VoltCruelerz

Yay cover art! Regarding the present discussion regarding Jasnah's appearance, I don't mind it, but it isn't what I imagined. As other before have mentioned, I expected her to be more of a groomed elegance than just beautiful. As I recall though, Vorin garb does tend to show off feminine curves, so it does fit the world. Cross-posting from what I put on tor: The Giant: While this was not at all what I imagined a thunderclast to look like (I imagined obsidian quadrupeds), I figure it’s a pretty safe bet that it is one. That said, I can’t imagine whatever else it might be, so I’m going to assume that thunderclasts are basically magical rock mechs now. I’m surprised the main post suggested that a Parshendi was in there. From Dalinar’s vision, I took it to just be animated rock brought about by a voidspren. Another interesting tidbit is that the thunderclast is walking away from the wall. Maybe that’s Rlain helping out? The Lightning: The presence of red lightning is unsurprising enough given the presence of Voidbringers, but the blue lightning suggests that a Highstorm’s stormwall may be approaching. Either that, or someone’s doing something funky with their spren. The Spears and the Wall: The presence of spears clearly indicates a battle, at least of some scale, though we have no idea where. The Parshendi were all over the world before the Everstorm, so there’s not really any place this couldn’t be happening. I’m going to guess though that it’s one of the cities the party can teleport to from Urithiru just because defending anywhere else with their present force is basically impossible unless Navani suddenly gets a whole lot better at making fabrials. We might see her make a new Oathgate by the end of the series, but I seriously doubt she’d be able to in Book 3. The Glove: It’s Jasnah. She’s an atheist and enormously pragmatic. If she’s going into battle, she’s not vain enough to hide her safehand. What’s more interesting to me here though is that she’s not wearing any armor. While by no means a fighter in her own right, she still strikes me as the sort of person that would never willingly go into battle without protection. Honestly, I think Jasnah might be hiding from the thunderclast. The Sword: Ivory is doing something, but we’ve never seen anyone need to summon their blade when they weren’t getting ready to use it for something sword-like. She might have had had Ivory out and is simply turning him into a different shape like Syl did at the end of Book 2. Then again, maybe there are higher powers we don’t know about yet. The Stairs: Well, this is just weird. There’s no real… yeah, I’ve got nothing. I can only imagine she’s creating them on the fly, but then they’d be mounted to the wall. These are floating, which is a power she doesn’t have, so maybe she’s halfway in Shadesmar or something? Alternatively, this could be some new ability we’re not familiar with as mentioned above.

Wouldn't this affected some of the Returned then if it's just caused by not wanting to come back? I'd think Lightsong would have commented on that at some point.

Yes.

Lift also wasn't there at the time to see it, just a guy who'd been recently brought back from the dead.

I'm guessing moving parts. I suspect it has to be a contiguous piece. Though whether it can form itself into a cable or some such, I'm not sure.

Now that we've seen Wyndle become a fork and mention other Spren becoming bows (but not the strings or arrows?), do we have any knowledge of what the upper size limit is on a shard-item? I'd previously assumed it was a constant mass which you could mold however you see fit, but in the end, you'd still have the same amount of it. Unless Wyndle became a superbly dense fork--which I feel like would have been mentioned by Lift were it so--I'm seriously wondering what the upper and lower bounds on the size of shard-items are right now. Did Wyndle only partially become a fork perhaps, leaving most of his Investiture elsewhere?

Honestly, the thing that surprised me most was that the fork was truly sharp at all. Obviously forks do have pointy bits, but magical pointy bits seems excessive. Was this deliberate on Wyndle's part or must there be some sharp part of a shard-item?

So... he's about to Snap? I'm not sure why Endowment would have any particular affinity for the past, unless you counted the resurrection of the Returned, but Nalthis isn't the only place you can return from the grave. Also, with your comments about color, remember that Nightblood sucks the life out of things. For all we know, he could be pumping Investiture from the physical realm into the cognitive realm, hence the glowy bits that only Lift can see. I'm not saying a malatium-shadow-style effect isn't going on, but I don't see any evidence of that. Possible, yes, but I see no justification for that over any other theory. That said, the idea that Nightblood pumps investiture across realms... Given how heavily invested he is, he might actually qualify as a small perpendicularity, so this might actually be possible...

