A Simple Pilgrim

The numbers don't make sense on the face of it: Beacon had 50 ships with 150 people on them. Every ship needs a sun heart to keep going. A group of 150 people would struggle to have more than 4-5 children per year. Let's assume the population is stable, not growing or decreasing, so 5 deaths per year. Let's say all 5 get turned into sun hearts. Some basic math later and, you get that each sun heart has to last 10 years in order to keep beacon running as it is. The text instead makes it sound like they only last months. If every sun heart lasts 3 months, then they need 200* sunhearts a year to keep beacon running. That is obviously impossible on a population of 150. The only way to reconcile this is that beacon hasn't been regenerating sunhearts for years during their situation with the cinder king, or that they had lost many sun hearts in the process of opposing him. Then they instead of dropping ships to conserve energy, spread the energy of their remaining sun hearts through everything in order to keep it running, and that's why they ran out of power all at the same time. The 200 BEU sun heart they gave Nomad was actually already heavily drained, not anywhere near full. One of the only things that support this interpretation is that the Charred creation spear, which Nomad I believe thought had about 2000 BEU in it. As charred are made from modified sun hearts, that means a new floor could be put at 2000 BEU, and the one that Nomad had was only at 10% capacity. If you want to be extra about I you can even assume that the modification process makes the sunheart lose some energy, and thus a normal sunheart holds thousands of BEU. The few hundred on the depleted ones that beacon had left would only last a few months, but a normal full one could last a decade. Dux, where did you find the part that Rebecca's mother had died only a few days ago. I was under the impression it was longer than that, but I could be wrong. Finally on the overall point, I don't think there's any indication whatsoever that Canticle had accelerated aging or birth rates. In fact as I don't even remember seeing any kids. They probably do have tons of kids though, the puritans historically rejected sex in many ways, but definitely not for reproduction. That's how the early puritan settlers had some of the highest population growth rates in the world at that time, once married women had tons of kids. We even see 'an' example of this with Rebecca having a brother and a sister at the start. Brandon's stories usually don't have that many siblings despite being set in historical periods where everyone should have like 5-6 siblings. *It's interesting that despite two different approaches to calculating how many sunhearts are needed, we came up with similar numbers. That means the impression that Brandon gave was consistent.

I don't think the line: "We fled the Evil. Then we fled Threnody." really says much about the timing of these events coming from the shades in the Chorus. More importantly, how do you reconcile that with the line from the chorus: They say that they arrived on ships, and that they were able to (presumably within hours due to the sun) turn those ships into mobile cities. That is a level of sophistication that is far, far beyond any indication of the tech they had on Threnody pre-evil. We know in fact that they were using gunpowder at the time and it was considered advanced. And we know that the tech level of threnody declined after they fled to Hell, as things were lost, and then stuff couldn't be maintained while following the simple rules. The tech that they would need to leave the planet is totally incongruous with what we knew they had at the time. Finally, if the threnodies had ships capable of leaving the planet at the time the Evil came, why in the world would they choose to go to a continent they literally named 'Hell' instead of anywhere else? We should expect a vast Threnodite diaspora as they fled to literally anywhere else. There seems to be none of that until the modern age. About the Greater Good being 80 and thus would know more if the arrival to Canticle was recent, that's not necessarily true. They know plenty about Threnody, and they are the only ones who really got that Nomad could be from another planet. Why would they know the details of the ships that brought them to Canticle? Those were retrofitted and replaced into the modern ships that can run off sun hearts instead of whatever the Threnodites who arrived used for power. They had no intention of leaving the planet, even if they could, so why would they be asking about the details of interplanetary flight to their parents or grandparents?

