Lewis Nethur

To be completely fair, Harmony is objectively a manipulative liar who has knowingly harmed the innocent with intent to kill and driven many of his best agents to suicide after committing global genocide...

Ouch. Sorry about that, I've added a spoiler block, that's my bad. Yeah, Harmony is definitely a good person in the traditional sense, he just isn't a very good God. I think the better question to explore here is: what actually would make a good Shard? In my opinion, that's essentially what the 17th shard is: an aggregate entity which fosters goodwill, community development, knowledge sharing and documentation, and intervenes directly as little as possible in the affairs of mortals while accepting all new worldhoppers with open and loving arms. Does it harbor dark thoughts and intentions sometimes? Maybe, but good luck proving it. Definitely a million times nicer and less destructive than any of the other 16. If there is ever a last god standing in the cosmere, my money is all in on it being the 17th one, the one that doesn't exist as a single mind, but many working and playing together.

What was Taln too late for...? Taln, the only Herald not of noble birth, was not supposed to remain unbreakable to his soul even after his mind was shattered by torture and watching his friends die. He was late for his own funeral and rebirth because he was stubborn enough to frustrate bedrock into submission...he overshot timing by a power of nine plus three orders of magnitude and he's "afraid that [he] Might he too late this time..." ...call him late or slow all you want, the only two people who have had a greater individual roshar-wide impact on cosmere history than him are Honor and Cultivation...

It's SOOOOO much worse than genetic engineering! It's genetic engineering, plus electrical engineering, plus chemical engineering, plus mechanical engineering, plus systems engineering, plus theoretical physics, plus literally every other subject that I don't understand the proper name for yet simultaneously. It is kind of fun to think through though! And you're super welcome, you've dropped some golden posts, I usually just try to bounce 'em back or up higher these days.

My running theory has been that linchpin spikes function like power regulators and heatsinks between complex circuit components for hemalurgic constructs that are too complex to otherwise survive organically. Without getting buried in jargon, that interpretation would imply that linchpins are needed anytime two hemalurgically augmented interfaces are exchanging kinetic Investiture and only when the magnitude of that Investiture could theoretically be drawn upon powerfully enough to cause damage (which, in my mind, would essentially mean they exist to prevent the accidental creation of internal Investiture feedback loops inside a body or machine). This approach would mean that a linchpin doesn't so much "coordinate" Investiture flow so much as guard against massive uncontrolled spikes in transfers between entities, are tehcnically the cause of hemalurgy being "leaky" and less efficient than "naturally" obtained power, and really only serve to protect the most delicate parts of any system in which they are present from being overwhelmed. I would anticipate that location within a hemalurgic construct or body is technically, critically important, but also, surprisingly flexible with a little ingenuity (like pieces on a circuit board). Hopefully that helps. For what it's worth, I believe you are correct that people are the hardware in many of these cases.

I mean...maybe...but maybe not if they ONLY made new kandra with the blessing of stability. Those ones might be able to resist hard enough to remain covert and autonomous.

Wow. well...In late era3 or early era4, I would expect extremely exotic artificial computer/machine-aided hemalurgy to allow for human drone pilots to assume remote control of non-sentient robotic bodies (IE: mechanical dolls) using a removable linchpin spike to connect and disconnect from them. I expect to start seeing scadrian machines on page with enough Identity and Connection to make this work relatively soon, they'll probably (100% speculative) just need to figure out how to ethically harvest and cleanse (remove Identity residue from) many thousands or millions of hemalurgic spikes or, more likely, truly begin artificing with them and delving into the capabilities of harmonium. Sort of like...a widespread modularization and normalization of hemalurgy. Currently, the art simply requires violently murdering too many people to ever be industrialized without constant genocidal warfare supported by outright forced nazi breeding programs...which is an absolute no-go if that doesn't go without saying. If it can be mechanized and powered artificially, then I could imagine connected machines, a scadrian internet-equivalent, remote control technology, and a whole suite of other robotic powers, to open themselves up for scadrians.

Edit: Unpublished unconfirmed information placed under spoiler tag.

