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I think that it's either A or C. There's no mention of odd gravitational effects inside the bubbles, which implies that a continuous external force acts on the objects at the same rate in their reference frame as if they were not in the bubbles. Under Relativity, I'd expect that the planet will also experience the same apparent force in its reference frame, because Relativity does not have one reference frame be more "real" than another. However, Brandon has stated that Allomancy contains the capacity for FTL, so presumably temporal Allomancy contains some violation of Relativity.

I know that's pretty common speculation, since the caches were in mining towns when they were built and a thousand years later they were still in mining towns. Usually one would expect the mines to stop being commercially viable in much less time than that. But I don't know if it's been confirmed that they regenerated instead of Scadrial just being much more mineral-rich than Earth. And Scadrial is rather tectonically active, so more metal would emerge from the mantle every so often. Granted, that would only happen frequently near the Ashmounts, and I don't think the caches were anywhere near them. I expect it does regenerate, though, since it getting obliterated would violate conservation of energy in the opposite direction of what we'd expect from Preservation. According to the annotations, Allomancy draws in energy from Preservation instead of being powered by matter conversion, and furthermore the amount of energy gained by converting matter to energy is completely outlandish, vastly greater than the amount used by Mistborn. Of course, it's also possible that burning a metal converts it into a compound or allotrope that can't be used for Allomancy, which would keep the total amount in the world the same but make some of it rather difficult to access for the forseeable future.

I guessed that Steelheart was vunerable to people who were not attempting to attack him, although I did think it somewhat unlikely that he never got caught in a stray blast before. But he'd been getting shot at with assault rifles immediately prior to taking a wound, so I rather doubted that anything about the bank negated his invincibility.

Well, David's father knew full well Steelheart was physically capable of killing him. Steelheart may or may not have realized it was theoretically possible to injure himself, but he certainly wasn't expecting it to happen. Certainly, at the time of his death Steelheart was absolutely confident in his superiority and invincibility. Maybe if things had been going worse for his subordinates and he didn't know where Prof was, he'd have been nervous enough to start worrying about how they might bypass his weakness and figured out that they might try tricking him into self-destructing, which would negate it. But he was gloating about how he was perfect and divine as his foes lay prostrate before him, not worrying about what might go wrong. If he had figured out that Davis's plan would work, I expect he wouldn't have made killing enemies with their own weapons his trademark, especially once Davis began describing his weakness.

I don't think it's quite that strict. Granted, we have precisely two instances of him getting hurt, but his behavior seems to imply that it's looser. He makes a concerted effort to terrify the population, to the point of fabricating atrocities. Also, I don't consider prudent precautions to be indictative of fear; plenty of people work dangerous jobs with many safety measures but don't seem to be afraid of the jobs (often indicated by them bypassing the safety measures because they're inconvient). I think the requirement for hurting him is being absolutely confident he will not hurt you under the circumstances. Deathpoint was confronted by an Epic of unknown powers who seemed entirely unintimidated by his ability, which raised the nagging question "does he have a way of countering my powers?". The SWAT team was doubtless aware that some Epics could shrug off gunfire and slaughter their attackers. The Reckoners spent so long hearing about how powerful and ruthless Steelheart was that they weren't sure he even could be beaten, and were also nervous about confronting an Epic based on their guesswork at his weakness. Getting a team from China to pull off a kill would be a bit of a tricky balancing act, but they'd be confident that they can kill an Epic if they know his weakness and used to killing people others considered invincible, and not have a special fear of Steelheart over and above other Epics. I think it'd work if you could successfully convince them he had a certain weakness without them directly testing it, so they'd feel absolutely sure that their plan would succeed. Or if you could arrange a plan to test it and a secure escape route they're confident will work. Of course, the big obstacle here is that any experienced Reckoner team will worry that the target has a previously-unknown power, and might be smart enough to ask, "So if you know his weakness, why don't you use it?". You might have better luck getting an Epic who has never heard of him before and convincing that Epic their power will bypass his invincibility.

It kind of seems to me that the main effect is that using their powers gives Epics a sense of extreme superiority over normal humans, to the point where many of them don't see any inherent value to human life, so they casually murder anyone who becomes more annoying than getting rid of them. So Prof is enraged when one of the insects dares to question him, but he doesn't murder Davis because Davis is useful. And the events of the big fight with Steelheart imply that it's not completely impossible to resist, since Tia was convinced she could talk Prof down and he saved Davis at the end (although possibly because he wasn't sure Steelheart was dead when he put up the forcefield; he'd significantly reduced the extent of his power use by the time he healed Davis and would have been thinking more normally).

I'd say Warbreaker does not have any analogue to snapping, unless it happens automatically at birth. Everyone starts off with one Breath and can use it if they know how. I think the annotations indicate that Feruchemists can use their powers from birth, too.

