Lewis Nethur

Doesn't pumping excess power into suregebinding cause a rapid drop in temperature though? I feel like I remember Kal and Szeth freezing their clothes a couple times. While I imagine a Herald probably could lash or burn just about anything with as much force as they wanted to, they would risk being encased in a block of ice.

- A general reminder to all radiants: Your squires' functional excellence and combat readiness require your proximity. Be mindful of your relative position during operations; scouting resources are strained enough as it is. - To all windrunner squires: please restrict training exercises to your order's designated grounds; the administration will henceforth consider unsanctioned utilization of other order's facilities an intentional instigation of confrontation and will be punishing offenders in a proportional manner. The other orders are not responsible for combating the burden of your opulent participation. - Edgedancers and Truthwatchers found utilizing Progression to grow plants in community spaces will face harsh retribution; the recent collapse of a certain dining hall due to rapid crack-propagation resulting from an unsustainable influx of root systems in the foundation stones was a completely preventable disaster.

My word, was that ever fast and thorough...Have an upvote for uncanny vigilance and speed of reference.

So on Roshar my recollection is that the spren began to develop, at least in part, as a manifestation of other sapient being's personification of the forces/things around them. I can't see a normal metalmind gaining sapience without awakening; I feel like a single person just doesn't have the gravity to warp the three realms enough to create a thinking being from so small a container of Investiture. However...if you had thousands of ferrings worshipping and periodically storing investiture into a massive idol composed of all 16 metals (or fewer, it would just be easier to get contributors with all 16) I could definitely see that going somewhere. For example, maybe the first generation or two of worshippers view contributing a little Investiture now and then as a ceremonial token sacrifice to show their love and devotion for their community. Time goes on, the first few generations die off, and now the idol becomes a symbol of immortality and continuity; a sort of partial vessel for the souls and wisdom of lost loved ones. I don't imagine such a creature would be capable of much more than existing and perhaps, if it grew Invested enough, speaking to those with a strong Connection to it. I think the basic idea absolutely has merit and I expect that with a little creativity a wildly accelerated process could be pitched that is, at least for the time-being, consistent with the rules of the Cosmere as we know them. That said, I don't see this happening for one reason: bringing objects to life is awakening's main draw. I think it's what makes warbreaker interesting and if it stops being unique that would make the eventual sequel less fun.

I mean...There are plenty of riotable emotions that, if applied consistently around a focal public figure, would probably be absolutely devastating to everyone everywhere. Just because people have the self awareness to know their emotions are irrational doesn't protect them from the side-effects of those emotions...Just ask anyone who has ever struggled with depression or psychotic episodes. Of all of the many things a rioter could do, I posit that rioting happiness and joy is among the least evil. Using their power constantly for any purpose would probably be a horrible thing to do. in-universe characters argue strongly that firm emotional manipulation isn't tantamount to mind-control; they are wrong. Sure, you can't reliably control individual people, but you can shove everyone very hard in one direction, which is way more than enough to get just about any desired effect on the grand-scale.

Abuse caffeine and store the overflow alertness/wakefulness throughout the day to get down to normal, then tap it back once the caffeine wears off. Should allow the user to reduce their need to sleep to just a couple hours a night with minimal side effects (morning headaches from caffeine dependency and I'm speculating hypertension). Riot happiness in everyone around you constantly to develop in them a deep seeded association of you with goodness/pleasantness.

My favorite single metallic art hack is an iron-ferring standing on spring and manipulating their mass to collapse it down and lift it back up. Add in some machinery and you basically have a free energy machine.

Not to be pedantic, but I mean...kandra are still composed of living tissue, so a skeleton made of any metal that isn't biologically inert (surgical steel, titanium, and gold/titanium I think?) is technically going to poison them as it slowly corrodes or leeches into their tissue. Their ability to heal means this would have very little effect but...Since mass/energy/investiture are more or less conservative in the Cosmere, I assume a kandra using its healing powers to filter metal from itself would cause it to lose a small amount of mass/energy/Investiture (presumably in the form of CO2 or some other some other waste/exertion/byproduct), so theoretically, a kandra with a metal truebody should have to eat slightly more to maintain their mass (maybe in the ballpark of a few crackers to a few slices of bread worth of calories per day depending on what metal and how efficient kandra biological processes are?). Off the top of my head, of the allomantic metals, I would guess aluminum would be one of the least poisonous to make bones out of and the worst would probably be pewter.

