cometaryorbit

I think there's a Cognitive-Spiritual difference here, though. Bodily existence in the Cognitive is possible, but not in the Spiritual. So "looking in" is all that's really possible for embodied beings (sure, everyone and everything has a Spiritual aspect, but leaving the Physical for the Spiritual isn't really possible short of Ascending). I don't think Shards themselves are Perpendicularities, though they're usually associated with one. Shards are basically Spiritual by default - their "bodies" are things like atium and lerasium and harmonium, or the Mists. If a Shard hasn't manifested any of that... Of course, the power of Ruin and Preservation is in everything on Scadrial, but I think that's in the Spiritual aspects of things not their Physical ones. A rock on Scadrial is "of" Ruin + Preservation (or Harmony), but it isn't Harmony's body - harmonium is.

Sazed drops his fist (swinging downwards where it's accelerated by gravity) rather than a normal punch (primarily forwards) there. F-iron is weird, but it's not inanimate vs living objects that makes it weird, it's density and momentum issues.

A full Desolation was way worse, both in terms of mortality and in terms of technological regression. The Bronze Age collapse destroyed/toppled civilizations, but I don't think people generally forgot about metalworking completely - the Heralds had to teach it from scratch on Roshar. 90% death rate is worse than anything in our history except maybe some of the most vulnerable Native American and Polynesian societies getting hit by foreign diseases - and this was species-wide. Sel is larger than Earth, and as of Elantris I think their shipbuilding tech is not *that* advanced - not enough to make large scale trade practical. There is some contact (there's a gyorn in Emperor's Soul) but it's very limited. I think it's like China and the Roman Empire - both sides knew the other existed, but trade was indirect, and so they had little reliable knowledge. There's definitely discussion of trade with other kingdoms, but I think they're relatively local (on a planetary scale). The Bright Sea is an inland sea. (The continent might just be relatively small, though.) Enforced stagnation is totally possible, but I don't think it entirely explains the lack of references to either ancient history or truly distant lands. Awakening as an art is fairly recent, but giving away Breath to Returned might have been known before. The Manywar is way later than the Desolations. The Manywar was 300 years before Warbreaker, which is between Mistborn Era 1 and Stormlight. The Last Desolation was 4500 years (~5000 Earth years) before WoK.

I'm thinking that any limb cut would be 'dead' but they could just regrow a new equivalent limb. They would still lose mass, though.

Now, if we exclude f-Steel to prevent the thread becoming entirely about the probably long established "it takes a ton of speed to be close to automatic victory, fairly small speed factors aren't that decisive compared to other cosmere powers" vs "even small speed advantages are overwhelming" sides... Is this Era 2, so the Fullborn has guns? Shardplate is pretty good protection against bullets generally, and presumably against regular Era 1 Mistborn coins -- and a Reverse Lashing could draw them away from the Radiant. But if they have planned specifically to fight Radiants (or others with healing like Bloodmakers) they might have something with aluminum bullets to get around the Reverse Lashing. But aluminum is terrible at piercing armor. A Windrunner could try Lashing small rocks or other random objects, but f-Iron reducing weight dramatically would give a Steelpush/Ironpull an impressive amount of acceleration. They wouldn't hit often enough to burn through much f-Gold healing. In general ... unless the Fullborn has some extra-huge gun to shoot big aluminum projectiles, which seems unlikely/an unfair assumption ... I'd expect the ranged fight to be inconclusive. If both sides want to take the fight to a finish, they'll need to close to use their deadlier attacks. The Windrunner will obviously use Shardblade. Unless the Fullborn has advance warning and time to Compound up a really Invested metal weapon, they'll probably have to fight with Pewter punches (or Leeching touch) since a Shardblade would chop up other weapons*. That gives the Blade a major reach advantage so they will probably get in more hits than the Fullborn (since a live Blade can morph at will, so it won't have the clumsiness disadvantage of a RL large weapon or a dead Shardblade). So the Fullborn will probably burn through healing faster. So I'd expect a straight fight to give some advantage to the Windrunner, but it's close enough that skill etc would decide. *An aluminum sword might be an option with time to prepare, but even alloyed, it's probably not strong enough to really stand up to f-Pewter strength at high levels. Even normal weapons would have trouble. However, the Fullborn may have some tricks. - Many Radiants would likely be vulnerable to being stunned or even incapacitated by a duralumin fueled emotional Allomancy blast. Using duralumin is dangerous, since it'll turn off a-pewter until the Fullborn drinks another vial, but this could be effective depending on who the Radiant is. Tapping a ton of F-Duralumin for Connection might make this even more extreme.. it's unclear if those powers would synergize or not. - We have no idea what, if anything, F-Chromium would do in a fight. Is it atium-like, or is it more Hoid's "I know where I need to be" trick - i.e. non-combat time scale? - A-Electrum could make a huge difference, but I don't think it's fair to expect a Fullborn to be trained well enough, given that Vin's exceptional Allomantic intuition didn't let her do it. Bendalloy in combat is more for isolating a duel from a larger fight, so it probably won't help here since it's already a duel.