Whoa. It would add a lot of credence to why they call the spikes "blessings," if they came from the splinter of infinity himself yeah, and also why they called him father. Edit: huh...I suppose that would mean that, with enough gold (or equivalent generic/liquid Investiture), Kelsier, or anyone else who gets their hands on a/the bands of mourning (assuming they get refilled or reproduced eventually) could make their own personal kandra army. Northern Scadrial's military might even be able to create secret kandra that Harmony can't detect or control doing something like this...that would be a great way to change him to Discord...

I'm inclined to agree, I feel like @Dofurion's suggestion might have some legitimate merit. Bulleted misc. Support in case it helps sway anyone: 1. The process for making kandra spikes reportedly legitimately differs from that of koloss spikes; koloss spikes are demonstrated as maintaining some of their victim's Identity and their previous user(s)'s Identity if reused, as shown with Human. No such demonstration that Kandra maintain a Connection to the victims from whom their spikes were harvested has been made. This is isn't conclusive, but it does leave the door open. 2. The Lord Ruler routinely delegated tasks to his Inquisitors; it is likely that he told them how to make Kandra spikes so that he wouldn't need to run around his own city kidnapping and killing people at night and simply forbid them from writing it down or speaking about it. This means Marsh probably knows and a confirmation of how kandra spikes are made would be rich content reveal for a second secret history novella, so...the theory should be able to be verified or contradicted on page eventually. 3. The Lord Ruler should have been aware of what storing/tapping aluminum and duralumin did, and Inquisitors showed that they could essentially beat and force mistborn to burn aluminum in order to wipe out their metal reserves. It seems to me that the Lord Ruler could have simply made and kept a handful of hemalurgic spikes on hand for granting people f:duralumin/aluminum. Stabbing a random Ska to give them these powers and forcing them to store Identity and Connection would be easy for a couple full-blown Inquisitors (monstrous, but easy). Then they could simply excise whatever Identityless and unConnected attribute they wanted and take their two duralumin spikes back I would think. 4. The point that Kandra spikes can't be swapped between bodies or reused and do seem to organically develop their own form of Identity definitely means something. 5. Mistwraiths were originally created by ripping something important for sapience out of the spiritwebs of Feruchemists, and kandra's two Blessings fill these two holes. I'm thinking Rashek might have just severed their Identities and Connections while ascended. 6. The lord ruler had many many many more koloss than kandra and each koloss took twice as many spikes; even if the kandra spike creation process is 10 times more complicated or difficult than that of making koloss, the bottleneck here shouldn't be one of manpower or the availability of victims. 7. I would opine that Identityless & Connectionless hemalurgic spikes could absolutely be made in era1, Rashek definitely knew how, and the resources and methods would have been easy for him to employ while keeping secret. I just hadn't considered that that might be how kandra are made. 8. The kandra of era2 might never be able to create another generation unless they can find a way to reuse existing spikes or find an ethical or artificial method for creating new ones if the original process specifically required kidnapping and torturing people. We shouldn't be surprised if it turns out it did; Rashek's inquisitors were already doing that. It's a terrible concept, but I think it kinda works unfortunately.

Just gonna hemalurgically staple this comment in here real quick: Just like the koloss are named for the real world colossus of legend, I would propose similar naming conventions for their counterpart hemalurgic monstrosities: H:iron (strength): the koloss after colossi, giant monsters of immense strength H:tin (sensing): the nym after nymphs, faelike creatures who achieve extreme sensory perception through their environment (such as being able to see/hear remotely like modern security cameras) H:zinc (emotional fortitude): the Yamus, for the yama, gods of death and justice who are depicted as completely unshakeable. H:copper (mental fortitude): the kitted, for the kitsune, fox gods of immense wisdom. H:chromium (fate): the fated, for the fates, the blind witches who choose who lives and who dies and when. H:aluminum (removes power): the lame, for lamia the demoness who's mere presence sucks the power out of nearby sources. H:nicrosil (steals investiture): the babi, for the baba yaga, the Slavic witch who steals valuables from anyone who asks her for help. H:duralumin (connection/identity): the skinchangers, for changelings and skinwalkers, known for impersonating others and mimicing their identities. It would probably be better if more of the above leaned closer to French origins given the general naming conventions of characters in world, buuuut...themes don't have to be perfect, so whatever.

