cometaryorbit

I believe the "throwing horses" bit was with Duralumin, which a Steel Compounder wouldn't have access to. A Steel Compounder could use their own momentum, yeah, but they are going to hit limits based on friction/air resistance - and I don't know that even if we make that coin 500 m/s rather than 300, it would break Shardplate. (And I really don't think a Steel Compounder could function well in a fight with a 200 m/s wind in their face... it's potentially survivable, from airplane ejections, but...) I actually think we might be overestimating what you can do with Feruchemical steel because of Bleeder in Shadows of Self - as a Kandra she might have been able to adapt her body to deal with this stuff better. I think a regular human would have serious trouble once you start getting into tornado-force wind speeds (relative to the 'static' air) which is pretty slow on this scale.

They don't have to use coins, of course, but I don't see evidence that they get enough force to break Shardplate regardless. The only thing I can think of leaning that way is Vin killing koloss with coins, and that might have depended on aim as much as raw force (plus Vin is kind of exceptional). Sure, but if coins are subsonic (and if they're not, why no sonic booms?) they're pretty slow relative to modern bullets (though many early firearms, IIRC, were subsonic). I think that coins at 300 m/s or so would be sufficient to be deadly against non- or lightly-armored humans if aimed well (and Allomancers can do other tricks with people in metal armor) but I think they'd just bounce off Shardplate (and might not be much use even against well-made mundane plate armor, which often was sufficient protection against 1400s-1500s firearms). Possibly, but the question is how long the Leeching itself takes - I don't think Steel will speed up the process itself. Yeah, Scadrial has significant technological advantage here (until Navani gets fabrial-tech up to speed, anyway)... revolvers firing aluminum bullets could easily be deadly to Radiants. Though I think you'd have to hit a vital spot - the stormlight healing wouldn't heal the wound while the bullet was in it, but I don't think it would "turn off" the ability to use stormlight in general. So an aluminum bullet in the right part of the brain would be fatal, but maybe not otherwise (Stormlight might even keep the body running even if e.g. the heart couldn't heal right).

Hmm! Ok, I guess the Radiants have a lot more flexibility in their powers than we've seen so far. I was thinking the Progression-Fused's self-alteration was probably fundamentally different from anything Radiant, and tied to the Singers' "form-shifting" nature, but if Lightweavers can potentially do lasers, maybe Radiants could manage that too.

I honestly don't know. Maybe Surgebinding is limited to 10 Surges because of Shard/planet interactions, so there are other things not included? OTOH if Transportation covers "transition between Realms", and Transformation covers "changes in one Realm create changes in another", maybe those are broad enough to cover basically all Realmatic interactions? I was thinking more "influenced by/filtered through" rather than "arise from" Cognitive perception. IE these are real things in themselves, but the form in which they manifest is affected by Cognitive perception. Fused seem to do different things with the same Surge than Radiants, and there are probably potential uses that neither have access to (Illumination is "Light, Sound, and Various Waveforms" but I don't think we'll see Lightweavers creating X-ray lasers).

Hmm, is that a WoB? I was figuring Progression would be "Cultivation's Truest Surge" the way Adhesion is Honor's. I think there's definitely a philosophical (which may become real due to the Cognitive? not sure) aspect to what the Surges are, but Transformation and Transportation might be Realmatic interactions that don't exist in our universe -- Transformation being the way Spiritual/Cognitive aspects change the Physical, and Transportation being transition between Realms. There are ten Polestones, maybe it's as simple as that. I mean with spren types, gems, and metals there are definitely more than ten possible types of fabrial...

Yeah, I am not sure if he is talking Allomantically or not with the "one thing" vs ten distinction. Alloy nomenclature in RL can be very loose... bronze is copper + tin... except when it's not (there's "arsenical bronze" which may or may not have any actual tin in it), iron ally nomenclature is complicated (steel is iron + carbon... plus a ton of other elements... and "cast iron" is also iron + carbon despite being called "iron" rather than "steel").

Yeah, I don't think the two WoBs are actually contradictory. Probably nothing, because your average Mistborn isn't set up to do it, but there is a difficult but viable way to make it do something.

Yeah, I think that the confusion is that both things (Spiritual Aspect and whatever-goes-Beyond) have been called "souls". The Emperor's Soul seems to go with soul = Spiritual Aspect (and not just for people, Forging involves 'souls' of objects...) I think this is what the Nightblood WOB means - Nightblood would consume the Investiture making up its wielder's Spiritual Aspect.

