cometaryorbit

It occurs to me I might have underestimated the Romans vs. koloss. From HOA, apparently they falter when humans stand determinedly against them - the Roman legions might be disciplined enough to get that effect. The real question IMO is whether shields could block koloss swords, or if the soldier's arm would just break under the force of the strike. We might be overestimating koloss in general. Elend, before he gets allomancy, kills one with a knife (a small one, granted). And they don't use armor or shields. Despite the thick layers of muscle, all but the largest koloss will probably be easier to kill than a Roman legionary in armor and shield. And TLR didn't have the force of hundreds of thousands of koloss that shows up in HOA; Ruin's been increasing their numbers. We know there were at least 20,000, the force that shows up in WOA, but as far as I know we don't know what proportion of the koloss army Jastes got. Maybe 50,000 total? That's still a lot vs. most ancient forces. The historical empire I'd really like to throw into this is the Aztec. They didn't have metal weapons, so Coinshots and Lurchers wouldn't be very powerful against them. Supposedly, the Aztec macuahuitl (a wooden sword-like weapon edged with obsidian) could decapitate a horse, so it should be quite capable of killing koloss. Their atlatls were very deadly too. The Aztecs really never got to show their maximum effectiveness in our history, since disease tore the empire apart so quickly.

How extreme are the temperature swings? Are we talking 100 F summer noon / -70 F winter night or something worse? In the first case, Earth-type adaptations ought to work fine. Coniferous trees can survive bitterly low temperatures in the Siberian taiga winter. Their narrow needles limit water loss (water is not available to them when the ground is frozen) & are protected by a waxy covering. At least some have the ability to survive freezing by pushing the water that would freeze outside their cells, so the ice doesn't tear up cell membranes ("extracellular freezing"). They are largely dormant, too. Most creatures will probably be dormant during deep winter, or migrate. (The Arctic Tern migrates from the Antarctic to the Arctic, so it gets both polar summers and neither polar winter. Of course, that only works if the hot/cold seasons are caused by the tilt of the axis, and thus opposite in opposite hemispheres. A planet whose seasons were caused by a very elliptical orbit would have them simultaneously in both hemispheres.) Some animals can do a version of the extracellular freezing trick, too. The wood frog and some insects can freeze solid and survive. IIRC, there's an insect larva that can go into basically suspended animation by drying out ("cryptobiosis" / "anhydrobiosis") and in this state it can survive being dipped in liquid nitrogen.

Yeah, when Vin cleared out the ash, she rotated the planet quickly enough that it didn't do much damage - it caused sunburns in moments, but didn't last long enough to kill. "[Elend] remembered well a short time ago when the sun had suddenly blazed with an amazing intensity. Those few moments had burned him so that his face still hurt. Then, the sun had ... dropped. It had fallen below the horizon in less than a second" - HOA Ch 77 The flaming trees come after Vin-Preservation sacrifices herself to kill Ruin. Then, the sun rises and that sustained heat is definitely enough to kill humans, since Sazed is surviving only by touching the powers of Preservation and Ruin. But by then, the people are underground in the storage caverns. "Koloss cried out in pain from the burning. The heat was terrible, and around Sazed, trees began to pop and burst into flames. His touch on the twin powers kept him alive" - HOA Ch 82 It's possible, but there's a WOB talking about how only the koloss in the storage caverns survived, so if the intensity of the sun was enough to kill koloss in a short time period, burning trees doesn't seem out of scope. Either would require a solar intensity far more extreme than you'd get at Venus' distance from the sun. That's only twice Earth's (Venus is about 70% Earth's distance from the Sun, so by the inverse square law, the solar intensity is 1 / 0.7^2, very close to 2, times that at Earth). And it's not really about the ambient temperature in this situation, but the radiative heating from the sun. The intense sunlight was brief, so while objects that absorbed sunlight got extremely hot, the (clear) air didn't have anywhere near enough time to come into equilibrium with the ground, trees, etc. (Also, if the air temperature had risen to those levels, the people in the storage caverns wouldn't have survived.)