Hmmm...sadly, I have to agree that they would probably exhibit severe deficits in empathy though, and maybe physical capability too; i think they would feel and be aware of the emotions of others, but they probably wouldn't be meaningfully influenced by them, which is like a weird and inverted form of psychopathy... Empathy problems does open up the question of whether such a creature would be vulnerable to remote control via concentrated emotional allomancy; honestly, it sort of breaks some of things many people think that they know about Hemalurgy, but I think they would be functionally immune to control like Inquisitors typically are or kandra with the blessing of stability or presence can become. They might land themselves some sensory deficits though while we're on the subject of physical capability unfortunately. If it helps at all, my best guess and advice for defining exotic engineered psuedo-human sapient constructs would be: Assume that augmenting and stacking power of one of the known classified kandra blessings comes with a partial (but not equal!) reduction in the other three. So...theoretically, it should be possible to load up a body with spikes until it is superior in capability to any naturally born creature with no detectable flaws, buuuuuut...one would have to kill an insane number of people and perform experiments on an absurd volume of human test subjects to master such a creation process... On second thought...You might be onto something with that grey aliens description...

Well, first and foremost, I wouldn't expect them to be caught dead anywhere near a classroom. An impossibly intelligent person would make both an extremely frustrated teacher AND an extremely frustrated student. Frustration and inappropriate pacing ruin creativity and the most insanely intelligent person who ever walked the earth, be they man or woman, would be nothing if not absurdly creative. What does that leave? Well, they sure as heck would not be left alone by the government or authorities, because those societal functions can't sustainably operate without keeping a close eye and ear towards the minds of their brightest citizens. I would expect them to most likely have rocky relationships with their family if their family was all human, if not because many (maybe most) parents and elders in a family tree struggle severely with raising, respecting, maintaining positive engagement with children who are more than 3 standard deviations to the left or right of them on the general intelligence spectrum, then simply because of how their child benefitted overwhelmingly from the death and suffering of others. It doesn't make either child or family members bad people, it just very fundamentally makes for unusual and awkward social situations that are impossible to avoid and that generates resentment... So...I'm thinking: hapless loner, who fully understands the benefits of social engagement but probably avoids close ties except when they can't avoid it, and prioritizes personal liberty, creativity, and self determination above all else. They should pretty unmatchable control over their body and reflexes (think Sherlock Holmes, or the most extreme su kong tai djin myths from real life). They should have uncanny intuition; it should be difficult to distinguish from precognition and telepathy to be honest. And lastly, I would expect them to be lazy as hell and to almost always use other people to do their bidding except when they have no other choice.

No no, I believe you're basically on the right track on this point, only a little misguided. Highstorms are not really physically similar to any IRL Earth weather event is the crux of the problem. They travel insanely fast, blow absurdly hard, and always follow the same one directional path. If memory serves, the leading edge of the storms, the Stormwall, is described in-book as many hundreds of feet tall and almost supersonic. That's so ridiculously worse than a tsunami that it just strains credulity to compare the two phenomena, IE: a stormwall 1,000 miles inland from the coast over bare rock behaves so much more radically violent, extreme, fast, tall, deadly, and incomprehensibly vast than the absolute worst possible coastal tsunami event on Earth that, while they technically obey the same underlying physical principles, it almost seems like they legitimately do not and a lot lot lot of math and hand-waving had to go into their creation upfront to make them work at all. (Recall: Roshar is a completely artificial world architected by Adonalsium and 100% of the human population is comprised of refugees, immigrants, and their descendants who all settled their after Honor and Cultivation had already started playing with it without the other Shards)