I don't think that's generally what we see, though. When Sazed uses it in WoA and HoA it's mostly just moving or fighting at accelerated speed. The only other PoV we get using it is Marasi with the Bands, and that's a special case. As for non-PoV characters, TLR at the end of TFE and the Inquisitor using it at the beginning of HoA are clearly significantly faster than Mistborn using pewter but not 'too fast to track'. Bleeder in SoS does seem more blur-ish. It might be relevant that the two Era 1 scenes are Vin POV (using pewter) whereas Wax doesn't have that. The Bands are a special case in a lot of ways, but I don't think they even necessarily break the rule given that we don't know how they were filled - could have been a very long time spent Compounding or filled directly from some kind of ettmetal trick or the Mists. Although they might be even more powerful than we think, given Marasi was leaking Mist, and that (TLM)

I don't think that's the right way to compare. 0.1 second (about maximum) vs 0.3 seconds (slower than average) is an x3 factor even though it's only "fractions of a second". And if the slower than average person with no enhancement is at 0.3 seconds, there's no way to get whole seconds of advantage - even if f-Steel gives you a reaction time of 0.02 seconds instead. The weapon was actually my point, reach advantage - thus the comparison to Shardblade vs Chromium Leeching touch. Big cats aren't sapient, but they are certainly smart enough to know that being stabbed is bad! But they have momentum. That's why spears were so effective against big animals, momentum doesn't necessarily give them a chance to avoid it (and means the spear hits far harder than the human's muscles alone could manage). Animals are quite intelligent enough to avoid obvious hazards. That's why setting spears/pikes against cavalry charges worked; horses didn't want to run onto sharp points. I don't think the numbers are that solid, but Feruchemists do store for ages for very brief bursts of power. I think high loss rates are pretty reasonable with what we've seen, personally. Ok, that I can see. I was complaining about the idea that x2-x3 speed advantage with a touch-of-hand reach would automatically be enough to outweigh the advantage of a Shardblade with 6' reach (or more, since Syl can morph from Blade to spear form, etc.) - assuming the precision/grace/speed advantages of Stormlight and possibly living Plate cancel out those advantages of a-Pewter. Once you start talking about higher speed factors and possibly f-Zinc to help too (I'm still not sure exactly how much the overlap is, but Sazed uses them together in WoA when fighting Marsh so there does seem to be some advantage in having both, at least when projectiles are involved in the fight), then yeah... *if* both combatants are on the ground. F-steel even at x30 isn't an automatic win unless they start extremely close together (so the Windrunner can't get airborne first) - once it becomes an aerial fight f-steel doesn't do much. It shouldn't accelerate motion in the air for the same reason it doesn't accelerate falling.

