Bigmikey357

@Frustration Not that I know why we're off on this tangent but here goes. For you, all hazekiller squads are kill squads but not all kill squads are hazekiller squads. Kill squads that employ invested individuals are not hazekillers even when those individuals use the same tactics. For me, that distinction is functionally irrelevant since the purpose is to kill or at least defend against a magic user much too powerful for one person to handle. I'd call a group of 10 Mistborn a hazekiller squad if they were fighting a Fullborn. But this probably has nothing at all to do with the topic so feel free to think as you wish.

@Frustration I read the definition on the coppermind, thank you for providing it. Still I read in the text kill squads with integrated allomancers attacking our protagonists. That's why I feel the definition is not broad enough. Either the kill squads with various mistings in it are hazekillers or they aren't. If they aren't then what would you call them?

@BenduLuke Honestly I was only arguing about the efficacy of your scenario. I don't believe it could even happen, much less if it actually did and the results of such a confrontation. I mean your agent isn't even equipped with about the closest thing to an 'I Wing button as Scadrial can make use of. Atium. So if dude goes in with no knowledge of Radiant abilities and no way to heal from injury he dies. If he knows anything about Radiant abilities he would not fight the Skybreaker in that manner. Aluminum armor may stop the Shardblade from cutting but it won't stop the momentum of a guy in power armor striking someone with a 6 ft unbreakable stick. I think you are unrealistically boosting Scadrial's advantages while discounting Roshar's completely. But it's whatever. As far as the scenario, if you're looking for a Cosmere valid reason for it to occur then there already is one in the text. The Ghostbloods. And they already know the ground and the combatants. They could certainly whip up a hazekiller type of squad to kill individual Radiants or, more likely, put a Radiant in a situation where their powers are useless. And you left out the one real advantage Scadrial has over Roshar. The Scadrian agents will be Cosmere aware while the Rosharans are not. @Frustration I believe that your definition of hazekillers isn't complete enough. The one gunning for Kelsier may not have had Allomancers in it, it has been awhile since I last read Mistborn, but the squads sent after Vin certainly had invested users. The full definition should be a group of people who use tools and/or techniques to counter powerful Invested Arts users. Excluding say a Thug from a hazekiller squad going up against a Mistborn because he has powers would be incredibly stupid in my opinion. If I had access to such a person I'm definitely putting him in my squad. It increases my survival chances.

The ironpullers with the breastplate to redirect incoming coins, the pewterarms with dueling canes, tineye and seeker scouts. Hazekiller squads were conceived to fight Mistborn and often had mistings in their number. While it's possible to have hazekiller squads out there with no metalborn members that's the mark of a very poor house in Era 1. It's an actual plot point in Well of Ascension. Remember Cett sent a hazekiller squad at Vin prior to him coming to Luthadel? It had all his remaining metalborn in it including his only Mistborn (he posed as a Seeker).

I would just like to point out that hazekillers do use magic.

@StanLemon you are absolutely right. The Ghostbloods already have all this information the agent would theoretically be seeking plus are already in place to discover more. So why send the agent in the first place? BECAUSE WHOEVER SENT HIM ISN'T WORKING WITH THEM. And that makes him a dead man.

