Lewis Nethur

Citation needed. Hoid is not omnipotent, ergo, if he laid limp and 500 wizened old women proceeded to bash him in the skull by turns with shovels, eventually, the Investiture sustaining him would exhaust itself and he would, by consequence of bodily devastation and lack of magical sustenance, succumb to the sweet release of death. It may be a little silly, but it's certainly not false.

Maybe they flew over it? Realistically, they probably just flew straight through without seeing any asteroids. Asteroid belts are much less dense than depicted in most artistic representations.

Interesting...there are currently experimental manufacturing techniques aimed at more tightly controlling, manipulating, and fundamentally altering the basic structure of common metals and alloys to better tune their physical properties, sometimes in profound ways. IE: you could have 2 samples of steel with the same ratio of iron to carbon that have wildly different atomic structures and thermal properties. Up until relatively recently, changing the chemical composition of the alloy was required to be able to manipulate a metal's properties. I wonder if in era 3 or 4 there could be super-pure or highly-tuned metals/alloys that interact differently or more powerfully with the metallic arts than their more primitive and "natural" counterparts. Probably would be hard to explain to readers without breaking the 4th wall though...

I think the subtext so far with the 17th shard on Roshar is that they are trying to stop Hoid from doing something that will free Odium. Odium is the king of pre-emptive and proactive intervention and widely considered a menace. In his letter, i believe Frost implies Odium's containment is a good thing and Hoids meddling is far more likely to quicken his escape than anything else. Hoid is a meddlesome rogue agent, but he's got far less blood on his hands than Rayse, so containing Rayse takes priority, even if that means confronting Hoid or burning Roshar I suspect.

Harmony can't directly stop people from practicing Hemalurgy, he can only forcibly control them if they exceed their personal spike limit (Suit implies 3-max is common, but we have evidence that mental illness lowers it further and exceptional Determination pushes it higher.)

I feel like a true living spren-bow has some merit as a weapon that could appear in-book, the Radiant would just have to supply a couple feet of steel wire and their own arrows. If the spren could change it's rigidity mid-draw, which is a stretch but not completely implausible, you would have an almost weightless bow, with virtually zero draw-weight, that fires harder and straighter than the most gruesome crossbow ever made IRL. Considering how emotionally damaged most Radiants are, I expect there might end up being some who need to not be deep in the fighting, but still want to contribute meaningfully from the back row. Highly speculative I know, but I feel like there are creative solutions that are worthy of exploration still.

My understanding is that, yes, leechers can drain metalminds and that part of the theory is solid. The problem is that being massless would only get you up to the speed of light, not push you past it. The only "plausible" methods I have heard to date to get past the speed of light limit issue that I have heard so far are: compressing space by traveling through (or partially-in ala skimming the edge between realms using some never before seen method) the CR, manipulating the passage of time using mobile speed bubbles which are confirmed possible, or teleporting using the spiritual realm. I like 2 best because it's the most tech based, but I don't know if any have been totally ruled out. Good thought though, traveling at light speed is still pretty good.

Yes, you could break the bracelet in half and get two half breaths, which is believed by Nalthians to be impossible under normal circumstances IIRC. The possible utility being that, if single-breath zombies are possible, half and quarter-breath zombies might be as well.

You just broke my brain; it never even occurred to me that metalborn could probably be hemalurgically harvested shortly after birth...this makes the "breeding an army of allomancers" theory a lot more horrifying and, in my opinion, plausible. Raising, indoctrinating, then breeding allomancers from birth to adulthood sounds farfetched; people are pretty prone to rebellion and running away under those conditions, and they would be so valuable that losing a few could be a major orgazational blow. Plus the time and resources required would be insane. But ensuring your soldier's loyalty by granting the best of them magic powers is an easy sell, and harvesting children sounds tragically easy...plus, the powers could be recovered and reassigned from the corpses of your fallen with little loss of potency assuming contact with wet blood was maintained...