Is there really? I personally doubt this. People's reaction times are probably far from identical. Certainly there's a huge variation in running speeds. Eh, there's a reason cheetahs don't dominate the landscape, and in fact flee from pretty much every other large predator in their areas. People hunted animals with far greater speed, and far faster reaction times, than humans (like the big cats) far before guns. I think someone with a Shardblade could hit someone using f-Steel at x5 speed to try to get in a Chromium Leeching touch in the same way people used spears against big cats. Reach matters. And I don't think even compounded f-Gold will heal so fast that a Shardblade hit wont mess up the attack. Healing within a second or two, sure, but they'll go limp or lose use of the limb momentarily, surely? Of course, the Fullborn could use a mundane weapon to try to match up reach, but that rules out Leeching and limits how much strength they can use to what the weapon can handle. Now, something like a couple of Leeching primer-cube "grenades" might be very effective (depending on how much Stormlight you can leech with one), but if we start giving that to the Fullborn, maybe the Radiant should get fabrials...

Yeah, I agree - the limits of Radiant oaths are likely a huge reason why the later Desolations were not one-sided. The very people who had the mobility and logistics to truly organize a unified Roshar-wide war effort ... probably couldn't, and coordinating Orders with totally different requirements was probably a nightmare. Honor was around then, but his nature was oaths - he probably wouldn't/couldn't help find ways to get around their stricter limitations. Hmmm, that might actually explain much of it. If the Fused weren't insane before the 4500 year imprisonment, and were directly coordinated by Odium (and/or Ba-Ado-Mishram), their side of the war might have been far better run. Although, if the Fused were that good then how did they lose the earlier Desolations, before Radiants? I think there has to be some arms-race aspect to it too...

They clearly didn't do it, sure, but I disagree that's why. People being reluctant to leave their homes isn't enough, because this is a war of survival, and it wouldn't be smart tactics to waste resources protecting people who refused to move to your safe cities - especially if you have Soulcasting on your side for logistics. I think the reason it wasn't tried was likely that they simply didn't think of it (I don't think Desolations era Rosharans, who were oherwise somewhere between stone and bronze age, had the cultural mindset needed to fully exploit the logistics possibilities of Soulcasting, and the Heralds were likely already 'worn thin' by the time Radiants became numerous and powerful), and also that Windrunners' and likely Edgedancers' oaths wouldn't let the Radiants just say "move or you will not be protected".

True, duralumin leeching would probably be faster, but it might not really solve the underlying issue - duralumin doesn't give you more Investiture from your metal, just the same amount faster. Depending on the relative Investiture of a small metalmind vs a Radiant's full stock of Stormlight, they'd likely just run out of chromium (if they risk running out of chromium before burning Invested metalmind piercings, which are probably pretty small metalminds like earrings...) I'm sure it *could* work, if the Allomancer prepared ahead of time - metal flakes in a vial are a very small mass of metal, if they ate a number of large beads they'd probably have like 100x normal. But they'd likely have to prepare specifically against off world foes - normal Leecher vials would probably not be enough. Yeah, I think people overestimate the value of speed alone. Cheetahs aren't invincible. Now, I do think 5-10x speed would be a huge advantage - but not necessarily an insurmountable one. OTOH a Fullborn is probably also burning a-pewter which not only increases speed but grace/dexterity/precision, canceling out the Stormlight grace/perfection enhancement the Radiant gets. I think a Windrunner would do fine against a pure Steel Feruchemist moving at, say, cheetah speeds - with similar tactics as Kaladin used against Lezian's teleports - but a-pewter gives a lot of subtle but collectively very important advantages. OTOH, this isn't enough to make the difference imo. Pewter and stormlight enhancements cancel out, and I don't think an x2 speed gap is enough to remove the advantage of flight and a Shardblade. Im not sure it's fair to assume that the Fullborn is specifically trained against Shardblades and knows to last-clap, which seems kind of unfair. x2 speed isn't nearly enough to make that a safe move anyway (I mean, how large is the natural variation in speed among humans? Surely more than a factor of 2. I know I couldn't run half as fast as an Olympic record.) And it's really only reaction time and agility on the ground, not *speed* per se, that f-steel would give an advantage to. Windrunners with enough Stormlight have demonstrated ~390mph flight, and at 5th ideal their limit is likely far higher (probably based on distance they have to accelerate, actually). I think f-steel isn't going to help with Iron/Steel flight, for the same reason it doesn't make someone fall faster or slower, so the Windrunner actually has the mobility advantage in the air. Windrunners could easily keep up with a car going 200 km/h (their peak demonstrated speed when flying with the highstorm is ~390 mph, which is about 625 km/h). I think reaction times for activating Invested powers are very fast (Mistborn are regularly reacting to coins flying faster than arrows, likely much faster) so pouring on a bunch of Lashings to get out of the way of a car should be well within their capability. Yeah, duralumin pewter would boost durability too, but using duralumin is dangerous in a fight since you need to replenish all Allomantic metals afterward. Its not as bad for a Fullborn (since f-Gold means they're not going to be wounded) but running out of pewter during a fight is still a shock and pretty undesirable. A 3rd ideal Radiant with Progression (Renarin in OB) is probably as good as Miles. A thunderclast stomp is pretty major - l'd estimate they probably weigh something like 30 tons (they're vaguely humanoid and about 30' tall, so by the square cube law about 125 times the volume of a 6' tall human, and stone is usually something like 2.5x denser ... plus they're probably more heavily built proportionally than humans, so might be more like 40-50 tons). I agree Tension could probably increase durability of the body like Pewter Allomancy does (might be why Taln is called Stonesinew).