Double Steel is crazy powerful, yes. The one question though is that with Stormlight healing + live Shardplate the Steel Compounder might have real trouble doing any actual damage (we don't see sonic booms in the books, so coins are likely subsonic; I am not sure they would be able to crack shardplate). If they have to stab the same spot (knife through eye hole or whatever) a ton of times, that might 'slow them down' enough to get Shardbladed. I don't see the Maybe I am missing something, but I can't see what bronze will do here... Seeking Allomancy and wakefulness? Another Twinborn that could be very effective vs Radiants IMO is Allomantic chromium (to Leech Stormlight) / Feruchemical gold (to survive a few Shardblade hits - assuming enough is stored up) or maybe Allomantic chromium/Feruchemical steel (to hit the Radiant before they can use the Blade - but the Leeching itself might take too much time).

Aha, this was the critical bit I missed! Thanks! The only time I'd seen 'avatar' used in the Cosmere before was for Autonomy, so I immediately started thinking Shards, so it didn't occur to me that 'Lord of Scars' would be Kelsier. I hadn't seen any of those recent WoB's either...

Double Gold has obvious advantages. But F-zinc would be really tempting. Mental speed would just be so awesome -- even the storing part, during boring meetings etc. I'm not really all that interested in having physical superspeed/superstrength/etc, and I'd be ethically uncomfortable with emotional Allomancy. So that limits the options a lot, especially since aluminum/duralumin are useless for Twinborn and gold Allomancy not much better except for its Compounding use. So either double Gold, A-tin/F-zinc (for the real world - super senses+mental speed), or A-nicrosil/F-zinc (in Era 2 Scadrial, with lots of other publicly known Allomancers around.. a-Nicrosil ought to be a great way to build good relationships with lots of Allomancers...)

It's never really been stated, but I think the implication is likely that Allomancers now Snap at birth (as Vin did), since there's a WOB that Sazed couldn't eliminate Snapping entirely. There's probably some partial resistance due to either natural selection or Innate Investiture, I'd expect. OTOH, Allomancers "burn off" metals to prevent poisoning, so I don't know how much metal actually ends up being applied in a toxicologically-relevant way. Still, it's not just obviously-toxic stuff like lead in pewter or cadmium -- Wikipedia claims that - Toxic effects begin to occur at doses above 10–20 mg/kg of elemental iron. Ingestions of more than 50 mg/kg of elemental iron are associated with severe toxicity So for a 50kg adult that's 500mg-1 gram for initial toxic effects or 2.5 grams+ for severe toxicity. Iron's pretty dense, so that's not much margin, if there wasn't some resistance.

This is true - though in some cases the broad patterns are very simple, it's the detailed feedbacks and stuff that are impossibly complex. (Kind of like climate vs weather - predicting weather even 2-3 weeks ahead is essentially impossible, but everybody knows July will be warmer than January in the north temperate zone...) Sure, but @Jofwu above posted the HOA epigraph that Ruin was messing with it... All I was saying is that the ash being dark wouldn't prevent the overall net effect from being cooling rather than warming. I think that was just to make it concentrate over the Final Empire area (where the magnetic pole was) ... but yeah that part possibly doesn't make the most sense, especially since the ash itself isn't that important climate-wise vs. the sulfate aerosols. Yeah... Given that these are volcanoes engineered by godlike magical power to cool the planet, I think they probably have whatever mix of gases to ash they need to have to get the desired effect... I am not really sure this would work in RL. It seems to me that the ocean away from the Final Empire area, more exposed to light, should evaporate at a horrendous rate and make the planet go runaway-greenhouse. OTOH, we only know that it worked for 1024 years - it is quite possible that the system actually wasn't stable (on geological timescales) and in the absence of Ruin/Vin/Sazed intervention it would have turned into a runaway greenhouse in a few tens of thousands or millions of years...

I think the two approximations actually cancel out, more or less... Alloy of Law is year 341 after the Catacendre, but 1 Roshar year = 1.1 Earth years (and after Harmony fixes things Scadrial is an Earth analogue, so 1.1 Scadrian years as well)... so it should be pretty close to 300 Roshar years.

The Coppermind says that RoW revealed that Thaidakar was Kelsier. Where is that??? There was a discussion of Thaidakar appearing as an 'avatar' which I thought meant it had to be a Shard...