To make a metal detector you just have to give someone steelsight. A single medallion or hemalurgic spike would suffice nicely and be far more effective than even a modern electromagnetic metal detector (unless you're looking specifically for aluminum...)

The powers will have effective limits to prevent the books from being redundant or silly. Like (totally hypothetical): "natural born nicrosil ferrings must be involved in the creation of all medallions, thereby severely bottlenecking production," or, "medallions can be filled during creation, but never refilled," or, "medallions can't be used for compounding," or my favorite, "allomantic powers that can't be stored in a hemalurgic steel spike cant be put into medallions." There are lots of very simple and practical ways to limit the medallions. Right now they look infinitely powerful, much like how electricity or nuclear fission probably seemed miraculous when first harnessed and demonstrated irl. The final truth will likely be much less grandiose than you are proposing, otherwise a solid plot would be difficult to deliver...

Oh yeah, they live by the sea, so salted fish too. I imagine Rosharans get tired of crab meat and grain every day and fish, even salted and barreled, is probably pretty beloved. Inland lakes other than the purelake probably have difficulty maintaining normal fish populations with all the highstorms...regional alcoholic beverages would probably go over well too. Also slaves, Lopen was enslaved and, at some point, sold to Sadeas' army; we shouldn't assume that this isn't a common occurrence. The Herdazians seem to be a very fecund people considering Lopen's many "cousins." It's possible they sell tremendous numbers of overflow children.

I would speculate that they possess exotic hardwoods, and otherwise rare foodstuffs and spices. Theirs is the tropical region after all, and their climate differs greatly from most of the rest of the human-settled parts of Roshar.

Time bubbles of the same metal but different user stack, so I see absolutely no reason why nicrobursting and duralumining wouldn't stack considering that they are different metals that fundamentally burn and activate on time-based principles. Further, I would posit that nicrobursting would stack if 2 nicrobursts grabbed the same person or if one nicroburst grabbed another who was grabbing someone else. Burning duralumin increases the rate at which metals burn; by my best estimates for allomantic steel and pewter (we don't have enough data on the other metals) the power increase is approximately a factor of 10 and the burn rate increase is at least the same and probably significantly higher (like 1-2 orders of magnitude) Bear in mind that Investiture overload, whereby the physical form (IE: human body) dissolves as a direct result of Investiture influx, is similarly a time-dependent phenomenon. Stacking too many burn-rate and output multipliers should therefore simulate the situation that Vin experienced when she picked up Preservation (her body was dissolved), with the caveat that the Investiture would run out very quickly after dissolving the user's body, leaving them, at best, disembodied and most likely just dead. I don't think this combination is in any way overpowered. It possesses an effective limit whereby the users and anyone in the surrounding area could be killed, blasted into the Cognitive Realm through a temporary Perpendicularity, or subjected to any other of a number of magical consequences that are hilariously ironic if abused to the point where they would undermine the plot at any given moment. Good magic systems, like good physics, possess natural self-correction mechanisms which prevent exploitation to the point of absurdity while still rewarding ingenuity and hard work. There are mechanisms in allomancy and feruchemy that, in combination, can grant users access to immortality and interstellar travel; very little is off the table when it comes to what is possible in the Cosmere, but there are effective limits that prevent simple combinations from being "broken" in terms of power output.

I'm afraid I don't understand your metaphor...in any case, silver can be pushed on; i believe you are referencing the scene where Vin is in jail and tries to swallow a screw or something only to find out she can't burn it because it is made of silver. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I don't think they say silver can't be pushed on, just that it can't be burned by itself.

As the title states, why did Ruin grant Marsh feruchemic atium? Do we have any reason for that? He was making a champion he only planned to need for a few days and was going to kill off afterwards by destroying the planet. He could have given Marsh, or one of the other inquisitors with fewer spikes, any other feruchemic power with that same spike, why waste it giving him eternal youth?