Huh, so anyone can use Hemalurgy, even though it's Ruin's system and he is only known to have contributed to Scadrial humans? That seems odd, since not even everyone created by the other Shards can use their systems except on Nalthis. You've stumbled onto one of our big standing questions, which is the extent to which magic systems are affected by the planet they're on. We've been told that magic systems come from the interaction of Shards and their worlds, and not gotten much information on what happens when someone moves between worlds except some vague suggestion that it's a bit difficult to continue using their system. So there's debate over exactly what would happen; we're pretty confident that people can use their systems on other planets, but it's theorized that they'd have to use them in a manner similar to how the locals use theirs, so a Surgebinder on Scadrial would need to use metal somehow. Even if they do transfer, there's the question of what sort of spike you'd need to steal other systems, since the metal spikes are keyed to stealing specific things and the full set of the sixteen Scadrial metals is taken up by human attributes and the other Metallic Arts.

I don't think a refusal to kill people is by itself sufficent to explain it; carefully controlled electrical discharges can easily disable people without dealing lasting harm. Now, Tasers are occasionally lethal, but that's because they deliver a fixed strength jolt and humans vary, and sometimes they're used repeatedly in quick succession. There must be some other limit that stops him from doing a non-lethal Emperor Palpatine impression at will, or he'd probably have staged a breakout. Yes, we first met him sedated, but since he could answer their questions about his history in the city, I suspect he was only sedated for transport. In fact, the bit where he left the city to help power tanks implies he was sometimes transported concious; he may only have been sedated because they were anticipating an attack. As for why he was afraid Steelheart would get mad, it must be remembered that the only asset he provides is powering things. Steelheart could easily maim or torture him without impacting his capacity to do so. I think the evidence suggests that Conflux can generate a high voltage in physical contact, which then behaves according to normal physics. Once generated, it'd seek ground unless in contact with electronics that provide an alternate low-voltage point. He'd be able to fry people he touched, but not throw lighting across the room except in very specific conditions, and in the steel catacombs it'd ground out harmlessly into the floor much more easily than it would jump through three feet of air into a human. This would make him plenty powerful if he had access to the right equipment, but he doesn't. This would also necessitate being able to avoid being electrocuted by his own powers, but I don't know if that's properly a seperate power or if he just instinctively generates charges in an arrangement that won't run a current through himself. When first interrogating him, the Reckoners make sure not to touch him, which supports the theory. Presumably his wife died because she was leaning against a metal or otherwise conductive counter with insulating supports, and he attempted to charge the microwave by touching the case. It then proceeded to provide an object lesson in electrical physics as the current flowed down the outside of the casing, over the outside of the counter, and through the path of least resistance to ground.

Agreed. What I think would work would be calling in a veteran Reckoner-like team from China. They wouldn't be afraid of Steelheart specifically, and feel pretty confident about taking on Epics in general. As long as they feel confident they know his weakness, even if it's a fake one, they'd probably be able to take him out.

I guess it's worth a shot, but I'm dubious. He flies through solid objects pretty readily. He might very well hold his breath while inside them, but Davis didn't mention any reports of him coming up for air. And Steelheart is immune to suffocation (Apparently at least one of his opponents was a man after my own heart), so there is precedent for Epics who speak without needing to breathe. Plus, since we know many types of matter cannot affect him, it is reasonably likely his intangibility can selectively permit specific gases. A more robust yet more difficult version of gassing him is removing all molecular oxygen from an area, possibly via a really big fire. That way he'd suffocate even if he only interacts with oxygen.

I have to wonder if it really works like that. They did threaten Edmund with a gun, after all. Now, I'm reasonably confident he could have attempted a breakout if he wanted to, but apparently it wasn't an obviously meaningless threat. Though it's hard to say if that's because his direct powers are limited in scale or in applicability; he can kill people with them but not necessarily under any conditions. It's possible he can only charge objects he's in contact with and has no other abilities except gifting, which would be spectacularly useless when inside several cubic miles of conductive material with direct contact with the earth.

The offical academic convention is for any discussion of events in books to be in the present tense, but I've never really liked that. It just feels unnatural to use present tense when discussing things that happened at different times. It's particularly problematic when attempting to discuss the impact of something on later events.

I wouldn't read too much into that. Most Epics have multiple powers, and while it's hard to put a number on exotic powers like matter disintegration, Conflux powered all of Newcago's heavy military equipment and provided much of the power needed for Newcago to operate, which is even larger than you might expect because it's shrouded in perpetual night.

I did a quick flip-through of the book. No conclusive counter-evidence, but on re-reading the introduction of the tensors I feel fairly confident in stating that they operate differently from Digzone because from the structure of the conversation I expect Davis would have brought it up if they worked the same way. While it is possible the nature of the Digger's powers was kept strictly secret, Davis is extremely well-informed about Epics in Newcago; if anyone except for the Diggers, Epics, and a special subdivision of Enforcement knows what their powers were, Davis would probably know. I'm not going to consign this to the "impossible" bin, though. The Diggers went nuts relatively early in Newcago's development, so Davis's Epic Encyclopedia was likely far from complete. If we assume that the Diggers' powers were kept secret (semi-plausible, Digzone could have used them to recruit an army of regular people whose gifted powers outmatched lesser Epics for a coup attempt if the details were well known), that Davis did not or could not get the details at the time (reasonably likely; he was younger, less experienced, and had less time than he did for studying Conflux, and we know that profile was far from complete), and that he believed Digzone was most definitely no longer working for Steelheart afterwards and thus didn't bother with retrospective research (this is the trickiest; I do not expect people survive being fired by Steelheart and if there were not a public execution Davis would suspect Steelheart discreetly kept him around), then it is reasonably likely Davis would not recognize the effect.