That can kind of work both ways, though, since the number of Radiants is limited by the number of appropriate Spren, and from ROW it seems that some of the Radiant Spren types are just not that numerous (due to the Recreance killing a lot of them). - But really I was talking individual ability. Radiants' abilities are "gated" behind the levels of Oaths. Whereas most Mistborn seem to be operating on relatively the same level. We don't see Noble House Mistborn who have been practicing for decades doing drastically better than Kelsier for example... In fact Zane's apparent skill advantage turns out to be Hemalurgy. IIRC there's a WoB that Kelsier is about at the peak of Pushing/Pulling skill... and he's only been Mistborn for like a year. - IMO a new Mistborn has a significant advantage over a new Radiant, but a maxed-out Radiant with live Blade and Plate has a huge advantage over a fully trained Mistborn (maybe even with atium)...

Well, he was right at the source for Atium, that's why I figured he used it. I am also not sure Pewter would be enough by itself for one unarmed man to defeat multiple armed guards. Kelsier was definitely experienced as a thief, but I don't know how much overt fighting he did, though he certainly knew something about improvisation and "fighting dirty" (that's how he was able to beat an experienced Mistborn in 'The Eleventh Metal'). As for the Oaths, that's kind of my point: a Mistborn has all their abilities potentially available at the moment of Snapping, and they seem to learn the use of them pretty quickly and fairly instinctively.

It could easily be a Hoed-like effect... OTOH, I am not sure that the Radiant is vulnerable to "bond-related damage" in the same way that the Spren is. I think the Spren is vulnerable to becoming a Deadeye because the bond lets them be fully intelligent/sapient/conscious/whatever in the Physical Realm, so when the bond is broken it's like ripping out a critical part of their brain... But the human just gets powers from the bond, and they're functional as a human being without those.

Glory = divinity is how I read it, either specifically Connection to Preservation or Adonalsium/Investiture in general, or more broadly that Elend is so heavily Invested right then (and mostly in the Spiritual Realm due to Duralumin+Atium) that he's briefly perceiving the world as the Shards do.

One other thing is "training time". It seems like Mistborn learn fast - Kelsier was able to escape the supposedly-inescapable Pits of Hathsin like the day he Snapped (although that's probably due to using Atium). It takes a long time to go through the Oaths, it seems.

IRL the primary cooling effect of volcanoes is from very small aerosols, largely formed by chemical reactions in the atmosphere involving sulfurous gases (SO2/SO3) - these gases become sulfate aerosols eventually. The ash itself is secondary - largely because it tends to fall out of the atmosphere quickly, while the very small particles tend to stay up for months (that's why the 1815 Tambora eruption could cause a very cold summer in 1816). I think these very fine particles also form more clouds (acting as "cloud condensation nuclei")... which are very bright and reflective. So pale ash would probably have helped some relative to dark ash, but maybe not very much. The net effect of the volcanoes should still be to cool the planet, regardless of ash color.

Oh, I agree that if TLR had gotten a chance to use the Well again, he'd have made himself "inherently" ageless; why wouldn't he? If he'd been able to fix that weakness, he would have been essentially impossible to kill, especially with Final Empire-level technology. (He presumably didn't understand the issues when he first used the Well; he didn't become an Allomancer at all until he used the Well.) But I don't think he was particularly close to running out of time, either.

Yeah, savantism details may change. And yeah, I think the Warbreaker analogy makes a lot of sense. so maybe a Bronze Savant who isn't burning doesn't notice when they are being watched, and in general feels disconnected/"cut off from the world"? Actually, that being the effect wouldn't surprise me... being more easily affected by emotional allomancy & other Cognitive Investiture stuff. And maybe your emotions become more changeable in general, or something, who knows.

I don't think TLR was anywhere close to the upper limit - wouldn't that be when you couldn't Compound atium fast enough to stave off aging? So since TLR doesn't seem to have been using up a significant fraction of the Final Empire's atium production, I don't think he was nearly out of time. (I have a feeling he'd probably run out of atium before he physically couldn't eat beads fast enough... the production rate is probably not that high. Hundreds, maybe at most a few thousand beads a week? How many prisoners were at the Pits of Hathsin?)

We're told in the HOA epigraphs that Tin and Pewter savantism are really dangerous, Bronze much less so. I wonder if that's because Tin and Pewter deal with your body's normal abilities while Bronze doesn't. But by that WOB it should have some side effect - just quite a bit less bad, I guess. ...Hmm, if Bronze works on the same basic mechanism as Awakeners' Lifesense from Warbreaker and other investiture-sense mechanisms in the Cosmere (there's something similar in Sixth of the Dusk), I wonder if a really severe case of Bronze Savantism would have some "Drab-like" effects when not burning Bronze, being less "in-tune" with Investiture than a normal person with no powers?