Lewis Nethur

Aluminum guns in the Cosmere contain enough aluminum that they are reportedly more valuable than gold by weight in an industrial revolution-era economy. In the 19th century, gold was worth about $700 per kilo and aluminum was priced at about $1200 per kilo. This means aluminum guns in the Cosmere are probably more than 50% aluminum, and @Beast_c_a_t has a legitimate metallurgical point. That said, i dont think we've seen an aluminum gun in the Cosmere fired more than a dozen times before it was retired from service indefinitely, either due to being confiscated, lost, or replaced. The service life on the Sets guns is basically half of one fire-fight...seriously, Miles loses like 6 in AoL off the top of my head...quality control and product longevity is not one of their engineering concerns. I doubt they've ever used one long enough in the field for failure to be a concern.

A quart of gasoline contains 7,500 calories. We need to get Lift a few gallons of gas and a funnel!

Er...youre slightly off on a few points. Preservation tells Kel he needs an "infinite mind" in order to see into the spiritual realm in a meaningful way. The context of the statement is basically Leras telling Kel that, without tremendously more Investiture than Kel could ever hope to accumulate, he can't possibly hope to see the future clearly enough to be able to save the world from Ruin, and attempting to do so will kill him or drive him insane. I'm not aware of any reference to an "infinity mind" I'm searching the book in its native English, are you perhaps reading a translation?

I love when this question comes up because it really highlights the fact that feruchemy does ultimately have limits, which is often overlooked by readers in my in my opinion. In terms of maximizing physical strength, duralumin enhanced pewter has probably demonstrated the greatest potential on-screen. My back of the envelope calculations put Vin at roughly 10x the strength and durability of a typical adult human, which is enough to deadlift a small car. Of course, she was only able to sustain it for a few milliseconds, but she had also only swallowed a few milligrams of pewter. If she are 10,000x more, ie: a handful of beads, it stands to reason that she could keep going at hulk-level strength for several minutes.

I really hate to undercut myself, but to be fair, TLR, Spook, and all the inquisitors appear to have lacked the invaluable tool of discovery known as the scientific method. It's...plausible...that previous scadrians' failure to understand hemalurgy was ultimately caused by poor methodology. In real-life, people with basically as much capacity for intelligence as people today spent tens of thousands of years hunting, gathering, and searching for food basically all day every day before they finally discovered animal husbandry and agriculture...The reason for their failure wasn't ignorance or stupidity or lack of effort, it was a lack of rigorous methodology. That said, I still don't think that any of the AA's list much truly meaningful info on hemalurgy. The So-Scads may have made some groundbreaking hemalurgic discoveries, which would make them dangerous to everyone everywhere, but I'm skeptical that anyone, Khriss included, has ever previously understood the magic system beyond a very remedial level.

I mean this more as an fyi for readers who aren't familiar with the original thread than a shameless self-plug...but here's the original post: Props to @Calderis for distilling my ravings into a clear and concise idea, as well as including citations that I'm pretty sure I never did. The link includes some supplementary speculation that attempts to address the theory's primary weak point: "How did Kelsier become a fullborn during his return to the Physical Realm?" The kandra-hijacking theory is strong on this point (because kandra were originally full-feruchemists that had been warped) but, in my opinion, is overly obtuse and weak on realmatics. The Connection-hacking theory is, in my opinion, strong on realmatics and elegantly simple, yet generally weak on explaining Kelsier's new powers.