I'm reluctant to entertain the possibility, but yes, I expect that brainwashing could be performed this way in the sense that victims can be partially depatterned and repatterned via emotional abuse, reward, and manipulation cycles. This is very much distinct from mind-control and I'm not sure that blasting loyalty alone could realistically be enough. An amoral psychopath could definitely use abusive supercharged emotional allomancy to punish and incentivize specific actions and results from anyone that they have sufficient leverage over to press into criminal service. That's...super dark stuff though. Hopefully not cosmere appropriate buuuut...who knows? Sanderson is still relatively early in his career; he could take a dark turn if he chose to down the road. Helping with depression is definitely going to be very complicated but, in general, yeah, I would expect that positive encouragement from a benevolent and transparent source could affect positive changes in targets' self-reports of mood and quality of life. I would expect that to translate into behavioral and attitude changes over time, but I'm reluctant to suggest that such a thing as depression could be "cured," this way; according to the current rules for stormlight healing, it could probably only be "treated/relieved." Still, an effective treatment regiment can be functionally as good as a cure under the proper conditions and in the correct environment (just more "expensive," from a human-economy perspective). To your other points, yep, I mostly agree, I'm pretty sure we're basically on the same page. I just always mention multi-bursting because I expect that feat to be important for extremely advanced era4 machines, but only once scadrial is fully evolved beyond the need to engage in human-testing to understand the metaphysics of the metallic arts, by which I essentially mean: once scadrial has produced and mastered artificial general intelligence and fully parameterized all possible limits of their magic system on page (so a long long time from now which may never fully be arrived at).

In general, I believe you're correct on this point in the large majority of cases, but we already know that there are, on a fundamental level, breaking points in allomancy. It's possible to ascend by connecting to and burning the mists hard enough, which essentially (many people would regard as the same as) kills one's body. Some other over-the-top examples to consider: 1. Several nicrobursts powering a coinshot should be able to force said coinshot to supersonic speeds near instantaneously, resulting in near-instant death by crushing all of their organs while their limp corpse blasts off to the stratosphere. Based on the acceleration bursts Vin experiences in era1, I don't expect that this would even require the coinshot to have ingested more than a handful of standard vials of steel to achieve, so...it should be fairly easy to do by accident. If you're a coinshot and 3 nicrobursts have their hands on you, using your powers may be suicidal unless you're almost out of metal naturally already. 2. Straff Venture develops what I would consider a persistent fear of Vin after feeling her mind-erasing Soothing personally. While persistent fear of an individual person might not count as an induced phobia if said fear is "rational," if the reaction causes persistent negative consequences in one's daily life (persistent terror counts in my opinion) that is a form of lasting psychological damage. I would offer the opinion that, if scaled up further and especially if rioting was supercharged instead of soothing, brain damage and permanent behavioral changes cannot be totally off the table. 3. It's possible to flair tin so long and hard that one is effectively blind and deaf without it and so hyper-sensitive when using it that they are in constant agony from even small stimuli. Nothing here is conclusive until it is verified formally of course, but I would opine that, since permanent widening of the cracks in one's spirit web is fundamentally a function of how much Investiture is forced through oneself and how long said pressure is maintained, that short-duration bursts of extreme magnitude should be able to push one's soul to the point of permanent deformation the same way persistent overclocking drives users to savantism. A real world analog in case that helps this dialog: In real-life, if you circulate water that is near to boiling through a radiant (small r) heating loop for a building (let's say a hotel) using plastic pipe, said pipes will gradually start to bend, shift, bulge, and rupture. This allows the flowrate through the pipes to begin increasing, thereby increasing the rate of heat transfer from water to pipe. Once that process is initiated, every additional microscopic crack and tiny expansion makes the system weaker and weaker, causing the process of cascade damage, widening, and deformation to accelerate, and also causing the rate of acceleration to accelerate, leading to catastrophic failure if not cooled and regulated. This is how I imagine savantism works; the magic system (metaphorically: the building system controls, sensors, and coldwater mixing valves definitely attempt to protect the building from runaway feedback loops, but they are in no way foolproof and accidents and sabotage do happen. Spook could testify to that better than anyone. I imagine multi-bursting an allomancer would work like a "water-hammer" event in a radiant cooling building loop (Sorry, I'm not good enough at fluid dynamics to personally give a succinct explanation here but Wikipedia should still have a good page on the physics of water hammer phenomena). Essentially, when too many valves are forced open and closed too quickly, the harmonics can cause catastrophic ruptures (basically explosions) in the piping around and throughout a building. Design methods and controls exist to try to prevent such events from occurring randomly or naturally during regular use, buuuut...it's absolutely possible to force them to occur manually. Again, it's just an unconfirmed theory, but it makes sense in my head so, hopefully it helps clarify in that respect at least.