That's not quite clear, for several reasons... - Elantris's place in the timeline may not be fixed until the sequels are written, it might be moved up closer to "current" time. - Sel is probably quite time dilated since there is so much Investiture (two Shards' worth) stuck in its Cognitive. So hundreds of years might pass elsewhere but only 20 on Sel. - We don't know how people like Khriss and the Seventeenth Shard (Demoux, Baon etc) prolong their lives. Is it slowed aging from Investiture (like what Breath does), or is it something more external like spending time in highly time dilated areas or having their age reset through Connection manipulation (in which case the individuals themselves might not be especially Invested)? -- Rosharan Ghostbloods might be their own thing, almost semi-rogue. Their hiring criteria might not be the same as Kelsier's; probably aren't, IMO.

Edgedancer shardblades (cultivationspren) are either Cultivation's god metal or pretty close. Gemhearts are actual real-life gem types (emeralds, heliodors, and so on) not god metals. The process they're produced.by seems to involve Investiture (though they're also made on the Physical level from minerals in crem) but they don't seem to be literally solid Investiture themselves. They're more containers for Investiture. It seems to be a property of Light to absorb into gems yet exert physical pressure on their crystal structure (where Breath can go in any object and, unlike Light, doesn't leak and doesn't exert any pressure; Mists won't go into objects or anyone except people chosen by Preservation's Vessel).

The quote is talking multiplier because the question is specifically a comparison to Feruchemy. Bulking up still makes sense because pewter strength isn't so huge as to make the difference in natural strength irrelevant.

Eh, imo you can't 1 hit kill a high Ideal Radiant without something that turns off healing or gets around it (Nightblood, anti-Investiture, larkins eating all the Stormlight, etc). Stormlight healing should fix a crushed head if you're a high Ideal Radiant (though not a Herald). I think this could easily become inconclusive where neither combatant has a good way to kill the other -- depending on how much f-Gold Health it takes to deal with Shardblade wounds. Leeching would likely be quite slow against Roshar levels of Investiture.

I think it's basically because compounding a lot makes you at risk of being a compounding savant, and if you are, stopping the power influx will be bad. It's like a dependency on the Investiture. Metallic Arts savantism seems to be a bit different than Soulcasting savantism in that Soulcasters seem worse off while using their power (Kaza feels a pull to become smoke) while Metallic Arts savants seem to be worse off when they turn off the power. TLR seems to have suffered some kind of shock when he lost his bracers (he didn't try to Ironpull them back). But maybe there's some shock effect even if you're not a savant.