Agreed. Hemalurgy, by the admission of its greatest known practitioners, is really hard to use in any meaningful way. Spook, the Lord Mistborn, one of hemalurgy's greatest advocates despite the obvious moral, ethical, and metaphysical implications and observable ramifications, opened his treatise on hemalurgy, which his God literally asked him to not publish, by stating that hemalurgy is so absurdly complex that he could not condone exploring aspects of the magic system beyond the scope of passing feruchemic and allomantic powers between people, which we have on good authority is the absolute simplest application of the magic system. Let's repeat this: He admitted that killing innocent people and harvesting their souls was okay for a greater good (which is a highly controversial opinion and would be consider by most people, real and fake, to be unbelievably blasphemous), but he felt compelled to point out that trying to expand the knowledge-base of hemalurgy was basically hopeless for human beings using the scientific method/trial-and-error, and therefore to be abhorred. He had no reason to lie which leads me to believe that he was telling the truth as he saw it after 100-ish years of exploring hemalurgy with his good-best-immortal-friend Kelsier. It is widely speculated (keyword) that the southern Scadrians' medallion technology relies on hemalurgy. It is generally, if not absolutely, accepted that the Shard of Autonomy is actively pursuing the genocide of southern Scadrians because of their magical technology and its implications and potential abuse if released to the Cosmere at large. My headcannon is that Hemalurgy is to the Cosmere what nuclear armaments are to real-life civilization. A boon, a curse, a glorious source of unlimited clean power, and a tool by which we could easily destroy ourselves and our descendants beyond any hope of salvation. Hemalurgy can be used to basically engineer anything into anything else. The cost of doing so is high. The cost of learning how to do so is outrageously higher. Considering the price real-life people had to pay for the knowledge and mastery of nuclear power, and the responsibility we inherited after doing so... Let's just say that I can see why a Shard would feel compelled to intervene to stop this exploration, even if I don't agree that such intervention would be inherently moral...

Considering hemalurgy can be used on non-human, non-scadrian, and non-metallic arts magic users, I suspect that the Ars Arcanum is woefully incomplete regarding hemalurgy. So incomplete in fact, that the existing information is probably more misleading than it is enlightening. The only metal I feel even relatively comfortable saying we have a good understanding of, in terms of how it is used in hemalurgy, is atium, because it appears to be capable of stealing anything. I'd call everything else extremely unclear at this point...

What always weirded me out was that Vin could sense Sazeds stored attribute despite not being a feruchemist.

I think it's because there are some old WoB that say more or less outright that TLR's strength comes from his mixing all 3 metallic arts. Recently, I think Sanderson has begun to move away from this and toward your much simpler explanation. He used to say that TLR had hemalurgic spikes, but in the last year I think he has revised this. He used to say flat out that burning a spike wouldn't do anything, now he suggests it would do crazy stuff that's RAFOd. So I think it's all a little fluid for the moment, and also, you're probably spot on, but 2 or 3 years ago the available evidence would've indicated otherwise.

Easy, copper makes people basically immune to emotional allomancy, which ought to make them immune to mind control via allomancy. Bleeder couldn't use copper allomancy to resist Harmony though, so it stands to reason that copper can't stop a shard from controlling sufficiently damaged hemalurgic constructs. My theory, emotional allomancy attacks constructs via the CR, Shards attack via the SR, and copper protects against CR based influence.

Agreed; if you bought White Sand 1 on faith and legitimately felt it didn't yield sufficient entertainment for its cost, then I encourage you to consider sending a positive and compelling message to publishers by continuing to support the Cosmere at large and cautiously investigating White Sand 2 through your local library. I don't presume to pass judgement on others for their individual value assessment, but I personally felt a little burned after purchasing White Sand 1. I'm glad it was written, I'm glad I read it, and I'm glad future generations of mankind will have it available to them as a cultural relic; but, like millions of other books, papers, and essays, I don't believe it is significant enough to justify owning a personal copy. I proudly display my copy of A Memory of Light signed by Sanderson and Robert Jordan's wife on my bookshelf; my copy of White Sand is in a box somewhere; I don't suspect I'll ever bother to dig it back out.

Correct; Sanderson is pretty good about identifying situations in the Cosmere where words/names are similar strictly by coincidence, and this is one of those times. Recall, the planets all have different languages and alphabets, so while we read everything with the same letters most characters in the Cosmere wouldn't. When words that have multi-world significance are spoken in-book, it's usually by worldhoppers.