There is a passage in The Lost Metal where Marasi discovers some of the people who had gone missing recently in Bilming. We learn that the Set has learned how to spike someone who is not an allomancer but who had allomantic potential, in order to steal that potential. This process creates a very weak spike that can't create a misting, but also doesn't kill the person whose ability was stolen. The Set then was able to repeat this, gathering 20-30 very weak spikes that could then be put on one person, creating a Misting from normal people. There's multiple ways this could have been done, we don't know the details. The most obvious method of just directly using all the weak spikes has some severe problems- that many spikes takes a severe toll on a person, there's probably a lack of bind points for this, and it likely required trellium spikes to stabilize. Perhaps instead they melted down all the spikes and instead made a single one from the combined metal. The biggest problem of all though is that the effect was apparently only temporary. Moonlight is still excited by this is at implies that a sufficient amount of investiture spiked, regardless of how it was obtained, can grant the ability. She says that maybe the process could be replicated with pure investiture like Dor without spiking anyone. Personally, I doubt that will be possible, as it goes against the whole 'intent' and logic of Hemalurgy, which is stealing some attribute. A heavily invested spike might do something, but it seems unlikely that it can be used to grant specific metallic arts. Now here is the what-if: Imagine spiking someone who had 5% of the potential needed to become a misting for example, and then using the pure investiture, somehow pump that into the spike in order to increase its power. The original spiking granting the 'intent' for the magic and then the pure investiture making up the lack of power. Then spike the person who the potential was originally taken from with their own powered up spike. Now that person has basically gained the ability their potential couldn't reach before, while minimizing soul damage by using their own spike. Now we don't know if it is possible to 'power-up' a Hemalurgic spike this way, but it seems plausible to me. Far more plausible than creating purely artificial spikes at least. If the Set was using the 'combine into one spike' method, then perhaps there is a way of forging the spike with more investiture put into it. Perhaps the spike could be stamped to think that it came from a full misting, thus being able to grant someone the power without stamping them directly and changing who they are. What are the thoughts about this method? Do you think it is possible? Do you think it is useful, or that if you had access to spikes and pure investiture there would be easier methods to gain power?

I have just finished reading both The Lost Metal, and Sunlit Man over the last week, and one thing stood out to me. The Elendel Basin has apparently never had a major military conflict in the last 350 years. There of course has been fighting, even surprisingly large fights, between law enforcement and organized bandit groups, but there's never been a conflict between 2 government entities. The Basin apparently lacked even an official military of any sort until the 'discovery' of the Malwish, after which Elendel set up its own army. That army has never even been in a single fight. Despite that Scadrians have seem to adapt to combat extremely quickly. Once they saw the necessity they quickly developed such things as machine guns, grenade launchers, grenades themselves, and presumably artillery*. None of these things were even influenced by autonomy, though her agents contributed to an unknown degree to the development of dreadnought style battleships and rocketry. The Set also apparently had little trouble training soldiers by the hundreds, with developed tactics that threatened experienced metalborn. Even Elendel apparently had a plan prepared to enact conscription and stage some sort of attack on the outer cities if it came to that. Contrast that with Canticle- who despite having actually been fighting an actual war of some size over a decent period of time never seemed to have developed anything beyond improvised bombs. No new guns, no real sense of tactics or training. While their smaller population and limitations due to the sun are an excuse, the fact the Chorus can craft advanced weaponry easily means it was certainly within their ability. The only innovation was given to them by Scadrians in the form of Cinderhearts. The charred themselves were then used abysmally for what they are capable of- though that's understandable due to the flower-war like nature of combat which sought to capture rather than kill. Canticle was implied to have been settled by spaceship, and as those are relatively new, it seems unlikely that they have been there a thousand years. Perhaps between 100-200. They came from Threnody, having left due to 'politics' and presumably conflict, as we do know Threnody develops impressive weaponry (see shade gun from the newspaper in bands of mourning, and the Night Brigade itself), which presumably gets used to some degree. So despite being less removed from conflict than the people of Scadrial, those of Canticle seem to be far less capable of it. That, I think, shows an aspect of Scadrial that is rarely thought about. Its people did not arrive there naturally, but were instead created by Ruin and Preservation. Its people are well aware of this and know that every person carries a piece of preservation in them, but perhaps they underestimate how much Ruin they carry as well. Wax alludes to this in the climax of TLM, when he says to worship Harmony is to also worship Ruin, with all that implies. TL;DR: The difference in military capacity between Scadrial and Canticle, despite similar starting situations, show the influence that Ruin has on Scadrians even in the modern era, and that part of them will probably have major implications for the future. *Mayor of Elendel says they can deal with it if Bilming only sends a single ship, which implies they have some way to fight it off- presumably coastal artillery.

having more breaths does explicitly make Awakening more powerful. It grants instinctive awakening, the ability to awaken with sound instead of touch, the ability to awaken non-organic materials, along with just making it easier to awaken and give commands. A person with 10,000 breaths of equal skill to someone with 1000 can do more with 50 breaths. That sounds like 'more powerful' to me. Now I also don't think it would make the surges necessarily more powerful, but it could have other impacts. Also Spren do have physical bodies (shard blades) so you can probably give them breaths while they are in shard form.

