8bitBob

Hey 17th shard. I took a long step away from the Cosmere while waiting for new books and have recently come back. While poking around, I saw some bits of info that contradicted some of the older theories on Iron. Here's my question: is it still assumed that, via a clever application of Iron storing and steel pushing off an object, then tapping Iron and Ironpulling, that one could effectively fly by reusing their anchor? I had a series of mildly interesting posts planned based on this concept ages ago, so I was wondering if this idea still held up.

Absence of something isn't proof of another thing. There are infinite explanations for why tapping the Nicrosil wasn't described, up to and including Sanderson just not bothering to write it in. By all means, discuss your theory and reasons, but treating it as fact and using it as proof that medallions don't consume Investiture stores isn't right.

@Calderis Your theory that Medallions do not require tapping is contradicted by Wax. Wax is just theorizing and Allik could either not know enough to tell he's wrong or is misleading him, but the in universe assumption is that medallions still require tapping to function. At the very least, no one jumps in and says, "Actually, you know what, I don't think I'm tapping the Nicrosil, Wax. That's weird." Maybe there's something going on to make tapping the Nicrosil automatic, or maybe Sanderson just didn't describe it, but I've not seen anything that convinces me that the stores of Nicrosil aren't drained. The idea that the lack of description for tapping Nicrosil implies something more is interesting, but by no means does it guarantee there's more going on there, or that using medallions doesn't still somehow drain the Nicrosil stores. Personally, I'd be pretty surprised if they weren't drained, but we can't really say for sure until Lost Metal.

Theoretically yes. There are some WoBs that imply this leaves scarring even after healing. What that does we have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if it resulted in reduced strength for the trait being spiked out. For nearly all of the WoBs related to this topic, see my huge Hemalurgy post exploring this very idea here.

While this was originally the case, the religion seems to have evolved to revere Iron Eyes over time. From Alloy of Law:

Can't recall the fourth, but there's definitely Sliverists, who worship Iron Eyes.

Long story short: we don't know, but something would probably happen. Short story way longer, see my giant post on the subject here. I know you said you're fine with spoilers, but it gets pretty spoilery. You've been warned. It gets a bit speculative, but it also goes over what we know on the subject.

It's not really that anomalous. Technically, many traits are "end negative" under that logic. For instance, if you store strength while in peak physical condition and then tap it while you're a frail husk after surviving disease, you're going to get much less out of it because you need to tap so much more strength to make up for your weakness.

We must go deeper! What happens when you duralumin + nicrosil a mistborn who's burning duralumin + nicrosil at another mistborn, etc... In all seriousness, I imagine you could achieve the same thing with multiple nicrosil mistings touching a single target. I also imagine that they would explode.

In my opinion, Stormlight is a superior story in almost every way. The characters, world, plot and fantasy elements just feel much more fleshed out and interesting. If I was to recommend something by Sanderson to another reader, it would almost always be Stormlight. That being said, I find Mistborn occupies my thoughts far more than Stormlight. We know just enough about the magic systems to reasonably speculate and consider the implications of, yet not enough to make it boring or uninteresting to learn more about. Meanwhile, when shown something in Stormlight, our best speculation usually devolves into "lol i dunno, maybe some Spren and Stormlight or something make it work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" As time goes on, I expect things will reverse somewhat. We'll learn enough about Fabrials and Surges to nerd out as engineers, and Scadrial will advance far enough past its homogeneous roots to really feel like a fleshed out planet, with a really interesting setting for stories and diverse characters for us to appreciate as readers.

This is a common but incorrect belief. WoB: Compounding correctly means you never have to actively store again if you don't want to. You just burn a small reserve to fill up a larger reserve. When that's running low, you fill a new small reserve and burn that. Even if you run out, you can just store for one minute, burn it for ten minutes of storing, repeat ad infinitum.

I'm basically working under the assumption that such things can be worked around. WoB says that the more spherically perfect you can cut a gem, the better it holds Stormlight. With more refined cutting techniques, it's possible that this could get them through the Weeping alone. Aside from that, there's the possibility that surrounding gems with aluminum will reduce or prevent leakage. Brandon gave a big ol' RAFO and compliment when asked about this, if I remember correctly. But yeah, this would be an issue if not solved otherwise.

