fyodor

Get up! I'm not actually terribly bothered by the omission- he might have just left out mentions of telegraphs to create a sense of scale/distance and have the characters running around, etc. I was mostly curious if anyone caught references that I might have missed, where they were referenced using in-world terminology or somesuch.

I am dubious. Telegraphy was mass deployed somewhat AFTER railroads in the US. Sending a messenger along a regular train route is still much easier than having a magical bouncing man carry messages back and forth. Despite this telegraphs were still deployed aggressively along regular train routes. In fact, one of the primary uses was notifying train stations along railroads of delays, crashes, etc. There's just not any way that that regular ongoing communications would be carried out by Coinshots.

I hadn't thought of it, but I guess that it's also possible that a Nicrosil misting is giving a soother the strength to take over Miles.

According to the map the Elendel basin is 400 miles across. I'd think that instantaneous communications would still be pretty important. Tathingdwel, which is I assume a Terris community, is several hundred miles from Elendel. Don't people in Tathingdwel want to send messages to Elendel? Would they really want to send someone by train whenever they needed to send a message. The first telegraph line in the US was from DC to Baltimore, which is considerably less distance. I understand that technology wouldn't necessarily develop the same way, but it's pretty much impossible to have the technology and scientific understanding necessary for public electricity distribution but not telegraphy. Anyway, it may be the case that it's just not mentioned, but it seemed to be an odd omission given the centrality of telegraphy in the 19th century.

Do we see any references to telegraphs/telephones in AoL? It would seem almost necessary that if they have the understanding of electromagnetism necessary to develop working electric power that they would also have telegraphs, but I don't seen any reference to it. Wax has a letter informing him of his uncle's death rather than a telegraph message. Did anyone catch any references that I might have missed?

I dismissed this initially, but rereading the books, the pattern of Miles's behavior does remind me a little bit of some of the spiked characters in HoA, particularly Quellion. Quellion was always a little fanatical, but Ruin's manipulation pushes him into ruthless and immoral behavior. The main question though is who? There's no more Ruin to corrupt him. People have suggested that someone is soothing/rioting him through his spikes. But have we seen this type of subtle control from mortals? Vin and Elend could take direct control of a spiked creature but it was always much more direct. Sanderson kind of implied that TLR was doing this with the Inquisitors, but I don't know if we ever saw it directly in action.

I thought that had to do with the users/people from other worlds-something along the lines of a particular spiritual DNA being necessary, rather than proximity/location. This is the quote I'm thinking of "Some of the magic systems have been discovered on different planets, and some of them do work. A lot of them don't, but some of them do. It depends on your spiritual DNA, what people are able to do, and things like that. But, if you find a way to do illusion magic in one of my worlds it's going to work pretty much like Lightweaving, regardless of which planet you're on. If that makes sense. " I read that as meaning that people from various planets can do certain types of magic because they were created by their gods to have those powers. So an Elantrian with the right magical spiritual DNA could go to Roshar and still keep his superpowers.

We've been told that we're going to see Allomantically powered space travel so that would suggest that the characters' superpowers will work outside their home world.

I'll try to find the cite, but my understanding is that Elantris is an amplifier that enhances their abilities but isn't the source. When they are near Elantris, their powers are stronger, but the farther away they travel the less the amplification effect. If they are far enough away (like Raoden when he city hops) they have reduced abilities like they did when Elantris was broken. So if someone was on another planet, his abilities would decline to their non-amplified broken-Elantris levels but not disappear completely.

Interesting-I had been under the impression that Alloy of Law was just going to be a standalone between the first and second Mistborn trilogies.

Bronze tapped more quickly would pierce copperclouds or cover more range. Copper tapped more quickly would cover more area and/or offer more protection. Pewter tapped more quickly would give more strength/speed. Tin-stronger senses. Brass/Zinc - Stronger emotional dampening/rioting covering more people. Iron and Steel are still somewhat dependent on user's allomantic strength - see p. 32 http://books.google.com/books?id=uTt-H5MAGT0C&lpg=PP1&dq=hero%20of%20ages&pg=PA32#v=snippet&q=really%20pushed&f=false I am not completely convinced that the feruchemy-enchancing-allomancy involves using the same metal. I'm betting that it involves the use of Nicrosil to store the "investiture" from the burned metal.

I read this to mean that the Inquisitors lost a certain amount of healing that they stored away- they put in 1.0 units of healing but got 0.8 out. It would seem though that this is the type of thing that topped off at unity-you can never get more back than you store.