About her use of Allomancy, I also noticed that she probably used two powers. Sizgil has been described as a tall (for a non-rosharan) thickly muscled man who is also highly invested. He should significantly outweigh a normal Scadrian woman. Yet when the researcher pushed on him, she wasn't said to move and instead Sizgil was thrown against a wall. That makes me think that she also used her tech to increase her mass to do that. If a presumably non-allomancer researcher can use 2 powers at once with her tools, it stands to reason that they can probably use all the common powers. It will help lower the power difference between Roshar and Scadrial substantially if every Scadrian soldier could conceivably be turned into a mini Mistborn.

About Shades I do wonder if we are ever going to learn more about them. This book clearly makes it seem like there is more to them than the Threnody story did, with the dual murderous/helpful nature of the chorus, and the more human shaped and functional shades of the Admiral. There's been a lot of information about how there's more to lifeless than meets the eye, and how the next Warbreaker book would go into them a lot more. I hope that the if we ever get a book about Threnody (which I think Sanderson has said would be about the Night Brigade) that it goes into shades a lot more, and shows us if there's anything more to them than deadly spirits.

I was aware of the WOB where he says the Cosmere is quite small, but had assumed that meant the pre-space age size. I hadn't seen that reveal stream however, as I was avoiding spoilers at the time. If the total Cosmere only has 50-100 stars, and Khriss is right that Drominad system has the most settled planets around a single star at 3, then that means that Sizgil has probably skipped to the majority of all the inhabited worlds of the Cosmere!

I've always been interested in demographics and populations, and have tried (often fruitlessly) to calculate the population of worlds in the Cosmere, how they are distributed, and the economies associated with that. For a while, I've been wondering what sort of scale of space opera the Cosmere would develop into. It could have been very small, like that of the The Expanse with 2 major planets in a Cold War, and a dozen or so minor worlds struggling to find their place between or away from them. Or it could be a very large scale like Star Wars, 40k, Dune, or Foundation. Now, the fact that the events of the Cosmere would be so influenced by a few significant planets and their empires implies a size smaller than some of the listed settings, but the exact scale remained unclear. Now we have a pretty good guess. In the first chapter of Sunlit Man, Nomad reflects on his inability to prevent deaths as 'millions, or maybe billions, die every day'. That number actually says a lot, as currently on Earth we have a population of 8 billion, yet only suffer 150,000 deaths per day. With this we can do simple calculations for population based on some variables we can manipulate. If the total number of deaths were 10 million for instance, and the Cosmere was twice as deadly as Earth today, that would give us a Cosmere with about 270 billion people in it. Personally I'm inclined to a higher number, as I don't think Nomad would be off by 2 orders of magnitude, after having been to tens of different worlds. 200 million deaths a day would imply a population between 5-10 trillion for example. As it seems unlikely we will get planets with 100s of billions of people, the ease of travel off world would probably prevent that level of density, that implies that the Cosmere probably has a number of inhabited worlds in the thousands, perhaps a bit over 10,000. That would give you a setting of about equal size to the first Dune novel, or Star Trek. The question we will have to see in more future books is how many of these worlds have fallen into one of the factions, and just what scale of galactic war could the Rosharans and Scadrians unleash?

Wasn't it stated somewhere that there were going to be 3 major empires in the space age: Scadrial, Roshar, and Sel?

If Nightblood contains a dawnshard (presumably destroy), wouldn't that mean that Roshar had at least 3 dawn shards on it during the events of SA? At that point I'd be looking out for the 4th.

There's a famous WOB about this. Kaladin would beat Kelsier in an open head to head fight, like a battlefield. Kelsier wins in all other situations.

I think the primary sticking point in this discussion is that some of it is based on SOTD2 info, however at that period at the timeline we just have no clue how enmeshed Shards are in the stellar empires born from their home systems. So far Autonomy and Harmony have been the most active in shaping life and government on their shard world. They give scientific information, talk to important people, lead important religions, and generally facilitate the advancement of society. The other shards we see don't appear to do this, and so I think it's fair to not count them. This might change, perhaps in the Sci-fi Era cultivation/honor/odium or whatever comes out of there is actively involved with running Roshar in a way the shards just aren't really right now. Further these shards have never used their power or personal resources to expand the influence of their shard world, which is a big distinction from autonomy. Overall, I think there's enough evidence to imply that Autonomy has, at this point in the timeline, outsized influence and impact on Taldain compared to other shards, and that should be taken into consideration.