@BenduLuke 1. Pewter does not burn slow, in fact it's the fastest burning of the 8 basic metals. There are only 2 metals that burn faster in the text, atium and bendalloy. 2. A-Pewter abilities cannot be separated as you seem to suggest. It doesn't even work like that using F-Pewter. You can do that with F-Tin but we aren't speaking of that. 3. A person holding Stormlight has their dexterity boosted about as much as someone burning Pewter. That same person in living Plate will be much stronger. 4. While I agree that F-Nicrosil will make your agent better equipped to make their pewter supplies last much longer than normal I am pretty sure that it's not a simple matter to convert stormlight into investiture usable by a metal born. Ghostbloods wouldn't be trying to kidnap Heralds if conversion were that simple. 5. The oxygen composition may help the agent physically but it will be absolutely ruinous on his weapons. The bullet casing might be air tight but the chamber of the weapon most certainly is not. Guns are made to contain and redirect explosive force within certain tolerances, above which they fail catastrophically. When you plug up a gun barrel it explodes because the force of the explosion far exceeds what the weapon is made to contain. Firing a Scadrian gun on Roshar makes that chemical reaction more energetic. When the gun fires that explosion will be beyond tolerance, guaranteed. You may get one shot off, maybe even two. They'll be wildly inaccurate but it may fire. After that either the barrel is ruined or the chamber is. Lose integrity in either and the best outcome is a simple misfire. Worse case? Boom. 6. Armor, no matter how light or flexible, restricts movement and slows reaction. The agent must account for this, for no matter how strong or dexterous he is he still is less dexterous and fast as he would be without 50 lbs of aluminum strapped to his body. The Skybreaker does not have this issue. He's just as fast, just as dexterous, and a helluva lot stronger in Plate. See Dalinar catching that chasmfiend claw. See him digging that cistern trench through solid stone. Basically you have an agent with a good amount of pewter, Armor that may block Shardblades but is still susceptible to blunt force attacks and restricts movement to boot, holding weapons that will be unreliable after a couple shots. He's facing someone faster, almost as dexterous, a lot stronger, with powers that take him out of range of any attacks he could muster while being a sitting duck. So he can't hit the agent directly with division? What if he sets the environment on fire? The agent, at least as you imagine him, is toast. Odds fare better on Scadrial of course.

That is until Roshar figures out Harmony's tone and makes the Ettmetal mute with antiharmony.

@BenduLuke Let me get this straight regarding the scenario you posted. You got some short foreign guy walking around on Roshar with aluminum armor and a bunch of devices unrecognizable to any of the inhabitants of the planet and expect him to be inconspicuous? And unless he has a spare Elsecaller working with him he can only transition to the Physical Realm through Cultivation's perpendicularity in the Peaks. That transition point is of course under water and guarded by the inhabitants. Your Scadrian agent has to bring himself and all this equipment through and remain undetected through several weeks of travel just to arrive at the fight scenario you proposed. He has to do this in a weakened state in order to store the attributes he'll need to survive whatever fights he engages in. Now on to the fight itself. If the guy manages to achieve several impossible things he gets to be a pewterarm with F-Steel and F-Nicrosil, I suppose through the use of medallions. He has guns that have somehow survived being dunked in the lake. The armor is aluminum as are the rounds, are the weapons aluminum too? Does he even know what a Skybreaker is? What is his intel on Rosharan magic? Speed is a bit OP but it runs out. Are you proposing that the Nicrosil bands are recharging off Stormlight and converting it to something a metal born can use? Scadrial figured out investiture conversion on a magic system they haven't seen? And what about the different air chemistry, most notably the extra oxygen? Those guns become essentially useless on Roshar because they're going to blow up in the hands of the operator as soon as fired even if they survive the lake. I freely admit that none of this is making any sense to me, no offense meant. Because here's the thing. Even if he somehow wins that fight, even if he makes it to that fight, he fails the mission and never transmits that information to Scadrial. And Roshar learns a whole lot more about their opponent, thus making a Rosharan victory much more likely.

Wax often does push on his bullets to give them more force of impact or better penetration. My question is, so what? Wax outweighs a bullet by several orders of magnitude. Once the round hits the target then that's when ballast comes into play. He is boosting the bullet, not drilling the target.

Wax was only able to push on trace Metallic signifiers when he was holding the Bands. Without them and with his Savantism he could better see metal traces, can influence some to greater effect (the bullet scene when he was a child) and the steel bubble. But he's not all of a sudden bloodbending people. Marsh can't even do that and all he sees is metal traces. But let's say for the sake of argument that he could. How many people would you say currently have this ability? Wax is extraordinary but he's also an agent of Harmony, which could in theory be augmenting his abilities, much in the same way Vin was boosted by Preservation. You cannot take an obvious outlier and assume that what they achieve is the baseline for any user of an invested art.