I believe so yeah, unequivocally. If you take a garden hose and connect it to enough booster pumps then you can absolutely force it to spray water so hard and fast that it ruptures and is permanently destroyed. I see no reason that such a mechanic wouldn't apply to people and have been trying to warn against multiple simultaneous nicrobursts targeting a single person for years... I don't need to see it tested; I'm 100% confident that 10 nicrobursted brass allomancers focusing on targeting one person could induce permanent mental, emotional, and psychological harm on their victim, and 10 nicrobursts ultracharging one allomancer of any kind can kill them in a violent explosion resembling a very short-lived perpendicularity. You have my vote.

Unfortunately, no, not really. Massive feats of soulcasting still obey (more or less...) newtonian physics regarding action and reaction. Jasnah soulcasts a boulder to smoke with explosive results. Soulcasting a massive pocket of air into solid matter should therefore probably be expected to cause a massive implosion and vacuum. Amazing feats like soulcasting a giant stone slab into crystaline glass or solid gold should be possible using the methods described, but producing food in large volume is basically a no-go considering that the weakest highstorm is stronger than the strongest hurricane, creating large permanent shelters/buildings out of air would likely be accompanied by reactionary pressure waves powerful enough to immediately implode and crush said buildings (and kill every living creature in the vicinity who isn't totally drunk on stormlight), and soulcasting complex constructs (multi-ingredient food, machines, and complex assemblies) is only possible for soulcasters who intimately understand the object that they wish to create inside and out still, no matter how much investiture they can command or control at any one time. I...could imagine it maybe being possible for an individual soulcaster to transmute a fully-assembled and functional Abrams tank out of thin-air if they studied their designs with unfettered access to all of the processes and infrastructure used to create them normally for a couple decades for example, buuuuut...even with unlimited resources, they could probably never ever transmute even a single next-generation stealth bomber since, as a simple matter of security, they're sort of designed to not be fully reproducible by an individual person within a natural lifespan no matter how well-connected or good at spying one is. So...I'm gonna say 'definitely not' to the question of post-scarcity roshar. But, it should absolutely be possible for Radiant soulcasters to level entire cities like something straight out of full metal alchemist during a storm, and extremely (EXTREMELY) well-connected and educated ones might be able to manufacturer moderately complex 20th and some 21st century hardware and machines out of thin air if they evacuated the area and controlled the environment properly. strictly speaking, roshar kind of already is post-scarcity in the sense that their non-working disabled and poor technically have the option to be fed, housed, and cared for by the vorin church indefinitely with no obligation to beg or serve in any form of labor capacity. This is arguably a better state to be at than any actual real world civilization has reached in my opinion. Buuuut...it's still not post-scarcity; their society is just extremely robust at keepin all of its people as alive as they care to be, it's nowhere near to perfect at fulfilling all of their wishes or helping to actualize and uplift every individual as far as they can each and everyone of them dream of.

Something important to bear in mind here also is that getting a shallow cut from a shardblade does not sever one's soul; in all on-page instances that I'm aware of, a limb or body part had to be sliced clean through it's center in order to have an effect and near-misses do not seem to count or cause injury (aside from heat-of-the-moment panic). So...I would expect last-clappers to have a surprising bit of wiggle-room with allowing the blades to bite into their flesh a little and for this added friction and resistance to help tremendously in staggering and wrenching the blade from any overly confident shardbearer who is swinging too loosely.

Yeah, i think the only satisfying solution here can come from someone drafting up a sketch or basic 3D model to kick things off. I'm 100% confident that a rail-based iron/steel-pushing harmonium-fueled ship-mounted artillery weapon of mass destruction is possible with established cosmere physical system limits. However...if I draw it myself, those rails aren't going to be parallel, they're going to be a double-helix and make any real world naval weapons expert vomit...lol. the really hard part is going to come up with a robust hand-wavy explanation for why the weapon makes more sense and could be arrived at more intuitively by in-world character than just...the "optimized" solution that we came up with in real life under the same metaphorical stressors: stuffing fat metal tubes full of explosives and large balls of metal...this is definitely a problem for a visual artist and wordsmith at this point, with only small inputs needed from the engineering and theoretical physics departments in my humble opinion.