That gives me an idea for the Cyberpunk and Sci-fi mistborn era. You could have some sort of artificial implant that can stimulate/simulate the brain waves that activate feruchemical healing, so that those with access to that ability could survive getting their head blown off, basically making them immune to anything short of their entire body getting obliterated at once. Also from Shallan getting plugged in the head in one of the books with a crossbow and still being able to heal it, it's possible that the physical brain is not that necessary if you are invested enough.

I think there's two separate questions here. How were the pre-everstom singers on the shattered plains maintaining their population, and how are the post everstorm singers across Roshar maintaining their population. For the first question, they explicitly weren't. The Alethi plan to bleed them to death via attrition was indeed working. I think the parshendi lost 2/3rds or so of their population during the war of reckoning, and the percent of the population they had to mobilize to keep fighting was completely unsustainable in the long term, and they were only able to keep it up for so long, and in increasingly worse conditions, because they were fighting a genocidal war. Even then, they couldn't take it anymore by the end, and were willing to do 1 giant gamble with the everstorm as they knew they'd be wiped out. Only a few thousand parshendi survived out of a population that 10 years ago was probably around 100,000. The singers a whole on Roshar are in a completely different situation. There's many different estimates of the population of Roshar, and I find the most credible to be in the 300-800 million range. What percent of that is Singers? Rome's population was 10-20% slaves, so I think at least 5% of the population of Roshar being singers is reasonable. That gets you 15-40 MILLION of them, or basically enough that there's no way to actually defeat them all in a reasonable length of time, especially as they occupy areas with tens of millions of humans, and there's tens of millions more that are actually a part of their coalition. Even if you give huge numbers that aren't really supported by the text, that a million singers are fighting the coalition, and that a million have already died in the war, then you still have tens of millions of singers who aren't actively fighting and can presumably be having kids. About which forms can have kids: WOB about it from 2015 Even in slave form as parshmen, one of the few things they ever asked for was the ability to get married, so I imagine a lot of them went into mate form when they gained that option be able to enjoy themselves with a loved one as a free person for the first time in their life. So Singers away from the front line are probably having enough kids to not let a population collapse happen. We don't have enough info to know whether casualties from being claimed by fused and just form combat are high enough to overcome the birth rate, whatever it is, but the fact that Singers mature faster than humans probably means that hoping for them to run out of numbers is a fool's hope. Such a war will take decades until a clear advantage shows, and centuries to finish.

About Shallan's kids, even if they are only 14-15 in book 6, the back half will probably cover a multiple year period, they could be 18-20 in the last two books, and thus grow in importance as characters as time passes. I do think that there will be major social change in Alethkar, but not complete social change. I don't think the nahn and dahn system will disappear, the same way that the caste system in India still exists in reality, even if legally it doesn't. I don't think Jasnah is going to do anything as extreme as mass land confiscation from the nobility and lighteyes - especially as they are the main source of soldiers in the nation. I do think that she will introduce democratic reforms, though I don't know if they will go straight to one man-one vote. Historically almost all democracies that evolved naturally had restricted franchise, or weighted voting, and that changed over time. There are legal privileges associated with 'caste' in Alethkar, I can see an expansion of those to more castes, though an interesting system in the future could be that your dahn and nahn receive some legal privileges but you pay higher taxes for it? It would be interesting to see Alethkar and Scadrial have different social and legal systems in the far future, rather than both converging on the same liberal model that dominates the west today. I don't think we are going to witness the fantasy version of Whig history in the cosmere lol. Also Gavinor is totally going to be raised to be a monarch, and is probably going to be an awesome character, so I think he'd have something to say about abolishing the monarchy in his lifetime. Finally Brandon seems to have a propensity for hierarchical societies and monarchy/nobility. Scadrial Spoiler: Edit: Also the fact that the most important figures to saving the Kingdom of Alethkar are all from the Royal family, and that the initial Knight's radiants all coming from the Royal family, or people very close to them, leading them to leading the orders. So by that logic, from the perspective of the average darkeyes and low ranking lighteyes divine right to rule looks alive and well, even justified. Also most high princes and nobility being on the front line of the war means they won't lose respect the way elites did OTL (due to changing nature of war).