Just to play devil's advocate, have we proven that bleeders spike wasnt of Harmony or maybe the pile of Ruin Investiture that Harmony didn't pick up during his ascension? (Recall, we don't know for sure what happened to Ruin's atium Investiture; it got burned and released, it didn't resolidify as atium, and Sazed couldn't have sucked it in during his ascension. Maybe he picked it up later or maybe it became a splinter or got sucked up by Kelsier or someone else).

@Calderis For fun, I would actually take the speculation a little further. I think if Wax stored weight in a piece of iron then reforged it into steel, the resultant hunk of metal might actually be more resistant to steel pushing than it was as an ironmind. My rationale is that the Investiture being in a rigid and locked shape within the lattice of iron/carbon atoms would do a better job of keeping external Investiture from being "pushed" in via allomany (or any magic system for that matter) than if the feruchemic charge were in it's normal and accessible state.

Something should happen since, when the metalmind was burned, the feruchemic charge would absolutely be released and a release of Investiture ought to do something. That said, when Vin burned Sazed's metalmind, the only benefit she received was a temporary ability to "feel" the Investiture in said metalmind. That's not nothing, and it has deeper implications, but it's not yet been shown to go anywhere valuable. Note, creating a sample of steel that can't effectively be used as a metalmind could be useful in and of itself. If it even partially resists attempts to store/tap feruchemically it should also resist steel pushing and iron pulling to a degree.

Once they discover relatively low half-life heavy elements and the chemistry to purify them: bendalloy grenades to apply multiple speed bubbles to a sample of nuclear material for a low-tech high-yield super-weapon.

Generally speaking, I believe Feruchemy functions by storing all aspects of a single attribute in equal measure. IE, a person storing 10% of their strength makes every muscle in their body weaker by (to a good approximation) 10%. Sanderson has RAFO'd the question of whether it is possible to selectively store/tap, IE: store sight from only one eye or tap strength in only one arm for more efficient Investiture use. It's unknown at this time whether pain can be stored independently of the sensation of touch, but they should definitely be able to be stored together. I would say your son's idea has merit either way though, as my opinion is that storing 75% of the sense of touch would allow for all but the most severe wounds to be endured while it probably wouldn't interfere greatly with a trained fighter's combat effectiveness (which involves more muscle memory and instinct than reliance on dynamic feedback). @The Harlem Worldhoppers that's hilarious, 5/5.

As a man who shaves his head I can tell you it is a serious pain to do without a mirror but it can be done. But Marsh has feruchemic gold so he probably just stores health for a minute and then brushes a torch over his stubble. If he did it every day he would only have to deal with healing very minor burns to achieve a perfectly clean shave. That or he waxes once every week or two.

A more veteran sharder can find the WoB, but yes, efficiency of both storing and tapping is reduced for people with feruchemical abilities gained through hemalurgy. Essentially, when they store an attribute, some of what they are storing just gets lost to wherever waste Investiture goes (presumably the spiritual realm) and when they tap their metalmind later some of the reclaimed Investiture also gets lost. Not sure if it has been formally canonized that all natural born ferrings are 100% efficient but, at least as of a few years ago, that was the major consensus.

I mean...Major WoT spoiler... Edit: I feel like my original argument reduced the story to sounding arbitrary and predictable, but it's actually my all time favorite. There are deeper morals about balance and good and evil never being able to fully conquer each other that I severely under represented. 3/5, would rewrite if had time.

My headcanon is that Nightblood would stop being awesomely destructive if his user stopped feeding him Investiture, either as a result of dying or through a hack. That said, once the blade is barred Nightblood appears to be able to suck Investiture in to some extent, including forcing people wielding him to be unable to release his handle. If that didn't let him start drinking up his holders Investiture through the aluminum gauntlet he might start screaming into their brain until they couldn't think or act under their own power (highly speculative). Definitely an interesting proposal though.