Yeah, probably a powerful splinter of some kind is my guess, though honestly I would not be surprised in the least if he's killed other Heralds. Of course, since they have a history of coming back, that sort of makes it a moot point unless they just dueled to the death for kicks one time or something.

You know you've succeeded as an author in making a compelling world when your fans are so thoroughly enticed by infodumps. This is a good point and makes me wonder just how much time has passed since the Shattering and what the early politics were like of the Shards. While passing a Shard to someone else is exceedingly rare, I can't help but wonder if perhaps this was done by some Shard holder who has long since let go. I don't know. As I think about it though, hauling your Investiture off to some remote world, dropping your Shard in some inaccessible place so you're just a Sliver... I imagine it would be easier to travel through the Cosmere undetected while still carrying enough power to influence things behind the scenes so long as you didn't do anything that would directly attract the attention of a Shard. Given what the Bands of Mourning are capable of (plus apparently time dilation is a thing), I think it well within a Sliver's power to travel the old fashioned way (through space) between worlds. If a Shardholder wanted to spend an extended period flying through space, it might be useful to have waypoints where they'd chunks of Investiture behind where as a Sliver they could "refuel." Perhaps First of the Sun is such a "magical gas station."

Eh, the first name that came to mind for me was the B-21 Nero. Bear in mind that we do have hellfire missiles though. And the first nuclear test was named Trinity.

Well, today we got an image of the new LRSB and it was announced that it would be called the B-21, but no nickname had yet been chosen. As it is a weapon (basically), is black, can be flown autonomously, and will likely do a fair bit of destroying evil, I would personally be a bit gleeful if it was ultimately named the B-21 Nightblood. Anyone else?

Rotation of the planet? I don't know. Like I said, something very strange is going on at the border, but it's not straight spacetime dilation as that'd cause the redshifting which we know isn't there.

OP, that was a delightfully gleeful rant, thank you. Also, I now really want some fanart of Kelsier showing up in Elendel and Sazed facepalming. On topic though, I don't mind. As you said, Kelsier loves Kelsiering. It's perfectly within character for him to claw his way back from the grave and to muck with everything he sees. I'm very interested to see what happens in the future trilogies between him and Hoid. Both are happy to burn down the world to get what they want so the two of them chasing each other around would be fun to see. I recall that Hoid once made a comment on Roshar about coming to see an old friend but ended up doing a lot of running from him instead. I figured at the time that it was just Demoux, Galladon, and/or some other 17th Sharder. Who knows, maybe it was Kelsier?

Thought about that, but I don't think it would work. Cadmium and bendalloy seem to hack time directly rather than just stretching spacetime. Recall that Khriss said that they didn't cause redshifting. They're not actually stretching space, just time. Something weird is definitely going on at the border though. My guess is that they actually somehow pinch off a piece of the universe and make that bubble of spacetime flow forward independently of the original universe. Maybe you could make a wormhole or teleportation out of that, but I'm pretty sure warp drives are a no-go.

Based on what, that they explode on contact with water? Why couldn't Uranium (see Chernobyl), Harmonium (it's magic), or metallic Hydrogen (contact with water might release a cloud of very hot hydrogen gas that would burn the moment it touches the air). On top of that, they handle it several times without gloves or suspension in oil. You don't do that with alkali metals. It also doesn't seem to instantly oxidize on contact with the air.