This would make more sense if the lifeless in question had guns, but as far as we know, that doesn't exist on Nalthis. Additionally most of a lifeless's skills come from what they had during life (though I think an expansion of lifeless capabilities will be a prime change in the next warbreaker book), so any Nalthian lifeless wouldn't be able to use guns and modern tactics effectively anyway. 'Repairing' a lifeless who's bled out doesn't sound as simple as you make it seem. The body has to be retrieved from wherever it fell, the wounds have to be stitched up and and cleaned, hopefully none are permanently debilitating. Then they have to be refilled with Ichor Alcohol, and as damage accumulates they function worse and worse, due to diverging more from a human form. Attacks that destroy the body would destroy lifeless too. Overall, lifeless with guns who used to be soldiers would be quite effective actually, though keeping them supplied with ammunition would be the main issue. However, Nalthis doesn't have guns or modern tactics so that's why I wasn't impressed with lifeless. Theoretically you could send a strike team of Awakeners to take out a small military garrison, and then animate all the bodies, and repeat this until you have a lifeless force capable of combat, who can engage enemy forces so you can resurrect their soldiers as lifeless. This, however, seems extremely convoluted. One interesting application would be using lifeless to steal technical skills. If they can't get any earth gunsmiths to defect or work when kidnaped, they could assassinate them, steal their tools, and then resurrect them as lifeless who can endlessly work the production. That sounds like a possibility in the industrial era of Nalthis, where the most technically advanced workers get resurrected after death to keep working.