Nightblood's bond strikes me as more like a seon bond than a Radiant bond - telepathic communication but no granted powers.

I don't think fueling something like Allomancy is particularly hard for a Shard, in the sense that they're at the limit of their capabilities to do it. But I think they need Connection to make it work (Vin to Elend and Ruin to Marsh). Preservation and Ruin or Harmony might be able to fuel any native Scadrian, because those people's ancestors were their creations and their Investiture is imbued in the people's bodies (and all matter on Scadrial) and composes their souls. But I don't think they could fuel a random offworlder's magic system. It is also costly for them to do (and yeah, I agree the reason it costs them is probably for time-to-recycle reasons like atium). At least, it's costly when the Shard is closely balanced with another like Ruin and Preservation. (Warbreaker) Do you have another thread on the Bands Mists thing? I was about to post a really long response to that, but it's probably too much of a digression here. I would think it'd have to be bindpoint specific. Otherwise anyone who knew about Hemalurgy could automatically wipe out powers with aluminum bullets. But if it's bindpoint specific, getting the needed precision with a gun is essentially impossible.

I don't think anyone in world really knows what Chromium Hemalurgy does anyway, and certainly we don't. "Might steal destiny." Is destiny the same as Fortune or not? I don't think we really know what Fortune is either - it is Spiritual and has something to do with the future, and Hoid's ability to be where he needs to be is similar to Chromium Feruchemy. But we don't know details. I personally think Fortune is a kind of guided "gut instinct" of what someone needs to do - less future *sight* and more supernatural intuition - so I don't think Atium (or electrum or malatium or gold) Allomancy is really exactly Fortune, though both are Spiritual Realm related. I think the normal impure atium Allomancy we see is a constrained version of the full duralumin burst or pure-atium effect which is full sight of the Spiritual Realm and kind of transcending into the Spiritual Realm (Kelsier says in SH that even impure-atium burners are "transcending the Physical Realm"). But I could be wrong there, and Fortune could include any partial mortal perception of the Spiritual Realm's future-possibilities vision (vs a Shard's full access). I agree that stealing atium shadows as a permanent no-metal-needed power would be really unfair. I do wonder if someone with the right kind of Hemalurgic soul-hole might be able to perceive future things through the Spiritual 'passively', though. But maybe the soul-hole needed for that is so big it would be fatal. (Stormlight)

It's probably relevant that Gold is not a Physical metal, it's a Hybrid metal (Temporal for Allomancy). So it's physical-ish but not purely a physical thing. Someone - I don't remember who - pointed that out to me on the Discord when I complained about the weirdness/unbalanced-ness of F-gold being able to heal things like Hemalurgic or Shardblade wounds when Sazed and Wayne only seem to get physical symptoms from storing health. The idea of storing a general spiritual/physical matchup concept of health would explain how you can equate 'being sickly for X weeks' with 'heal a soul-wound' - all the storage just turns into generic health-power which fixes whatever is needed when tapped.

That would be a terrifying combination. Assuming he gets way more health benefit from pewter than a normal Thug due to his savantism, he could store a lot of health easily by burning pewter. His healing wouldn't be quite as crazy as Miles's, but he'd have the superstrength... Pewter / koloss-blooded is already a scary combination. It's likely the extra base toughness from being koloss-blooded made it easier to survive becoming a pewter savant (which is usually fatal before someone gets there). Add f-gold, wow. F-steel + pewter savant koloss-blooded would also be terrifying. Double pewter savant koloss-blooded too ... easier to kill than the other two, but still super scary.

Thank you!!! I thought there was a reference like that but couldn't remember whether it was Spook or Ham. Pewter Allomancy really does do a lot.