The limitations of many of the metals changes radically from scene to scene if you dig too deep. The explanation for this is that the magic is, in part, governed by perception, which can be altered substantially in a panic situation. IE: sometimes Wayne strains to speed time up by a factor of 100, other times he speeds it up by a factor of 10,000.

I feel like this is a common misconception. I think all we know so far is that etmetal can be used to reproduce allomantic abilities when used in conjunction with as of yet unknown mechanical (or electro-mechanical) components, like the switches of the southern grenades. All we've seen raw etmetal due is power some apparently fluorescent tubes in the temple housing the BoM, and that still involved external non-allomantic hardware. Storing powers is probably only a single specific way that etmetal can be used. Much like how a battery in real life can power a light bulb, or power a fan, or explode when shorted across it's terminals.

I don't care for the 8x time multiplier approximation. Wayne routinely slows bullets to a crawl (x100 multiplier) and slows a dynamite blast to a slow walk (x1,000-x10,000 multiplier) in one scene. The amount of slowdown/speedup is extremely situational, apparently controlled more by instinct than intent, and is adjustable by flaring/slow-burning across 4ish orders of magnitude.

Or stagnate as people become set in old ways and traditions are reinforced over and over again I'd call them equally likely at this point.

Even if compounding copper doesn't duplicate memories, I envision families passing down treasured memories and even knowledge or practical experience to their loved ones if they are fortunate enough to be able to see that their time of death is near. Being able to gift your grandchild with 60 years of welding experience might not seem like a flashy power, but it would have serious implications for culture and how society treats elders. I even envision the social elite using copper medallions to buy knowledge to get through difficult school programs or simply to master new skills on a whim.

Do we know for sure? No. But, it ought to be something simple and intuitive, as we aren't really talking about crossing magic systems here where things get weird quick. My speculation: it would project atium shadows for anyone in the etmetals radius of effect and grant the mental power to use them. That's the only explanation I can think of that wouldn't be useless or inconsistent with observation. Nothing happening would be lame, so I'd like to think that won't be the case...

I think the bubble would pop instantly, like on the carriage, resulting in uncomfortable whiplash for the user. It might be possible to throw a bubble every 2 seconds (the fastest they can be opened) to diffuse your momentum (by partially redirecting it in a random direction) and therefore be able to survive falls from much greater heights.

Yeah, a cadmium bubble would give responders mire time to save you. Flaring cadmium in your deaththrows, you could probably really REALLY extend time. The bubble might also pop from the strain of the mass flow rate of the water if you were in a strong current, but otherwise I imagine the fluid you were drowning in would obey the same rules as air, in that there's a little deflection and swirling, but it's mostly negligible.

I would answer this as: "not directly." Storing/tapping memories, or tapping someone else's memories for that matter, could seriously alter your cognitive and spiritual self, but I don't think you're storing your cognitive self, which would make you more vulnerable to certain types of foreign Investiture. One practical example: if two people stored all of their memories in identityless metalminds and traded them, they would both be radically altered, but I wouldn't say they had literally swapped or merged Identities (capitalized). If they made keyed metalminds before/after the swap, I imagine those would still be keyed to their physical, spiritual, and by extension, cognitive self.

Couldn't find the WoB, but I believe one exists for this question. The above are correct in that skill and perception can allow additional "lines." Having additional Investiture (aka steel spikes like an inquisitor) helps, but is not strictly necessary as I recall.