Yep, that's the basic idea. There's a lot of possibilities for this sort of thing though. I think the best Rosharan example would be something like a temporary city wide Storm Roof. Obviously it would be impossible to build a roof over an entire city if it's not pressurized, so you'd do something like a ring of interlocking cloth tarps that unfurl before a Highstorm. You use Tension to give the cloth rigidity, Gravitation to reduce it's weight, a series of support points holding it up with their own Gravitation surge to help against impacts, Abrasion on the cloth top reduce the friction to near nothing, vastly reducing force generated by the winds, etc etc. Suddenly you've turned mundane cloth into a sturdy defense against the storm, and now your city can remain productive during such time. Add in a series of drainage and filtration pipes for run off and you've got your city's water problems solved. Seeing as it's only active during a Highstorm, finding the Investiture isn't exactly going to be difficult. Obviously I am making a lot of assumptions here, but this should illustrate the potential usefulness of Active Support for construction. There could possibly be a line of sight issue for molds. Just speculating as to why they haven't done this, because you're right, it would be more efficient. The issue is that curing diseases, illnesses and traumatic injuries is insanely difficult, which means it's hard to research. The fact that we can do it at all is kind of amazing. One just needs to look at the difficulty of training doctors to see this. Even in universe, Kaladin's father was always treated with distrust for meddling with the insides of others. In our world, there were often complete bans on studying cadavers at all, labeling it necromancy and a sin, so there's always been a taboo around this sort of thing. Certainly Roshar could and should study anatomy and illnesses, and some certainly would in private, but I can't imagine it would be mainstream. On the one hand, you can wave magic at people and cure 99% of all problems, on the other, you can desecrate corpses, hack people up and deliberately get animals sick so that maybe in a couple hundred years you can stop accidentally killing people with bad science. Even assuming extreme urbanization doesn't kill rural communities even harder than it did on earth, transportation is still going to be insanely easy in a Fabrial run society. Why would you invest in training and paying an on call doctor instead of pooling town resources for a Progression Fabrial, or for an Elsecalling hookup to a major city for all kinds of emergencies, which can double as the way you treat the sick and injured? If there's no impetus to learn medicine and biology to stop people from dying, then there's no strong push to pursue this science. As the space industry has shown us, things don't just automatically progress because they should. I can legitimately picture Rosharan's landing on other planets while having no idea what a virus or DNA is.