Alright, this is interesting so I'll give my take. Normal Soldiers: Overview First off the non-magic soldiers. Everyone except Taldain is entirely irrelevant. We have WOG that Taldain has modern earth tech, and is the most advanced current cosmere world, but we don't know how their militaries are structured and what equipment they have (good organization and leadership is as important as technology) so it's hard to asses how strong they are. They could have NATO level equipment and doctrine, large budgets, and experienced commanders, and thus be above any military on Earth bar the US, or they could be running around with corrupt and kleptocratic post-soviet style militaries which would struggle even against lower tech enemies. That comment about organization being as important as tech now leads to the greatest irony of the cosmere worlds we have the most information on. Rosharan Military Roshar actually has spectacular military organization, doctrine, and leadership. They are currently fighting a global war with hundreds of thousands of active high quality troops across a multitude of fronts. There could be many hundreds of thousands fighting just in Alethkar, a country whose military organization, recruitment system, and professionalism resembles the peak of the 19th century. However all these troops are running around with pre-gunpowder technology. I don't want to call it medieval or late renaissance, because the armies and organization and metallurgy and standardized equipment really doesn't resemble history until the 1500s, but by then military doctrine increasingly revolved around gunpowder - the best doctrine of that time was the Tercio, which was composed of roughly 1/3rd cavalry, 1/3rd melee infantry, 1/3rd musket men. No amount of good organization or leadership can make sword and bow armed soldiers relevant on the modern battlefield. Casualties in anything but pure guerrilla warfare will probably be in the 1:100 range. Seriously though, the soldiers of Roshar are disciplined, professional, and intelligent. It says a lot for an army to be able to coherently march through rough terrain for a week, then fight a battle outnumbered and tired in harsh conditions against an enemy which they have never seen before and can shoot lightning out of their fingers. A real medieval or even most renaissance armies would have fallen apart in the march, or shattered when faced with those circumstances, but the Alethkari fought and would have probably won. North Scadrian 'Military' Meanwhile Scadrial has decent enough tech even by modern standards, WW1 level stuff, though they can probably push a bit further due to metallurgy being the most advanced field in Scadrial for cultural reasons. Troops armed with grenades, rifles, and eventually the machine gun, along with primitive vehicles and rail-road supply lines could fight in the current world, most conflicts today look more like that than the current fighting in Ukraine which is relatively high tech. The problem is that .... there is no army! There's no military structure *at all*, there's not a single person who has spent time thinking about what a fight involving more than 50 participants looks like, of how to manage supply lines and tactics for an army of a million, which is what the Elendel basin could reasonably assemble based on WW1 mobilizations, and a population of 15 million (though I'd argue that their population should realistically be closer to 40-50). The final empire at least had some military understanding, and the wars that went down in era 1 were relatively sophisticated, but era 2 just doesn't compare. Without a shard's help or outside influence, it will take decades or even a century or two to build up a decent military doctrine. Seriously, they are worse off than the militia centric army of the United States in the war of 1812, while the Alethkari have organization that is closer to the Napoleonic. Nalthis Nalthis meanwhile ... they seem to be an actual normal late medieval society, around the 1300s I'd argue. So lacking in both technology and state organization to create and use a modern military. Without COPIOUS outside influence, it would take centuries to get them up to a level that can even tickle modern militaries. I'll quickly mention lifeless here, in that in their current form, they are not really more useful against modern soldiers, as a few bullet holes will drain them of ichor-alcohol quickly enough for them to prove only slightly more resilient than a normal human (which is the squishiest thing by far on the modern battlefield). They make a lot more sense when in the context of melee weapons and armor where major wounds are hard to create and thus they can fight endlessly, and have logistical advantages Sel I don't know enough about regular soldiers in Sel for me to really talk about them. Potential for improvement Fundamentally that means, I think that once Roshar gets their hands on guns and the theory behind them, they'll be able to integrate them into the military and bring themselves up to an 1870s level quite rapidly, within years I'd say. Scadrial meanwhile will need a while to build up a military worthy of the name in order to begin gathering enough experience to actually improve themselves and get to a decent level. That's a decades long process to get good at using the tech they have, but once they organize an actually military they'll at least be relatively useful and increasingly so as they professionalize, so assuming military buildup is needed starting from the point of The Alloy of Law, their doctrine and tech should advance apace for 20 years until they have a decent interwar level of tech and organization.So in terms of mundane soldiers, we have large sophisticated armies that lack the technology to be effective in any way, and a society with the technology to at least be relevant but with 0 military organization or thinking, and is thus incapable of using what they do have. So I'd give the final conclusion: mundane soldiers of the cosmere are entirely ineffective compared to a modern semi-professional military. They would only be relevant at extremely backwards battlefields, such as civil war in the Congo or something along those lines. Magical Soldiers: Now unto the magical soldiers where things get FAR more interesting. Awakening Awakening in it's current form has not been explored in a military context, probably because it would take tens of thousands of breaths, and is thus hard to evaluate. I see awakened constructs such as more sophisticated Kalad's phantoms as a good start for being able to match modern vehicles, though they would still be relatively vulnerable to squad sized weaponry and direct fire. Nalthis is just relatively backwards, and we haven't seen large scale combat with awakening, so at the current state of development, while there might be interesting tricks, I don't see it as militarily relevant. Elantris and Era 2 Scadrial I need to re-read Elantris to talk about it. And I haven't read TLM yet (busy with classes) so I won't speak about the metallic arts until reading that. Radiants Radiants are the only people who can be a credible threat on the modern battlefield. Their healing factor, and the strengths granted by stormlight, make them relatively difficult for artillery (which relies on shrapnel and concussive force rather than direct hits) to deal with, and the more mobile orders should be able to move faster than the normal infantryman could credibly hit, and their maneuverability and small size (compared to a tank) means squad sized weapons would struggle to ever get a lock on and hit. Shardplate would greatly exacerbate this. More advanced aiming systems such as those on modern tanks have a better chance, though they could never hit something like a flying radiant or most probably an edgedancer either. Fundamentally most aiming systems use infrared to detect the heat released by vehicles (engines are extremely hot) and lock on to that, while radiants don't stand out as much, and if the frost from stormlight is actually cold this becomes even more difficult. The best way to get hits would be at long distance when the enemy can't see you (stormlight doesn't not grant telescopic vision) and you can fire a round that moves so fast that there's really no time to get out of the way unless you have transcendent instincts like Kaladin. Overall, I'd give tanks the advantage of they detect the radiant first (which drones will help greatly with), and the advantage to the radiant once both are aware of each other. The real difficult thing for radiants to deal with would be aircraft. Those engage at such long ranges, precision guiding can be so precise , laser guided bombs can hit what infrared can't find, and there's no good way for them to be dealt with. They fly so fast and high generally, and there's no credible anti air to force low speed near ground flying either. Those would be the real killer. Once aluminum becomes standardized as an outer shell of armor for vehicles (not really worth it on infantrymen), things get even harder. They become harder to detect with magically, unless their absence is more glaring than their presence?, and it would take more clever and, critically, investiture intense methods to deal with them. Logistically the armors of Roshar seem to have good supply lines for forces via teleportation and soul casters, but the most critical element here is stormlight. We haven't really seen what a long term combat deployment looks like for a radiant. They seem to operate on a more mission based model where they only engage the enemy for a few hours and can then return to Urithiru. Modern warfare is insanely fuel and supply hungry, and it would force the same immense rates of expenditure from the radiants in terms of investiture. Could they keep up? Conclusion: Overall, a few hundred radiants with abundant stormlight could be a threat to a smaller national military, like Albania or something. A few thousand with abundant stormlight could put up a fight with a decent military like that of Germany or maybe Poland. To tangle with the stronger military powers would take tens of thousands of well trained, well organized radiants, several thousands hopefully in shardplate, with near infinite stormlight. I think there's only a few tens of thousands of radiant spren in total, so I don't think that's even possible from what we know. It would also be a force incapable of really fighting a traditional war. They would be able to destroy enemy assets, but would struggle immensely holding their own ground, and would be woefully incapable of conducting offensive operations that intend to occupy enemy territory. As of the current state of ROW, the forces of the Coalition of Roshar are about capable of taking on a modern country as strong as ... Austria maybe? For reference that's a nation with 23k soldiers in total, though officially there's 120k reservists, which hasn't fought in a war in 70 years, has 15 fighter jets and about 100 transport helicopters, 56 tanks, and has military spending under 1% of GDP (that is very low for reference, NATO standard is 2%, and US is 3.5%). Total population of the country 8 million, which is probably less than 10% of the that of the area which is controlled by the Coalition. That should be about a fair fight. Edit: Final Note If the cosmere really wanted to fight Earth, they'd be far far better off doing it via subterfuge and infiltration at the moment than a straight up fight. As Brandon seems to like the heist and espionage plot lines, there's really quite a few powers that would be very useful in these roles. Cosmere super spies and super assassins would be a major menace. Sure, somebody like Wax or Vasher probably would struggle to get anything done on a modern battlefield, but lock them in a room with 5 security officers that only have pistols on them? It would be a massacre. The situation kinda reminds me of the old Harry Potter question of Wizards vs Muggles, where yeah wizards could get killed by a single bullet. However the logical thing wouldn't be fight the armies, it would be to teleport into the President's bed room and mind control him, or prominent politicians, or generals, etc. In that sort of 'warfare' the cosmere could really do a number on earth even with the current tech gap.