@BenduLukeDid you read the excerpt from Sixth of the Dusk 2? Both Scadrial and Roshar are going to develop FTL and will likely be in conflict. What we're talking about isn't what happens 100 or more years down the current Cosmere time-line. We're talking about a hypothetical conflict between Era 2 Scadrial and post-RoW Roshar. Neither of them have FTL or lasers or Star Wars tech. Revolvers and slow loading Rifles vs. Shardblades and Soulcasters. If that war started today, or at least in the next decade. Neither side is pulling FTL or the H-bomb in that time. That Ettmetal bomb from SoScad ain't there yet. Antilight applications are not there yet.

1. Scadrian metallurgy is going to be off if they try to reproduce on Roshar, atmospheric pressure, gravity and oxygen composition are all elements in producing machine grade metals. The percentages that are so important to making viable metals for the Metallic Arts are going to be way off until they adjust. They will have to have large stores in hand while they adjust, all while establishing a beachhead, firming up their supply chain and fighting off an army well familiar with the local conditions. 2. Understanding vector physics intuitively does not necessarily convey vast scientific knowledge. At most it just provides a head start. Scadrial ain't picking up E=MC^2 tomorrow just because they can throw coins around by magic. I think that to say so is vastly overestimating the speed of Scadrial's technological progress. 3.That copper library is about 1000 years out of date and has very little in the way of scientific experimentational notations thanks to TLR. The Keepers stored much in the way of cultural cache but little science. Again, they are not pulling off E=MC^2 tomorrow.

Just wait until Roshar gets a peek at temporal metals and start incorporating them into Fabrial cages. Hell if Kriss accidentally dropped an Allomancy chart somewhere Navani could see it I think Roshar becomes absolutely terrifying in yet another way. Admittedly that's more long term, but by the time the actual clash between these 2 becomes Canon they both will be so close tech wise that it'll be a challenge to see who's better. Hell it's close to a toss up right now as 35 or so pages on this thread alone can attest.

If we stack up the Big 4 then Awakeners are the least OP. However they'd be an extraordinary ally to any of the other 3 depending on how they are used to support.

The Manhattan Project is already happening on Roshar. They are after all already in the middle of a global spanning war of annihilation. They already have the greatest minds available to them gathered in one place. They have already come up with a weapon with Cosmere spanning implications. Scadrial OTOH hasn't even passed the first stage of this. And the best technological scholar they have is an antisocial recluse with absolutely no political power and no interest in such. Nor do they have the type of political system to optimize their technological advantages in peacetime. It takes time to build up a war machine and Scadrial isn't even in the starting block. Also, while science and technology generally go hand in hand, it's not exactly the same. I don't know if Scadrial's scientific understanding exceeds Roshar by any great measure or even at all. The one thing we know for sure is Scadrial's metallurgy is far superior, makes sense since metal is the basis for their magic system. But TLR repressed nearly every other technological advance for over 1000 years. Roshar has had over 2000 years of scientific research experience, limited only by the low relative metal deposits and higher than average oxygen in their atmosphere. Another thing to think about. If Roshar comes to Scadrial they will have some issues. Higher gravity, lower oxygen, and advancing on a world with better weapons. But they have much easier access to food there, the Elend basin is ridiculously fertile. But if Scadrial goes to Roshar their adjustment period would be harder. They wouldn't know how to deal with category 5 hurricanes every 2 weeks. Their vaunted weapons would blow up in their faces half the time because everything they use is much more flammable. It would be harder for them to produce steel locally because the gas mix would be off. Kelsier is doing it the right way for Scadrial.