HoA epigraphs say his "essential Allomantic strength" was the same as a Lerasium Mistborn's. The fact that he got the power using the Well might be a retcon of that, but might not be; TLR may have used some other Compounding-related trick to increase his effective strength above that baseline (there is an old WoB suggesting this). I'm actually not sure Rashek was *that* much more powerful than Elend anyway. We never really see them do anything with Allomancy that's directly comparable! A few weeks ago when this came up on the 17S Discord I searched HoA for rioting/soothing/zinc/brass to see how many people Elend could affect, and it's quite unclear. He's either affecting everyone present (the small army at the beginning of the book, or Yomen's ball) with no sign of being near his limit (it's specifically pointed out in the ball that he's not near his limit - but Breeze would have been); or there's the large army scene (immediately before the Mists hit Demoux) where it isn't totally clear if he's affecting the *entire* army or just the formation he's standing next to. We know Elend could pierce copperclouds, he just never had a chance to demonstrate it on page. Rashek wasn't a savant in every metal. Even the old WoB says "or near-savant", and with the apparent reworking of savantism to focus more on consequences, I doubt he was a savant in all that many. Brass almost surely, since he seems to have had that on constantly; copper and bronze seems likely since those savantisms are so mild; he was likely an Atium-Compounding Savant since he needed that to live*; maybe a few other things. But I'm pretty sure he wasn't a tin savant, which has obvious effects, or an aluminum savant (why would he ever burn it?), or a savant in the metals that were inaccessible in the Final Empire (sure he knew they existed, but the industry didn't exist to produce them). *and the fact that he doesn't try to Ironpull his bracers back to him probably has to do with a savantism-disadvantage induced crash when he loses the bracers.

I think that a stronger Allomancer (Elend vs normal Mistborn) both has a higher peak burn rate and gets more Investiture per gram of metal burned. I don't think Elend can use that Investiture more efficiently - that's more what savantism gives (adapting your soul to the power) - or more skillfully (Vin is clearly more skilled than Elend). Burn rate is usually a pretty hard limit on Allomancy, but duralumin gets around that. I don't think duralumin increases a Mistborn's "Investiture per gram of metal burned" though. I do think Allomancy has a stable upper limit, though not an absolute upper limit*. Both Vin burning the Mists in HoA (before she fully Ascends) and use of the Bands in BoM cause Mist to leak from the body. I think above the stable level you're losing power. So maybe if TLR had made himself super absurdly strong with the Well he would have leaked mist until he dropped down to his observed stable power level? Maybe he even did do this? *well, it kind of does; when Vin burns the Mists fully, her body vaporizes and she becomes Preservation. Once she's a Shard she's not really meaningfully an Allomancer anymore. I'm not sure what would have happened if she'd taken in a body-vaporizing quantity of Mist while Preservation was still held by another Vessel: would she have died (and had the chance to become a Cognitive Shadow), or become an avatar of Preservation, or would her Mist intake have been limited below vaporization level?

Storing Connection makes you less "memorable" to other people but not actually invisible. I think it's the same thing - people with lifesense would detect the Feruchemist storing Connection but not attach any importance to them. Whereas storing Investiture would make the Feruchemist actually undetectable, I think. Lifesense is weird because Drabs are totally invisible to it - even 4th Heightening Perfect Life Sense that can detect grass growing. Yet surely even a Drab (who's still sapient and has a soul) has more Investiture than grass. So I wonder if what lifesense is really detecting is some kind of "excess" or "available" Investiture beyond the minimum to be whatever kind of being - so Drabs are at the minimum to be humans at all, so there's zero "available", while a plant would be a little above the minimum to be a plant. Lifesense is also weird because it seems to work on Innate Investiture - thats what Breaths are and what Drabs lack, and what Nicrosil Feruchemy stores - whereas other Investiture detection methods we've seen (Bronze Allomancy, white sand, Odium's screaming spren) seem to be Kinetic based. The mind-sense beings on Patji have seems to be similar to lifesense (but not identical).