Cloud formation is complicated. Yeah basically it's water vapor cooling to condense into droplets (that's why cumulus type clouds tend to have those very flat bases - at the level of the atmosphere where it gets cold enough to condense). But there are wrinkles that can affect it. It involves 'cloud condensation nuclei', tiny particles in the atmosphere. Even particles that absorb sunlight (are dark) can act as nuclei. The pollutants reflecting sunlight has to do primarily with formation of nuclei (either direct release of particles like soot/smoke or reactions with pollutant particles. Sulfur dioxide reactions to produce sulfate particles is a major one - this is also the major factor in the 'year without a summer' effect from really big volcanoes. These very small particles stay up longer & make a larger difference than the actual ash, as I understand it.) The clouds on Venus probably trap some heat, but the real factor there is its ridiculously CO2 filled atmosphere (it's about 90 atmospheres of CO2, vs. current Earth levels of 0.04% of one atmosphere - 225,000 times more!) Venus' clouds are so reflective that the planet actually absorbs less solar energy than Earth (the sunlight is twice as intense, but Venus is more than twice as reflective.)

The normal term for this is "sidereal day", measured in relation to "the fixed stars" (IE - a reference frame outside the solar system). Actually, no, you only get the half-year day/half-year night at the Poles themselves. At the Arctic Circle you get one day of zero sun and one day of total sun. In between, you get something in between. At Barrow, Alaska (71 degrees north) there is a bit over 2 months of no sunrise and 2 months of no sunset. (Much of the 'sunless' polar night still has significant twilight however.)

This is very similar to the conditions in some parts of Russia. Just north of the Arctic Circle, you get a few days of constant sunlight around the summer solstice and a few days of no sunrise around the winter solstice. (As you move toward the North Pole, it increases - at Barrow, Alaska it's about 2 months of each, and at the North Pole it's 6 months of each with no "normal" day/night cycle at all.) Eurasia is such a large continent that its interior has very extreme temperature variations - almost no moderation by the ocean. Some parts of Siberia even get rather hot in the summer (at least sometimes), despite being utterly cold in the winter. So, you don't really need to do anything weird with the orbit to get the conditions you mention. Consider a planet that's much drier than Earth (say ~20% ocean instead of ~70%), with the seas primarily around the equator. Make the tilt a bit more extreme, to push the Arctic Circle south into warmer latitudes (and thus make the summer hotter). There will be a narrow band of mostly nice areas around the seacoasts, but this can be broken up by deserts (on Earth major hot deserts tend to fall just outside the tropics - the Sahara and the SW US/NW Mexico deserts in the northern hemisphere and the Namib, Atacama, and the Australian Outback in the southern).

Most of the ancient empires will lose to koloss, even without the Allomancers and Inquisitors getting involved. The Mongols should do very well against koloss though, given their horse archery focus: range and extreme mobility. Coinshots would be a huge problem for them though. Koloss aren't going to be much use against 19th century armies - they're tougher than humans, but not that tough. Massed gunfire will kill them quite effectively, and they have no ranged capability. And artillery will just splatter them. Coinshots are going to be very effective, but the Victorian British Empire is big enough they'll figure out bullets don't work before they're conquered, and they'll probably figure something else out. (Incendiaries, probably. If they figure out it's specifically metal, maybe ceramic bullets.) Inquisitors would be a major problem, but if they've figured out how to deal with Coinshots and can avoid panicking they might be able to do it - at terrible losses, but there are only a couple of dozen Inquisitors. Also, the Final Empire wouldn't have the naval capacity to compete at all. Their ships would be wooden sailing ships, and probably pretty awful ones given that the Final Empire's sea area is pretty small; for most of the Victorian era the British would have ironclads. The winning strategy for TLR would be either subversion by kandra or TLR himself wading in. It's very unlikely they could kill TLR; it's probably technically possible (I'm not sure even gold compounding would save him if he were literally blown to bits) but he's got too many powers to be put into that situation.

Destroying a building would be possible but impractical. It would take a ton of storage, because you'd have to tap at very high rates, but also keep it going long enough to hit different parts of the building - unless you could destroy one critical structure that brings the whole thing down. What Wax does with Iron tapping and allomantic Steelpush is much more efficient. A mountain probably wouldn't work, though. You couldn't store enough in a lifetime. Even a billion times strength wouldn't let a human destroy a mountain with bare hands - destroying a mountain would take a rather large nuclear explosion, which has much more than a billion times a punch's energy. (The Sedan test, 100 kilotons, made a crater 320 feet deep and 1280 feet wide -- that's still significantly smaller than a mountain.)

Sure, but Scadrial was much closer to the sun than the inner edge of the habitable zone. Without the ashmounts, it wouldn't have been survivable at all. Venus' year is 225 days, and the solar intensity at Venus' orbit isn't nearly enough to ignite live trees.