I think that the idea behind using Feruchemy to enhance Allomancy is that you could store and then release a much larger amount at once. You'd still need the same amount of metal but you could store the "burn" in a metalmind and access it later at a much higher rate. The advantage of feruchemical compounding is that you can use metal to fuel an attribute instead of that attribute. i.e. when you store healing in a gold metalmind it makes it an allomantic healing metal which you can then burn for healing. The advantage of feruchemical allomancy enhancement is, I assume, that you can store an attribute and draw it out at a much faster rate. I don't think that storing-burning would increase your yield because even if you stored-then-burned you'd only get the same burst that the metal could supply in the first place.

Or really any kind of emergency work-pulse a burning house while the fire department comes.

Since this is already a nerdy discussion, I'll point out that the terminal velocity would be like twelve percent lower not twenty five. Terminal velocity is reached when the downward force (gravity) is equal to the upward force (drag). Drag is a function of velocity-squared, not velocity. So if the gravitational force is 75 percent of what it was, you'd need a velocity at about eighty eight percent to generate enough drag for acceleration to stop.

I also want to note that the initial explanation that Sazed offers about reduced graviational pull doesn't seem consistent. It seems that even within WoA Sazed demonstrates greater inertial mass (resistance to acceleration) when Marsh tries to Pull/Push him. Now I know that additional greater gravitational mass will create some additional resistance to movement (greater lateral frictional force between your feet and ground) but the descriptions are much more consistent with a more massive object than some sort of extra foot drag.

To dumb down what the other posters said, you're more dense in that you weigh more and occupy the same space, but not in your ability to stop bullets.

I'm pretty sure that at some point in HoA Elend notes that they had random noblemen that they had scooped up working as allomancers for their army. It's possible that some of those were Tekiels.

Not necessarily-there is a lot of evaluation by Wax to see who has the most lines going back to Spook (i.e. people whose ancestors are most heavily inbred by Spook-descendants). Spook's descendants in the paternal line wouldn't necessarily have the most-Spook DNA.

A few additional comments I would have liked if we got a little more information about the non-roughs parts of the Basin. I am kind of skeptical that you could have a 19th century city of two million people as a quasi-stand-alone entity without corresponding supply/manufacturing/resource chains, smaller cities, and trading partners. I guess that Sazed could have played around with things to make it work. I'm kind of curious what the new "natural" Koloss are like. They're still somewhat barbaric, but do they have human-like intelligence? The Koloss-blooded guy seems to be reasonably intelligent if somewhat violent. Are there human-Koloss relationships or are we to infer that all Koloss-blooded people are the result of rape? I agree that Allomancers are more common among the high families, but it seems to be more dispersed than before-enough so that the broadsheet mentions allomancer trade unions, pewterarms doing industrial work, etc. I'd also be curious if there is some sort of numerical quantification of how many people are Allomancers now. Sanderson says that they're "more common" in this world, I presume as a result of the relatively large number of Allomancers among the founders. Sanderson also said that Snapping happens differently now, so it may be that many people who previously would have needed supernatural intervention (the mists) to trigger their abilities can access them more easily. Did Spook have a house? Obviously people trace their lineage to him, but it doesn't sound like there is a house with his name.

I guess that I don't find this to be that questionable. Ruin didn't even know that he would be freed when they attacked the Feruchemists. It seems entirely plausible to me that he would want an immortal superpowerful slave that could keep up the fight indefinitely. And even after he was freed it doesn't seem like a bad idea to have someone ready just in case.

Doesn't the actual text say that he's so powerful with tin that he can hear heartbeats, pick out facial expressions, etc? I don't find this to be that big of a jump. Also, someone who can compound Zinc would be able to think vastly faster and pick out quick reactions, etc, that someone else might miss.

Did any of them have steelminds during TLR's era? I thought that it was just the gold spike. I remember Vin and Elend being pretty surprised and shocked when one of the Inquisitors showed off his superspeed at the beginning of HoA.

I wasn't thinking of compounding, just using the augmented healing effect of Pewter allomancy to compensate for the effect of storing gold.

I'd think that a pewterarm with steel or gold feruchemical abilities could store healing or speed and then use their pewter to compensate for the loss. This would presumably allow them to store much greater amounts of healing or speed than a regular feruchemist. Though it seems that the inquisitors were unable to do this (they needed to rest a ton to charge their healing spikes) so maybe I'm wrong.