About the Rosharans reverse engineering guns it's very possible that it is near impossible for them to make gunpowder naturally. I've looked into it a little, and Roshar's lack of soil generally means that potassium nitrate, one of the 3 main components of gunpowder, might not form naturally outside of shinovar. And the only way it would me discovered in Shinovar would involve mining, which I'm pretty sure goes against their religion. Now the solution to that would be soulcasting. If the Rosharans get their hands on quality gunpowder, they should be able to soulcast it, or at least it's components after a little analysis. It would probably be very difficult for normal soulcasters to do, but radiants should be able to figure it out without issue. Problem then would be that Rosharan ammo production would rely entirely on the very few radiants capable of soulcasting complicated chemicals. It seems impractical for that to lead to any widescale adoption. Especially as logistics would be such a pain, since gunpowder is meant to remain dry, and Roshar is an incredibly wet planet, from high storms to rain to the weeping. One thing that also hasn't been mentioned enough is how much angle matters when it comes to the damage a bullet does. A person in shardplate has increased agility, especially a radiant, so it should generally be possible for them to deflect most bullets obliquely off their armor, instead of taking the brunt of the damage. If it take 2 or 3 steel pushed bullets to break shardplate, it could be very hard to get those 3 shots if the majority of them waste energy on being deflected. This reminds me of the whole shardbearers being walking tanks, and when you add in bullets it becomes almost literal. As to the whole radiant vs mistborn thing, I think it's a bit of an unfair comparison. A lot of radiant abilities are very suited for combat compared to Mistborn abilities, but would be less useful outside of it. For example in kaladin's infiltration mission in kholinar, I much rather have a mistborn than a radiant. Their ability to manipulate emotions, move things without touching them, detect all sources of metal, would be invaluable and invisible to most.

Exactly, even though Lightsong did not believe in his own divinity it is still shown that he is a god is some way. This is revealed as he dies. His unacknowledged godhood led him to get himself into a terrible situation, which he turned into an incredible one. If it was not for him, the Pahn Kahl would have gotten away with it, the god king would have not have survived, and Siri would have been sacrificed on an altar