It's crazy that the Elantris we see almost 10,000 years prior could stand toe to toe with modern day Roshar and not be completely outclassed. We don't know much of anything about modern day Sel but what we do know makes Sel a very dangerous opponent. We know they have been world hopping longer than any other Cosmere group. We know that their scholars have extensive knowledge of everyone's power set and may have discovered things about their power sets that even they don't know. We know that they have at least limited mobility of the AonDor. We know that they have a helluva head start. On the con side we also know they are fractured and that the advances made at Silverlight have not been widely distributed (Emperor's Soul and no electricity for example). Given that, unless we get source material to the contrary, Sel in general and Elantris in particular would be nearly impossible to break. The defensive capacity and the versatility of the Magic, unfettered by any Shardic entity capable of limiting magical output, any attacking force gets annihilated before they ever reach the walls. Roshar in particular would have a bad time since most of their most powerful magics require Cognitive Realm manipulation and Sel's is a mess. You aren't moving troops en masse through the plasma storm either, but even if you found a way there would be no element of surprise to aid you. I actually believe Scadrial would have a greater chance, although I still don't see them ultimately winning even with guns. That being said, all those advantages blow away like a puff of smoke as soon as they try to leave their fortress of a world. While they have found a way to fuel their Magic off-world it cannot be super easy or extensive enough to support an army of users or magitech devices. It's unlikely that they can find fuel locally like a Scadrian could or convert existing local fuel to something they could use. But even if they've figured out the very thing the Ghostbloods are currently struggling with I imagine their powers are ridiculously energy intensive. And slow compared to Sel or Roshar. Some of that can be mitigated with proper preparation; infuse a bunch of equipment, set it to use the local fuel source, send then in their way. But anything unexpected, any miscalculation, any new situation that requires one to quickly make a rune to counter a new threat and there won't be much time to recover. Roshar has the advantage here because their free flowing investiture doesn't cover the planet nightly like Scadrial. And can you imagine the fireworks when some Elantrian ignorantly pops an Aon Ene in a moment of panic, doesn't take into account the higher atmospheric Oxygen level and blows both him and his companions sky high cause he used the wrong modifier.

@The Technovore I like the analysis of Sun Tzu vs the Untouchables. I was going to make many of the same points. But I'd add that Roshar as Sun Tzu also has the equivalent of the Manhattan Project for their weapons development. Currently Roshar is behind Scadrial's technology but Roshar can catch up even more quickly than baseline. My argument has always been how long can Scadrial's technology advantage hold out with someone like Navani doing R & D on the other side? Roshar gets pounded early, adjusts quickly, and breaks Scadrial eventually. We are thinking about this the wrong way anyway. The Scadrian strategy should always be stealth and infiltration instead of overwhelming uses of force, that going head to head against Roshar would be incredibly stupid, at least without allies more experienced in war. That technology advantage is already drying up as we speak and their power set leans more towards subterfuge than outright punching matches against people who can alter landscapes. Plus, given the large propensity for Radiants to have mental health issues, Soothers and Rioters are the most dangerous forces Scadrial could employ.

You're right about the Koloss, I forgot they were mentioned. However we can still put them off the board effectively because how are you going to incorporate them into an army? They're completely undisciplined and it would take a literal act of God (Harmony in this instance) to make them an asset in battle even as shock troops. For all the good Harmony has done for at least one half of the planet, he really put the restrictor plate on the local magics after he ascended. (P.S. @cometaryorbit, try not to do the double post thing on here, it tends to be frowned upon in these parts. In future, just edit your previous post. Thanks.)

Roshar completely outclasses Scadrial in terms of magic and magical constructs. However strong and durable Koloss are, there are no more pure blood ones, so even if they were stronger than Thunderclasts with bones made of mythril and adamantium, they are no longer available. And as far as Inquisitors there is exactly one. Unless Marsh is telling, unless Harmony allows him to tell, they don't know how to make them anymore. Scadrial's technology advantage has only a little to do with firearms. Nothing Scadrial has is any more complex as a modern fabrial; give Navani an uninterrupted hour with the thing and she’d know it well enough to have a working prototype before the week was out. Scadrial's greatest technical marvel is the same as Earth, mass production. They can put a devastating weapon in the hands of every person on their side and still have leftovers. Both men and women since Vin pretty much killed gender bias on the planet. If only Scadrial knew how to really wage war they'd slaughter Roshar. But they don't. And their magic is pretty low wattage compared to a Knight, Regal or Fused. So again the question is, how soon can Scadrial develop real military tactics? Can they do it before Roshar can adopt all their technological advancements and use them against them? I can imagine Navani telling her husband to capture a factory once she knows about guns. And another thing to consider. Once a Radiant figures out how to get their spren to become a gun then the entire Cosmere got problems.