@cobaltking360 I think the groundwork has already been established to support a Scadrian war requiring artillery, and there is a lot of time between then and now...er...relatively speaking of course... You might try your hand at sketching out a model concept of your idea for the more artistically inclined members of the community to consider and build upon. (obviously not me, I haven't drawn or drafted CAD for folks in years). And maybe check out the pseudo-engineering sketches/notes of the miscellaneous artifabrian models included with the stormlight archive books for inspiration if you aren't familiar with them yet. Your idea definitely works. Truly, the only major hurdles I see are: 1) generating a model design which is pretty and elegant enough to look wicked cool when depicted in both painting and isometric sketch 2) justifying, in succinct notes, how the maintenance cost and cost-per-shot of such a design are magically more competitive than a conventional gunpowder weapons (the US Navy and NASA have some good papers on this subject, buuuuuut...well, RAFO...lol) 3) proving that the destructive potential of such a weapon, relative to its cost-per-shot, make it a fundamentally attractive warmachine to produce and reproduce. Deathstar-esque galaxy-brain ultra-mega-super weapons are...neat...but also painfully stupid in the sense that using them makes them worthless because their win-condition is essentially to just flip the table over and scream that no one can play now because you're going to kill everything everywhere all at once... (sooooo...the weapon needs to be stupid powerful, but not idiotically overpowered, in order to be viable is all I'm getting at)

Honestly, the easiest solution here that I see wouldn't be re-Forging the deadeye spren's history so that it was never bonded and broken up with by it's Radiant, it would be forging a regular random person (or oneself) to possess the exact same qualities that attracted the spren to forge (small f) it's initial protobond from its first relationship with a pre-Radiant. If you did that, then I would expect that only a relatively simple soulstamp would need to be placed on the spren to make it treat a bond to this new would-be Radiant as Spiritually equivalent to a bond from its first would-be Radiant. Hopefully that makes sense; my intuition is just screaming at me that two small soulstamps, one on either side of the Radiant bond, is definitely going to be radically easier to make work than rewriting all of history on one side or the other with one extra-big-ass soulstamp. As a bonus, smaller and simpler soulstamps are typically more stable anyway, so this method should technically be both easier to actualize, more time and resource efficient, and last longer than a full one-sided re-Forging.

Honestly, my money is still on Connection manipulation magic for producing artificial mistborn, but your theory has merit. The main problem I see is getting that many twinborn to work together and sacrifice of themselves in order to supercharge one person. The return on investment for a process like that would be...poor...to say the least. More efficient (at least in terms of human labor hours) but potentially less viable methods have also been proposed. My favorite remains the myth that a woman strongly tapping F:Duralumin for Connection while remaining in relative proximity to a concentrated source of Investiture keyed to Harmony (like a perpendicularity) from conception, through pregnancy, and to birth might produce mistborn children without the need to hemalurgically carve anyone up.

The trick to all superb cooking is combining love, attention, and as high quality ingredients as possible. Soulcasting food is...uniquely soulless in this regard as it leans hard on leveraging the absolute most low-quality ingredients possible because, first and foremost, soulcasting food is a tool for feeding armies on the move and the inner city poor. That said, some of the tastiest soul food and culinary innovations came to us in real life from such humble origins, so it is absolutely possible in-world. It's just gonna be way more complicated than normal. When Commanding a rock, I would imagine that it is relatively easy to convince it that it is made of meat now, and excruciatingly difficult to convince it that it is the tastiest and most perfectly metabolicly ideal haunch of meat that has ever been carved and aged to perfection. Buuuuuut...if you talked to it in the cognitive realm long enough, and you were nice enough to it, and you have patience that could put a rock to shame and frustate the saints themselves, then you might just be able to whip up a veritable feast out of nearly nothingness itself.