cometaryorbit

Huh, I hadn't thought of that. I would have expected Gold Health to actively remove pathogens as it restored the body to a (filtered through the Cognitive) ideal state. But maybe pathogens don't count as "part of the body" in that sense? I wonder if F-Gold would, then, not do anything to help with out-of-balance gut microflora? -- I wonder if, in a world where unsealed medallion tech makes F-Gold healing widely available, if the idea of a Cognitive-influenced Spiritual ideal healing works towards would make Scadrian society more negative than ours towards things like plastic surgery.

Hmm, the interaction of unsealed F-Gold and conventional (technological) medicine could be really interesting. F-Gold is way better for a lot of things, but technological medicine wouldn't have the Cognitive self-image related limitations. I wonder about things like parasitic diseases, too. I think Wayne says at one point that F-Gold works better for injuries than infections. F-Gold might have trouble with more complex parasites (hookworms, tapeworms, etc.) if they have more Cognitive presence than a virus or bacterium.

I doubt it will take that long. The Basin in Era 2 is ~1910 tech, though missing a few things (e.g. radio, airplanes) largely due to their civilization being limited to a very small area. Era 3 is supposed to be 1980s tech, so I think wed expect more like a 70 or 80 year gap rather than 200 years. And the introduction of Southern tech may speed things up. Roshar's moons are not in orbits stable over billions of years. They might be no farther away than the other side of the Roshar supercontinent.

Perfect Life Sense is achieved at the 4th Heightening, which means that life sense reaches its peak there. So a 7th Heightening Awakener (or even Susebron at the 10th) won't have more life sense "power" than someone at the 4th Heightening. Given that "cap", I kind of doubt that Nalthian life sense can pierce a coppercloud (unless there were some other way to boost it). We see an investiture detection machine in Sixth of the Dusk, too... IMO all these things work on similar principles (the First of the Sun mind-sense is probably more like Nalthian life sense than Bronze Allomancy, since it doesn't require active use of Kinetic Investiture to be visible). So I'd expect a coppercloud to block mind-sense of anything within its area.

If they are large moons, and of conventional matter, there would need to be some active effect keeping their mutual gravitational attraction from messing up their orbits. But if Tress's planet has an Earthlike day length and is roughly Earth sized, to fill "a third of the sky" from geosynchronous orbit would mean moons the size of a large planet (our Moon is a bit more than 10x geosynchronous orbit distance, and has an apparent size of half a degree, so would be about 5 degrees at geosynchronous distance). So I would think either the visual appearance of the moons doesn't correlate to their real size (or Hoid is exaggerating "third of the sky"), or the moons are not conventional matter and have very little mass.

Well there is probably something weird/not yet revealed about why the king insists people not leave that island. If there is really something really important there, and there aren't good local protein resources.... I mean I guess they could be spore-swimming fish, but if water on spores is really bad news I don't think conventional (water-based) biological life forms could live in the spore sea. And if humans can eat them they must be conventional biology. So it seems like they have to be imported. We don't know enough about the tech/economy to know how expensive that would be. There's a mention of mining machinery emitting smoke, but is this like early 19th century steam engines or more like 20th century to modern internal combustion tech? (Lots of smoke implies maybe a bit older tech, but OTOH if this world is largely hostile it might not be densely enough populated for environmental concerns to push toward cleaner engines. Also, if Tress's area is remote, their tech might not be cutting edge for the kingdom or world as a whole.)

The spore seas might be purely equatorial (directly under the geostationary orbit belt); the rest of the planet might be more Earthlike.

Yeah. I suppose it's possible that the "known" or "civilized" world is all limited to relatively near equatorial latitudes, where the Aether spores are, and the rest of the planet is not really known.

Oh, I think that is totally a version of the Aether of Night - I just mean that without a Shard connection, Night/Midnight and Illuminous (or its new version) might not be set off from the other Aethers any more - not 10+2 but just twelve on equal footing.

That makes a lot of sense - observe while trying to minimally change the things observed.

I'm not sure it's so much A-Bronze being more sensitive, as that it detects something different. A-Bronze detects (at base) Allomancy and (potentially) any Kinetic Investiture. But life sense seems to be detecting Innate Investiture.

Huh, that's an interesting possibility... though I don't know if the 10 Polestones are going to correspond to the apparently 12 Aethers. If the Aethers are now non-Shardic, there might no longer be "God" Aethers (Illuminous and Night) to fill out the 12.

Yeah, good point - there were 'Mist-snapped' Mistings like Alendi. That raises another weird question: I guess TLR learned about what the Mists were when he took the power at the Well? But I guess not immediately, or he wouldn't have tried to move the planet and caused all the other problems he had to fix?

Some Rosharan spren are really Splinters of Adonalsium, but even those became 'of Cultivation' after the Shattering.