I mean...if you hit him repeatedly, you could probably kill Hoid with a shovel, so yes, I'd think a magic soul-devouring sword could, under the right circumstances, do the trick. Lol.

This really seems right and obvious to me; to expand on your statement for any who are just tuning in: Nightblood was probably made of good steel to begin with, because if you're going to Invest a sword with 1,000 Breaths, you'd probably want it to be as durable and sharp as possible. Steel is crazy heavy. Nightblood is outrageously large compared to any sword a normal person would ever be able to effectively use regardless of how proficient a swordsman they were. If you are under 7ft tall and on a planet with gravity similar to that of Earth, you aren't going to be able to wield Nightblood effectively, it's just too dang big. When someone picks up a weapon that they are familiar with and that appears to be intricately customized and of obviously high quality, they don't expect it to be unwieldy or poorly designed. They expect it's performance to match its appearance, and any deviation between the two is extremely confounding. Think of an Italian sports car with an engine salvaged from a 70-year old rusted-out pickup truck; the idea simply boggles the mind. A person picking Nightblood up would immediately be confused by its weight because their brain would be trying to reconcile the fact that they were holding a weapon that was impractical to use. Out of context, this just doesn't make a lick of sense. You would expect that Nightblood would weigh an appropriate amount when you reached to pick it up; when you lifted it and immediately realized that you could never swing it effectively, you would be momentarily shocked, as this betrays all of your natural assumptions. By way of analogy, this would be like holding a grenade that's blast was so powerful, that no matter how hard you threw it it would still kill you; it defies your natural expectations of how a weapon works on a fundamental level. Lastly, if Nightblood were any heavier than his physical dimensions already account for, Szeth would probably drown if he tried to swim while carrying it for more than a minute or two. Obviously this hasn't happened yet, but the difference in difficulty for swimming while carrying just a few extra pounds of metal is non-trivial.

There's a little caveat that people often forget: Alik laughingly suggests that creating multi-power medallions, like the Bands of Mourning, would be almost trivially easy for a fullborn. This implies that the thing that makes medallion-manufacturing difficult probably has something to do with the fact that there are no full feruchemists/mistborns on Scadrial. Basically, yes. It has to do with "tricking" the magic system into thinking that whoever is holding the medallion possesses the ability to use the power stored within it using a mysterious tool/artifact/thing called an "excisor." Some people subscribe to the belief that hemalurgy is involved, citing the similarity between the maximum number of powers a medallion can hold (3) and the maximum number of spikes a person can use before Harmony can completely control them (and presumably stop them from adding more spikes). Other people think the medallions work by temporarily manipulating a person's Connection to Harmony, as this appears to be how Lerasium works, and is how natural access allomancy and feruchemy works (this theory has some pretty obvious holes, but is still often cited). Still others propose that the medallions are created by manipulating the Investiture stored in metalminds using more mundane technological means, such as breaking, melting, and recombining metalminds created by people who were storing, in addition to the power to be added to the medallion, their Identity and/or Connection. Please note, none of these processes are confirmed to be viable (they're all RAFO'd), they're just fan-theories for the moment.

I guess it could be, but... Considering the Sovereign's steelsight, my assumption is that the spike probably grants steel/iron allomancy (this is just speculation, Sanderson isn't likely to answer before SH2). The amount of lerasium required to make one eye-spike (an approximately 1-inch cylinder approximately 8-inches long) would be greater than that contained in all of the beads known to have ever existed.

@FiveLate I'm sorry to hear this; you're a worthy sharder and clearly an insightful person. Though it is selfish, I hope that, in time, you will return to our little corner of the internet and once again feel comfortable chiming in and sharing your thoughts with us. In the interim, good luck, and thank you for listing me among such notable sharders, I appreciate and am humbled by the sentiment.

