a huge necro, but I didn't want to make a new thread for something that already exists.

How possible would it be for a gas giant to have enough oxygen in it that a human could be in it and not die due to suffocation?

Sorry for the late reply. 

In theory, yes. A gas giant’s atmosphere could differentiate so that at the point where the atmosphere has a pressure similar to Earth’s, it is composed of a reasonable mixture of oxygen and non-reactive gasses. One of my worlds in my own fictional universe in fact is a gas giant like this. Practically, finding such a gas giant would probably be difficult, as most of the matter in the universe is hydrogen and helium, meaning that the average gas giant is going to be composed of those two gasses. Of course, it’s possible that such a gas giant would form naturally by random chance, if the conditions in the protoplanetary disc were just right. And, given the sheer number of planets in the galaxy, there might even be one that forms in the habitable zone of the star. Or, you could get the right chemical composition via terraforming. 

13 hours ago, Draginon said:

It's funny how some are disappointed that this isn't Cosmere meaning we'll get nothing there this year. In a way White Sand 2 is our 'new' Cosmere so we aren't exactly lacking, just getting a light year similar to 2013 which only had Silence.

Anyway I'm excited to see what this non-Cosmere story is since it's refreshing to get away from the Cosmere now and then.

Well, it doesn't help that a lot of us have already read the manuscript of White Sand. So while there are changes and new stuff in the comic, it kinda takes the suspense out of it. 

Not Cosmere. Well that sucks.

2 hours ago, Weltall said:

Brandon has said that for certain Cosmeric reasons he won't reveal, we aren't getting Era 3 until after the Elantris sequels are done. Their release date in turn is 'some time after The Lost Metal is finished' and that isn't slated for release until Fall 2019 so the odds of this new project having anything to do with Mistborn aside from maybe a side novella are similar to the odds that I'll wake up tomorrow a Truthwatcher. Whose powers I would totally not abuse to spy on Brandon and see what he's writing...

I am aware of that, I was just making a joke about Brandon writing extra Mistborn books when nobody is looking. 

22 hours ago, The One Who Connects said:

I need it, and I need it now.

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Honestly, there's so much open space that could be filled in the Infinity Blade Universe, it's unreal.

• The massive time-gap between the events of the flashbacks and the current story in IB: Redemption(per Jori: ~10,000 yrs)
• The story leading directly into IB 1 could use a little extra fleshing out
• Multiple continents to explore(IB Earth has the same issue as Reckoner's Earth in this regard)
• The "heaven" revelation in the Kingdom Come expansion from IB 3, the vague reference to rebellious Deathless in the alternate ending of IB 1
• So many characters with story potential
• The Great Pact, the Bog Giant/Moss Golem, the MX-series mechs/robots, etc...

The worldbuilding potential is almost endless, and (if they need incentive) I'm sure ChAIR could make good money off it if they got a skilled writer.

Yeah. There's such great lore for that series. I want a prequel that explains what exactly happened with Galath and Ausar.

4 hours ago, Niteshado said:

Im hoping so @Glamdring804 ive been waiting on this one. it should be close to time to start it right?

I swore i read something about it being released late 2018..

Well, last we heard, his plan is to start writing Lost Metal sometime in the summer, for a release early next year. Misborn Era 3 won't come until the break between the front and back half of Stormlight.

3 hours ago, Pagerunner said:

Craziest case: Magic: The Gathering story treatment.

My pipe dream is that he's doing something for Infinity Blade. That will never happen though, since ChAIR doesn't seem interested in returning to that franchise any time soon.

21 hours ago, Angsos said:

 he accidentally wrote Lost Metal

Well, according to previous patterns, this should be the follow up to Lost Metal. Mistborn Era 3, anyone?

I guess this is kind of late, but you could mitigate this by having the core comprise a disproportionately large amount of the planet's volume. Mercury is in a similar situation, where the planet lost most of its mantle during formation, likely from a colossal impact. I haven't done the math, but the core would probably have to be pretty big to compensate. Also, note that with the smaller size and smaller mantle, there probably wouldn't be very strong tectonic activity, meaning mountains would be smaller, and volcanos would be rare. 

I believe he might have already been on Roshar. Remember the devotairy of sincerity? The one Jasnah recommended to Shallan? I noticed on a recent reread that their motto is:

"There are always more answers to be found."

Hm. There are always more answers to be found. There is always another answer to be found. There is always something to discover. There is always another secret.

Its could be nothing, just a false positive, but given Brandon's style of foreshadowing, I find it very hard to believe the similarity of their core belief to Kelsier's favorite saying is a coincidence.