Yeah. One of the things that inspired this theory was... well, Knights are generally going to have a close relationship with their spren. For the Recreance to be as nearly universal as it seems to have been, IMO it would almost have to have involved at least a perceived betrayal by the spren.

Yeah, and Sazed became very light. "The thin metal bracelets on his legs were the heaviest things on his body, and they kept him pointed feet-downward." The metalminds can't weigh that much - they're specifically described as thin. I'd figure he's probably down around 1-2 kg or so; significantly less if the bracelets are actually heavier than his whole body rather than just heavier than any one limb/the head/whatever.

Surely the non-Feruchemist Terris, who avoided the mistwraith transformation, knew what Feruchemy was. And IIRC the Terris suppression didn't reach the severity we see until quite late in the Empire's history. The knowledge would have been largely localized to Terris, but not nonexistent. It wasn't figured out because TLR's powers don't look like Feruchemical ones. He lives for centuries, which definitely isn't a Feruchemical power; his healing is far beyond what any Feruchemist could manage; otherwise, the powers he primarily displays are really strong Allomancy. (And it probably would be hard to distinguish use of Feruchemical steel, as long as he didn't hit really absurd speeds, from what TLR could do with his extremely powerful Allomantic pewter.) Sazed figured it out quickly, yes -- after the fact. Once TLR's bracers had been removed and that killed him, it was clear his powers were Feruchemical in nature. Oh, I agree that most people believed on at least some level, for lack of other explanations. I just question whether that actually was important in maintaining his rule. As for his mystique disappearing... maybe, but I think you may be projecting our essentially mechanistic understanding of Cosmere magic onto the inhabitants of the Final Empire. Allomancy itself is presented as something quasi-divine, a gift of TLR to those he favored; the Ministry refers to "blaspheming against Allomancy". The Terris Worldbringers seem to have seen their power as a sacred charge. I'm not sure that knowledge that his power differed from Mistborn or Feruchemists only in degree (enormously) and not in fundamental type would change very much. He would still be seen as effectively a god, if not as part of (capital G) God.

Feruchemy in itself wouldn't undermine it at all - Feruchemy was known at the beginning of TLR's reign. Public knowledge of Compounding would make it harder for TLR to claim his immortality as divine... but how much does that really matter? TLR is publicly known to be an Allomancer, after all. Anyway, TLR's power isn't fundamentally based on religious faith in him. The Skaa are forbidden to worship him, and Elend says even the Nobles don't bother with it much. TLR's power is based, fundamentally, on the fact that he's unkillable, controls the Koloss and Inquisitors, and is capable of crushing any rebellion personally if he finds it worth bothering with.

Actually, the tolerances aren't that narrow. The Earth is near the inner edge of the habitable zone, but not that close. 0.95 AU is a number you often see for the inner edge, but that would mean a 338-day year. Anyway, Scadrial is way closer to the sun than that. When Vin removes the ash, trees burst into flame very quickly. That wouldn't happen at Venus' distance from the sun (where solar intensity is only twice Earth's). The solar intensity needed to ignite living, moist trees would be really high. In fact, the ash would have to cover the whole planet - even the uninhabitable 'burnlands' must be shielded from most of it, just not enough to make them human-habitable. If most of the planet was exposed to that kind of solar intensity, there'd be a huge temperature gradient, which would power lethal, burning winds that would make the Final Empire unlivable. And it's probably not habitable long-term, even with that. Outside the FE, evaporation will be really high, and a water-vapor greenhouse effect would probably eventually turn the planet into a Venus-like world.

Allomantic pewter plus feruchemical gold, feruchemical steel, or full feruchemist. This way you can fill your goldminds/steelminds from the extra health/speed you get by burning pewterwithout ever dropping below 'normal' health/speed. While it's not as good at any one thing as compounding one of the feruchemical metals, you get the broad physical boost (strength, agility/balance, speed, healing, physical toughness) of pewter allomancy.

Well, Preservation says to Kelsier that looking at the Spiritual Realm is really dangerous. Probably Endowment gives Returned-candidates a limited glimpse of the future, but not a full window into the Spiritual. I think it has to work by looking into the Spiritual to some degree, though - even atium's second or so of foresight works that way.

Earth is so dense largely because of gravitational compression, though. Mercury has a much higher iron/silicate ratio. A planet with Mercury's composition and Earth's mass would be much denser than Earth. Even at Roshar's mass, it should be somewhat denser.