This idea has some legitimate realmatic merit. My understanding of the focii for the metallic arts is that if you burn steel, the Investiture that is filling you up, should be exactly the right "shape" to be funneled into a steel mind. IE: When you store speed in a steelmind, you're storing "steel-shaped" Investiture. Normal compounding involves adding a feruchemic charge prior to burning the metal, so presumably, if you didn't add that feruchemic charge, you could store the allomantic power in some way. However, to the best of knowledge, we've never seen anyone try this type of compounding, and Sanderson has refused to answer questions about it. Please correct me if there's anything other than RAFO's on these, as I believe it's been brought up a few times.

Er...Officially, kandra are not able to replicate things like bone or hair, which would probably prohibit organic armor... However...Kandra do appear to be able to create nails (which are basically made of the same stuff as hair), and the chemicals that bones and hair are made of are present in other cells that they are able to mimic...This is only paradoxical if you only consider a physics perspective (it is a magic system after all). I believe the limitations on what kandra can do will be more realmatic than physical, in the sense that, from a biochemical perspective, they should definitely be able to mimic chitin and bone, but despite this, according to all sources, they cannot. (So no, they probably can't become Greed from Full Metal Alchemist) My headcanon at the moment is that this is some kind of inherited trait from the fact that they are hemalurgic constructs; IE: since hemalurgy confers power via contact with "blood," (we have indications that blood-like analogs may also be sufficient, so the term "blood" shouldn't necessarily be taken literally) a kandra can't mimic tissue that would not normally contact blood (like a lobster shell or hair). This interpretation is by no means perfect, but I feel like it's a decent jumping off point.

We never see TLR drink metal vials and, considering how arbitrarily invincible he was, he kept relatively few metalminds on his person. The BoM, filled to bursting, only allowed Wax to replicate TLR's power for a few minutes. I feel like there was definitely something else going on with TLR's powers than standard compounding. Sazed, Kelsier, and Trell are the only beings whose knowledge and mastery of the metallic arts can be meaningfully compared to TLR's. My best guess is that his ungodly strength had to do with burning hemalurgic spikes. Since the powers stolen by spikes don't line up correctly with the metals used to access those powers, with enough knowledge and preparation, a fullborn might be able to use hemalurgy to fuel their allomancy using the "wrong" metals...3 intermingling magic systems makes things crazy complicated...

Nice. Then I'd recommend pewter allomancy analysis. I believe Kel tells Vin how long a pewter bead takes to burn at one point. Then they sprint for like 24 hrs. Vin isn't super athletic without pewter, so you can probably safely assume virtually all of the energy of that run comes from pewter, estimate the size of a pewter bead, and back calculate the number of beads she swallows using the distance they travel over the duration of their run. Hope that helps more than it hinders.

Id suggest that you try analyzing scenes involving the surge of gravitation. If you can find a scene where Kaladin or Szeth draw in stormlight from an exact number of "identical" gems, and quantify the total energy of their lashings, you'd have a reasonable basis for a standard unit. Or maybe analyzing healing magic vs the energy required for cells to grow and divide, though this seems harder...

That's a fair point; I believe that it's been confirmed that TLR's memory was in fact essentially perfect due to magical shenanigans and not just a myth he encouraged (l'll leave the discussion of the exact mechanics to other threads). Meaning, he had access to 1,000+ years of photo-perfect recall. I feel like it would strain credulity to suggest that all of that information existed physically in his brain in the same way that information exists in a normal brain (basically as an intricate 3D spiderweb of connections). The information storage density of the brain is incredible, but it is finite. In light of that (as well as copper feruchemy in general), it seems probable that the fundamentals of neuroscience simply aren't applicable in the Cosmere. If that's the case, then dementia wouldn't be inevitable, however, without specific magical memory preservation shenanigans, I'd imagine that a person in the Cosmere would still gradually forget large swaths of their life-experiences (though only the ones they don't think about regularly or treasure the most dearly) if they lived long enough, which might not drive them insane, but it might put them at a higher risk of experiencing depression and loneliness...