(Emphasis mine) Last I checked, by WOB, in the Cosmere, Investiture (along with momentum, matter, and energy) is conservative when all 3 realms (Physical, Cognitive, and Spiritual) are considered. This means that drawing Investiture away from a Shard does in fact weaken it. My understanding is that Shards can, to some extent, draw the Investiture they expend (or have siphoned from them) back to themselves through a kind of "natural" process of entropy that is local to the Cosmere. IE: Investiture is siphoned from a Shard to create matter or energy or a storage of Investiture, then that matter or energy or Investiture is, in a roundabout way, eventually returned to the Shard. The process by which atium is burned then coalesced back into a bead without any intervention while Preservation and Ruin were both crippled is, I think, a good demonstration of how this process naturally works. The consequence of this cycle is that, theoretically, a compounder could "store" the entirety of Harmony's Investiture if they had a sufficiently large metalmind and a sufficiently large store of metal to burn. This would kill Harmony and, as a bonus, since the metalmind would be keyed to the person who made it, they would likely be able to ascend by drawing it all in at once. The problem with this is, by most estimates, it may not be reasonably possible for a compounder, or even a large group of compounders, to siphon Investiture from Harmony fast enough to be meaningful; Preservation and Ruin did create a planet from the void and swing it across orbits for fun if you recall...Also, Harmony may have trouble acting himself, but he probably wouldn't be afraid of asking his kandra to assassinate someone if he thought they were going to try to kill and replace him (speculative). The other problem is that Scadrians probably have not yet observed that Investiture is conservative; without free access to all three realms, making any hypothesis about conservation in the Cosmere would just be nonsensical speculation and grasping at straws rather than true scientific investigation. Most of them probably don't realize that Harmony might actually be killable and Investiture might actually be finite (in a sense).

So, you burn the part invested with the attribute, but theoretically, you could reinvest that into the metal you're burning and create a feedback loop to very quickly fill the bead you're burning to the max. I would argue that, in most situations, how invested the metal is when you start compounding doesn't really matter, but it is an interesting nuance.

There are lots of ways to cheat: store determination while being rioted, store wakefulness or mental speed while abusing amphetamines, storing health after loading up on antibiotics (results would likely vary), storing eyesight while wearing corrective lenses (Sazed does this actually), storing thirst while keeping your mouth opened under water (drain a lake? Lol), I'm sure a more creative person could find a way for all 16 attributes.

@RShara the only knit-pick I have with your data, which is astonishingly complete, is that I would add the caveat that the weird precession in Roshar's moons is ultimately due to the fact that Roshar (the planet) exhibits an unstable orbit with its nearby bodies. In other words, in the future, be it distant or near, one or more of Roshar's moons will either slam into its surface, or be ejected from orbit unless something very drastic happens. Many Cosmere fans forget this fact when first attempting to make orbital projections about Roshar; I can't recall the location of the link off-hand, but I believe Peter has stated this outright in the past. This assumption leads to a very deep rabbit hole of Lagrange points and stable orbits that really just isn't applicable; I wish you all the best in developing better calculations than your predecessors; TLR knows I didn't get very far...

Awesome catch. I don't have time right now, but I recommend reviewing the Cosmere timelines to see if the iridescent tones had been founded before TLR's ascension. I believe those dates are known to within a century or so. Considering how portable Breath and Atium are, I could see enterprising world hoppers doing serious business between the two planets...

I agree that we don't have enough information to say some people could definitely maintain full control with 4 or more spikes. But, bear in mind that Marsh, for a brief moment, defied the direct and focused control of a Shard while bearing 20 fully charged spikes. Suit can handle 3, mistwraiths can handle 1, and we've never seen a koloss with less than 4. That's what we know. We can speculate and theorize beyond this, which i strongly advocate, but my original intent was to clarify that the 3 spike limit isn't a hard-fact. It's a good theory with strong implications, but...this is Sanderson we're talking about here...he's pretty wily.

I believe the only time the "3-spikes and Harmony gains noticeable influence over you" thing is referenced is by Suit, and the context in which it is discussed is very much personal to Suit and/or his associates. My understanding is that the door is very much still open for some people to be able to handle having more spikes while staying free of control, while other people could be controlled with fewer. It's also left unsaid whether Harmony could push harder and mind-control someone with fewer than 3 spikes if he really had to; in most circumstances, this would probably go against his Intent, but it's never said he couldn't do it...it's just indicated that he hasn't been caught doing it.