So in another thread I got to thinking about this, and I think I've figured out how the Scadrians are going to get their hands of FTL tech, but there's some very odd quirks to it. As of BoM, we now know that when you suck the mass out of something, it accelerates to keep momentum constant. If that's the case, then all you need for a ship that travels just below c is a ship with some thrusters to point it the right way and an ironmind to store its mass. Store 99.999999% of its mass and you'll probably end up going a significant fraction of the speed of light. Now, let's say you get good enough with this that you can go 99.99% of c. This is obviously going to be useful for interplanetary travel. I would not be surprised if the Scadrians of Era 2 have already sent astronauts to all other planets in their star system. Going really really fast like this though can cause time dilation. Let's say Scadrial and Roshar are 10 light years apart. With an ironmind drive, you could get there in just over 10 years from the perspective of the crew, but from the perspective of the outside world, it would be far more than that. Enter the second component of a Scadrian interstellar drive: bendalloy bubbles. Now, the strange thing about bendalloy bubbles is that they speed up time for those affected by them so if you used a bendalloy drive to supplement an ironmind drive on your starship, you could in fact reach Roshar in less than 10 years from the outside world's perspective while the crew would perceive it as more than 10 years. That's strange though. Very very strange. Bendalloy is expensive and burns quickly so I think we're liable to see starships use it, but sparingly. Yes, you might be able to make a trip from Scadrial to Roshar in less than a year to the outside world's perspective, but you still have to pack a decade's worth of supplies on that rocket. Not a whole lot of people would be willing to do that. It would be horrendously expensive and would really only be useful if you were on some time-sensitive mission. That said, I can see the Scadrian equivalent of Air Force One using a high-performance bendalloy drive. Missiles would also likely use bendalloy drives to make them nigh impossible to intercept. As a final note, steelrunning could also be relevant to interstellar travel, but only if it actually impacts velocity/momentum/time and not just the body's metabolism, though this doesn't seem to be the case.

No, I think their ships will just work in three stages: 1. Conventional reaction-mass rocket to accelerate to some arbitrary speed toward its target 2. Yank the mass out of the rocket to hurl it along at 99.99...% the speed of light 3. Start bendalloy hopping

Pretty sure it was in reference to Lord Penrod.

I tried turning the whole process into computer code and it made me think that the only way this works is if Nicrosil and Aluminum work differently than the others or you cheat and use Hemalurgy. Nicrosil has to be generic, otherwise it wouldn't "bind" to the other types of Feruchemy and make the whole process possible. Similarly, you have to be able to drain identity to zero or you'll never be able to create unkeyed metalminds of any sort. If you can use Feruchemy, you might be able to get away with avoiding both those though. First, obviously you can spike someone with extra attributes. Since spikes would literally depend on someone else dying and Metalborns are rare for the Malwish, it would explain the rarity of a medallion with three powers or more. Getting around the identity problem is tougher, but it might be possible, depending on how souls are. If we assume souls have different components in distinct locations, it might be possible to surgically spike someone and thus remove their identity without actually getting rid of their Feruchemy. I don't think this is the answer though because that would be hard for real-world doctors to pull off, let alone the Malwish who may not even have electricity. EDIT: I suppose one other option might be that compatibility with using another person's metalminds would be your Connection to them. In theory, you'd have some Connection with everyone on Scadrial, so perhaps you just need to drain your Identity down enough so that what little Connection you have to everyone is enough to make the metalminds compatible. This, combined with spiking people to get around the Nicrosil exception seems the most likely mechanic for this. I think this is how it works...

We really need before-and-after maps of Scadrial. Anyways, we know Luthadel was the magnetic north pole, but my impression is that the Malwish actually did find a way to live toward the equator during the Final Empire's existence and adapted to that. If Harmony then basically spun the planet's crust to put Luthadel inside the temperate zone, that could shove the Malwish people down toward the geographic south pole, thus freezing them. A thousand years of heat adaptation wouldn't go away over night unless Sazed deliberately got rid of it, but it doesn't seem that he did. Did he not recognize them as humans or something? EDIT: ninja'd by Skaa whose theory explains things quite well.

Based on the plaque, I'd say it's almost certainly Atium.

See this thread from the other spoiler board. My guess is that ettmetal is either Harmonium or metallic Hydrogen, but some people are arguing for Cesium, Sodium/Potassium, or Uranium.

As hilarious as that situation would be, you'd have to be using nicrosil tools to do it which would be... Well, unlikely to say the least. I suppose it's possible that someone playing an instrument made from nicrosil might accidentally do so though as some instruments can be made from nickel alloys. Of course, I don't think you'd ever actually end up with something sentient, you'd just end up with... Well, honestly I don't really understand what happens if you store investiture without anything else. But I doubt you'd get sentient saxophones.

I now have an image in my mind of Kaladin riding a chasmfiend into battle with Allomantic cannons and shields strapped to it. Thank you for that image.