Yeah, I know about the price, but I was responding to the comment that it has to be alloyed due to the properties. Yeah, aluminum is nearly always alloyed - certainly for any kind of structural use - but lead is really soft and bullets are made of that.

Well, the HOA Chapter 54 epigraph says, So what was done is explicitly unique to humans. Well, this touches on stuff which as far as I know is not completely explained yet regarding the nature of Investiture, its different forms, and converting it. Everything on Scadrial was created by Ruin and Preservation (R&P), even the planet itself. But everything except humans, atium, lerasium seems to be an exact 50/50. And even atium doesn't act Invested - Vin can Push on it. I think it's the difference between converting Investiture into matter/energy and Investing someone/something. All Scadrian matter is 'composed of', converted from, the Investiture of Ruin and Preservation. And R&P retain a link to it. But it's not Invested in the way things like a hemalurgic spike or metalmind are. I think the difference between humans and other creations of R&P is the same sort of thing. Yeah, this is outright contradictory. And both WOBs are from the WOR release (though different interviews), so it doesn't seem to be a matter of Brandon changing his mind as the Cosmere developed.

While it may not be strictly correct, I'm pretty sure "sentience" is used to mean "human-level intelligence" in that context... the context is clearly that humans are unique among all of Ruin and Preservation's creations. I don't think we really know the relationship between Investiture and Spiritual Aspects, but I doubt they're identical, given that Investiture is just one of four Feruchemical Spiritual attributes. Yeah, Hemalurgy can steal from animals. That's probably the best evidence that animals are Invested, but IMO it's not certain until we know more about exactly what Hemalurgy steals when you're stealing something other than a specific power (Strength, Senses, etc.) The HoA epigraphs refer to stealing the bit of Preservation in someone's soul, but would that mean you can't steal Human Strength/Senses/etc. from someone from Roshar or Nalthis? I doubt it... And what about someone from a Shardless planet? WOB is contradictory on this: http://theoryland.com/intvsresults.php?kwt='drabs' Herowannabe That was actually going to be my next one- No, sorry, not a drab, a Lifeless. Brandon Sanderson A Lifeless. Lifeless are kinda weird, because they’ve had their soul leave, but then they’ve had a replacement stuck in, in the form of Breath, which puts them in a really weird position compared to a Drab, which has had part of their investiture ripped away, but the majority of it remains. So anyway, I’m going to give you one more. Pick your favorite. but Question Do all the humans have innate Investiture? Brandon Sanderson I believe that they all do. I don't think that you've seen anyone without innate Investiture yet. [Drabs] do not have innate Investiture. And on Scadrial they have the pieces of Ruin and Preservation in them. And they do have it on Roshar. (my emphasis)

Doesn't Syl become a group of leaves at one point in WoK though?

I don't think it's outright impossible. TLR knew a lot about the Metallic Arts, and he thought it was possible - that's why he suppressed Feruchemy and forbade noble-skaa intermarriage. They don't happen in the AoL era, but the genes are pretty weakened by then. If Lerasium Mistborn had been marrying Full Feruchemists, with the Mistwraith-transformation never having happened...

Why would pure aluminum not work for bullets? Surely it's not softer than lead...

Yeah I think a lot of this comes down to a "threshold" of actually being an Allomancer. Apparently everybody on Scadrial has "the seeds of the Metallic Arts" but until Lerasium got introduced into the population, Allomancy was very rare - possibly limited to Mist-Snapping around the time the Well filled (was Alendi Mist-Snapped?) During the FE the Allomantic strength inherited from Lerasium burners led to Mistborn, but the Inquisitors limited the genes' spread. By Era 2 the genes are distributed broadly, but the strength has decreased... especially as most of the Allomancers died in the Catacendre. Well, in terms of their actually being noticed, three factors - genes, Snapping, and then them actually being exposed to their metal. Mistings outside the eight 'basic' metals (and Atium & possibly Gold in the Ministry only) would never have been noticed in the FE era. And some Skaa mistings with subtler powers like Tin or Copper, limited to just picking up trace metals, might have Snapped and never been noticed, if they were far from the Ministry's Seekers or were Smokers. (though Spook's being a Tineye got noticed...)

1 - 500 day year is from the perspective of the people on-planet, so it has to be solar day (sunrise to sunrise) not sidereal day (rotational period). 2, 3 - I don't think we know.