Yep. Unless you are insanely talented and have a natural affinity it takes a bowman years to be competent. The US Army makes competent rifleman by the busload every 2 weeks.

Scadrial has the technology but not the numbers or the tradition. They have no concept of true military action. SoScad fights like tribesmen and NoScad is barely competent in police action. Roshar is behind in tech (although not quite as far as you imply) but well versed in warfare vs magical weaponry. Firearms would not particularly faze them, they'd look at them as a different type of fabrial and immediately seek ways to counter it. Modern warfare isn't all that different than ancient warfare, tactics change but objectives do not. Sure Scadrial has the tech to squash a Rosharan army if they knew how to effectively employ their weapons. The question becomes how fast can Scadrial figure out how best to employ their weaponry before their tech advantage dries up? They're not stupid but they don't think militarily and that mindset takes time to cultivate. Meanwhile if say Sadeas saw a firearm in action it would take him at most a battle and a half to figure the best ways to employ said weaponry or find a workable defense against it. The thing about warfare is the longer it goes on the smarter the enemy gets. Roshar has been at war off and on for about 7000-ish years. There are less capable commanders, but nearly all the stupid or incompetent ones are dead.

You know, maybe Scadrial is actually doing the infiltration invasion plan already. Axindewth (sp?) did give the voidspren to Venli after all. If the goal is to keep Roshar from gaining too much power on a Cosmere scale then kicking off a new Desolation has almost no downside. There are two concerns when pursuing such a strategy, one an inevitable consequence and the other kinda of a worse case scenario. The consequence, Rosharan forces gain valuable, practical experience in fighting supernatural foes. Since they already have experience with mundane foes giving them any more experience is problematic. The worse case scenario is if the conflict ends too quickly, even worse if the humans and Singers unite. Think of the weapon of mass magical destruction represented by anti-light. That discovery came about through collaboration. If they could collaborate on a permanent basis then the offworld problem gets solved way too quickly for the piece of mind of any Cosmere-aware society that isn’t Roshar. But based on the history of conflict on Roshar this would seem like a very outside possibility from an outsider's perspective. But if Scadrial did indeed put the plan into motion then Dalinar would be absolutely terrifying to them.

Well Roshar is developing vaccine tech right now. I think they could survive germ warfare. It would hurt them no doubt but not enough to cripple on its own.

If Roshar aimed to become the rulers of the entire Cosmere then taking out Scadrial right now as a preemptive strike would be a great idea. But of course none of this matters if they can't get there. And let's be clear, Scadrial isn't going to be as vulnerable as they are right now for long. But I don't believe most of the advantages Roshar possesses in terms of strength of magic and military experience would be relevant for this invasion. The main reason to throw a large army at a place is to provide an occupation force once you smash it. But if you're Roshar why would you want to? They have nothing you want or need. Their tech is easily transported, any natural resources they have can be made, the concept of mass production can be stolen. Their people are short, kinda strong from living in higher gravity, but generally unhealthy and, from a Rosharan perspective, plague-ridden. So the mission isn't going to be conquer and occupy, it instead should be destabilize and sabotage. Send in Lightweaving troops and do your damndest to keep the locals ignorant of your mission until it's too late. They don't have local Shard support either; Harmony is dealing with something. Honestly though, I think Scadrial should be the one doing the invading, and I think they could execute the Rosharan plan I outlined above much better. Keep those powerful warmongering rubes occupied with their own planet, blockade them. Of course the god of Hatred might object.