That does seem likely; but OTOH it kind of seems like no one could possibly have had a chance. TLR chose who the first Allomancers were, and he created and controlled the koloss and kandra - and besides all that, TLR could probably have destroyed armies single-handedly anyway. All the magic was on his side. Although, I guess Scadrial then was ~early 19th century tech, and koloss don't seem all that useful on a battlefield of that era (almost to the point that I kind of wonder why TLR created them, giving Ruin more tools). So if TLR or a Lerasium Mistborn wasn't personally present, it could be pretty even. Another odd question: how did TLR create Inquisitors? The only Allomancers then were him and the nine kings he chose, and he'd just turned all the Feruchemists (except himself and Kwaan) into mistwraiths or kandra. So there would be no source of Allomantic or Feruchemical power-granting spikes. Did he only design Inquisitors with the expanded mind/knowledge of the Well, but not create them until generations later?

In WoA, Tindwyl says that King Wednegon was one of the last to resist the Lord Ruler in any "meaningful combat". Yet his biography says that he blamed his defeat on the Deepness, saying that his kingdom's food stores were depleted so his people couldn't both grow food and fight the koloss. That would seem to imply that his defeat was at most a few years after Rashek's Ascension, and thus that Rashek/TLR ruled the entire remaining habitable part of the world within a few years. But one of the HoA epigraphs says that "The Terris stewards resembled the servant class of Urtan, which Rashek conquered relatively late in his first century of life." Rashek was quite young when he took the power at the Well, so "late in his first century" must be at least 40-50 years post-Ascension. And it's also stated that TLR kept the koloss away from civilization, using them to put down rebellions and conquer societies discovered on the islands... and that's stated in a way implying that this conquest of new islands has happened in comparatively recent times. Is this a contradiction, or is Tindwyl making a distinction that Wednegon was the last who was thought to have had an actual chance (whereas Urtan and the islands, etc., were massively one-sided)? "Societies discovered on the islands" also seems odd in another way, because since Rashek/TLR made all those intentional changes to the world - Ashmounts etc. - shouldn't he have a pretty good idea of what is in the remaining habitable area? Thus no real new "discoveries"? But maybe he didn't share his knowledge with the Steel Ministry, etc.?

If the moons are apparently in the same point in the sky all the time, they must be in an equatorial (geostationary) orbit. So the spore oceans may be only equatorial; at higher latitudes the lands and oceans might be 'normal'. That might only mean that Hoid's audience knows it, though.

Yeah, I think it would make the most sense if the "third of the sky" is some kind of visual distortion (or Hoid exaggerating). On Earth, a geosynchronous orbit is about 23,000 miles up - about a tenth of the distance to our Moon - so if the Moon was in geosynchronous orbit, it would look about ten times its current apparent diameter (a hundred times its current apparent area) - about 5 degrees across, nowhere near a third of the sky. The Earth is about four times the Moon's diameter, so even another Earth wouldn't take up a third of the sky. So unless this planet rotates way faster than Earth so geosynchronous orbit is much closer - which would mean a really weird day-night cycle - the moons can't literally be that large and still be moons.

I'm not sure we can rule out the spore oceans being a relatively small part of the planet. If the moons are apparently stationary and in a geosynchronous orbit, they must be over the equator; so there might be twelve relatively small spore-oceans on the equator, with regular water oceans in the temperate and polar latitudes.

I would imagine so (or the revised version of it, maybe it will be called Midnight this time).

I think Frost is either of, or allied with, the Seventeenth Shard (Hoid says "your friends of the Seventeenth Shard" in the WoK Epigraphs letter), and in the WoR Epigraphs letter Frost says that " The worlds you now tread bear the touch and design of Adonalsium. Our interference so far has brought nothing but pain." and " However, it seems to me that all things have been set up for a purpose, and if we—as infants—stumble through the workshop, we risk exacerbating, not preventing, a problem" - I think that means Frost sees Adonalsium's design as good.

I think Nightblood started as sort of a Splinter of Endowment, but an artificial one (Brandon compared him to a 'robot spren'), and has eaten lots of other random Investiture since.

I think the Purelake fish absolutely are Invested/magical, but they are not part of a magic system in the sense of a full-fledged Invested Art; they're more a "magic in nature" thing. Same for chasmfiend/skyeel weight-lightening spren bonds, gemhearts in Rosharan wildlife in general holding Stormlight, etc.

Perhaps there were still left-over traces of Invested gold in his system from eating some for Compounding earlier, and he was able to burn it for a last bit of healing - getting extra effect out of a tiny amount due to being a Gold Compounding savant?

I picked pewter, but it depends whether this is applied to my RL life or in Era 2 Scadrial. Applied to my RL life: pewter (for the health benefits, and things like ignoring hot/cold temperatures and endurance, not for fighting). Zinc or brass might be even more useful, but I find them ethically iffy and anyway I'm not socially perceptive enough to make good use of either. In Era 2 Scadrial with lots of other Allomancers around: nicrosil (easy to make friends with other Allomancers) or copper (protection from Soothing/Rioting as well as the coppercloud effect)