They're given out at book signings, apparently.

Admittedly, in my read-through I actually did not find any explicit references to Digzone, even though I wondered what exactly the story with the Diggers had been. Still, the Diggers seemed pretty important to Steelheart's government. So I kind of suspect he disappeared to the bottom of the lake when he outlived his usefulness. Admittedly, Steelheart seems to be the type for big public executions, but he's also big on Epic supremacy, so he might not have wanted to openly execute an Epic for simple incompetence. Also, the way the Diggers went insane doesn't seem to fit the pattern for the Epic Effect. They apparently ceased responding to orders and began tunneling randomly instead of getting a god complex. Though if they weren't driven nuts by their powers, that leaves the question of why they did go insane.

One thing I've noticed is that it seems like the equation for the system is force on Allomancer *A = force on object. Vin and Elend both occasionally throw objects harder than they get thrown; during Vin's training exercise with Kelsier, they both go flying back at high speed even though Kelsier is at least twice her mass, and during Elend's escape from Yomen's manor he explicitly notes that his greater strength is letting him shove back Coinshots much harder than he's being shoved back. Also, while this isn't exactly part of the physics, it seems like when Allomancers are pushing/pulling, they set a desired acceleration and automatically increase the force until they reach it; this would explain why they can get thrown back unexpectedly when they shove on an object that turns out to be braced, or when a coin hits an obstacle. Furthermore, I don't think the Allomancer's mass is in the force equation. Granted, we can't confirm or deny this, but it seems the main limiting factor on pushes is resisting the counter-force; braced Allomancers can push pretty hard. Again, it seems like one of the limits is net acceleration; an Allomancer can only push as hard as it takes to produce a certain relative acceleration of the two objects in the system. This means more massive Allomancers are more powerful by virtue of needing more force to move them.

It's kind of hard to think of additional things for Hemalurgic spikes to do, because the possibility space is restricted to stealing stuff from humans and that seems pretty well covered. I suggested nondecay because Preservation adds energy while Ruin removes it, so using a piece of Preservation in Ruin's magic system might cancel out the decay effect. Patching the spiritweb would also fit, since a Lerasium spike would have the energy of both entities that empowered humanity.

Actually, there's also the fact that no one else recognized his powerset either. Davis never explicitly compares the Tensors to the Diggers, and as far as we can tell the witnesses to the Conflux raid didn't recognize his powerset as Digzone. Granted, it's entirely possible that they simply assumed Limelight happened to have a similar powerset, or Steelheart didn't much care whether or not he was Digzone.

I prefer drawing an unambiguous distinction, for situations where it's important to discuss Shards changing hands. Admittedly there is exactly one known case where there is any possibilty for confusion at present, but things might get more complicated in later books.

Jasnah apparently does not see the Symbolheads but can soulcast. By inference, she's in an adjacent order.

I'm mostly suspicious of this because either it's simply too easy, or the numbers don't seem to add up. I'm of the opinion that the Radients would produce as much Shardplate as they possibly could, both for use in the Desolations and for generic use as powered exoskeletons in manual labor if they could make enough. So if an innate soulcaster could create multiple copies of Shardplate, then there would have been more Shardplate in the world because it's basically impossible to truly destroy. On the other hand, if they make one each, they'd only make enough for the orders with Soulcasting, and Windrunners apparently don't have Soulcasting but did have Shardplate.

One of the readings on the site (not from Steelhunt; look through the news archive) has a chapter from Words Of Radiance with a Parshendi viewpoint character. Apparently there's actually not all that many Parshendi or Parshendi Shardbearers. 6-8 originally seems a pretty good estimate.

Tanavast would have been a Shardholder, as opposed to the Shard itself. Personally, I generally refer to the Shard/Shardholder combo by the Shardholder's name when their personality seems to be distinct from the intent of the Shard, and by the Shard's name when it doesn't. As a sidenote, Way Of Kings made the nomenclature incredibly confusing by introducing Shardblades and Shardplate. The question of whether Honor (held by Tanavast, original personality probably absorbed unless he was a recent replacement) is the same as the Almighty is kinda a complicated one. The historical events associated with the Almighty appear to be ones involving Honor, but that does not mean that all the attributes ascribed to the Almighty are attributes possessed by Honor. I guess you could say Honor is the Almighty in the same sense that some ancient Celtic warlord is King Arthur; he existed but has little to no relation to the stories about him. The Stormfather is Jezerin, who is one of the Heralds and historically was subordinate to Honor.