This post will be less "Here's a modern device they could make with Fabrials" and more my musings on how Fabrials will change how Roshar develops due to their advantages. Personally, I think that, without outside intervention, it will be a very long time before Roshar develops something akin to Electronics. Roshar has so much Investiture flying around with so many ways to utilize it that the need to do complex, repeated math work probably isn't that high. Just take a look at what drove us to develop the earliest functional and useful computers: Artillery trajectory calculations Code breaking Gravitation and Abrasion makes projectile calculations a joke. You can even extrapolate this to space travel and see how rocket science is not exactly going to be a difficult field on Roshar. Pattern has already shown us his ability to code break absurdly fast. I wouldn't be surprised if niche math problems such as this were simply handled by Spren. Humans aren't going it alone on Roshar, after all. Even just things like basic transportation become a non issue when you can treat the problem like a high school physics question. "Apply force, ignore all resistances, profit." Long distance transportation will probably be handled by Elsecalling. For this reason, I think Roshar will remain fairly weak in technologies we consider High Science, like data processing, advanced mathematics and Biology, while having much more advanced Material Science, Chemistry and have an incredibly high standard of living. There's many analogues for this sort of thing. Leaving aside Soulcasting super materials like carbon nanotubes, Tension, Cohesion and Gravitation all represent one of Roshar's main advantages for construction: Active Support. There's plenty of youtube videos around if you want to see what that looks like in the real world, but Roshar makes it look easy. Navani's Archer tower is a good example of this, but makes it seem fantastical, while the reality is fairly mundane. Rather than build with materials designed to hold the entire weight of the construction, you constantly input energy in such a way that it lessens the burden, which allows you to build well past the limitations of the material. This sounds wasteful, but any modern construction has associated maintenance costs. Soulcasting is the norm now, but I imagine Progression is much more efficient for mass producing food. With vast farmland being much less important for food production, food can be easily produced at a local level, cutting down the need for transportation and preservation. Once Roshar discovers Chemistry and gains a Cognitive understanding of the periodic table, things will get pretty silly. They'll be able to Soulcast incredibly pure samples of substances and compounds in large quantities that are energy or material intensive for us to produce. This in turn will allow them to cheaply explore more complex compounds and processes. As for material production, who knows how things like Cohesion work? At the very least, Roshar should be able to mass produce synthetic diamonds of impressive size. Things like this will go a long way to solving the problem of Stormlight capture on a massive scale. They'll also be able to produce incredibly accurate glass work via Soulcasting, which will make the production of microscopes and telescopes easier, furthering scientific endeavors. Obviously the absurdity of Stormlight for medical purposes needs no explanation. It's honestly so absurd that I think it will stunt all related fields on Roshar. Similarly, Industry won't need to be as large of a thing. While you would probably have things like automated looms and paper production and the like, you won't need massive quantities of coal or oil to power them. The main question mark here for me is the matter of mass producing steel. How much will Roshar need vs how much can they Soulcast reasonably? Personally, I think Roshar is going to be building with stone for a very long time. Who knows? Maybe instead of Sky Scrapers and housing suburbs, Rosharan cities will be dominated by apartment buildings of modest size. It's not like they have grass lawns to covet or anything. Efficient use of space, water filtration and easy food production could mean that Roshar has much denser settlements than we're used to, vastly cutting down steel requirements due to less need of personal transportation and infrastructure. Most importantly, due to not having any need for toxic fuels such as coal or oil, industrial production can be done right next to residential areas without negatively affecting the community. Speaking of infrastructure, Roshar has it easy here too due to waste removal, which is one of the most important factors in quality the of life in urban areas. We've already seen what this looks like, with the refuse being collected and Soulcast into a less toxic form. I imagine waste collection would be a small scale affair, with local blocks collecting into one area and being cleaned out periodically. No sense making vast, city spanning systems when you don't need to process it or send it downstream. All in all, I think Rosharan life would be pretty different, but no less comfortable. Instead of watching TV, Rosharan's would go see a Lightweaving play. Instead of requiring vast global telecommunication systems allowing instantaneous video conferencing, VIP Rosharan's Elsecall on sight and handle the problem in person. Information is less easily available, but by no means at medieval levels or anything. Above books, but below internet levels. I imagine the cities would feel a lot more "human," with service and production jobs not disappearing due to automation and robotics. Who knows? Due to all the concentration of production and resources, maybe city states and Mercantilism don't disappear? I imagine that visitors to such a city would initially see it as less advanced and quaint, if incredibly clean, only to then be blown away while watching citizens casually flying around, maintaining perfect health and probably exploring their solar system with unprecedented ease. Now if only Roshar could stop getting attacked by an angry God and actually get around to any of this...

It could make it easier, yeah. Even if this works though, it's actually still possible that it wouldn't help with medallion creation. Long story short, it's possible having Soulbearer Investiture tapped won't help you store Trueself Investiture. This is theorized because, according to WoB, when storing in Nicrosil, you store each ability individually, not "Mistborn-ness" or anything like that. Under this logic, when you tap the Trueself Soulbearer Investiture, you're just granted the ability to store Trueself Soulbearer Investiture, not simply any power you have access to. This would require the use of Hemalurgy for medallion creation without a Feruchemist. Honestly though, the more I've read on the topic (and I've probably read every related WoB) the more I'm convinced we just don't know enough to make well informed theories on the matter. We'll probably just have to wait until the next book and have Brandon tell us how it's done. edit: Derp. Mixed up ferring names.