king of nowhere

Rememeber the device David was using in firefight? turned out there is already something like it. http://www.n-magazine.com/the-jet-sons/

I don't know, I am happy with this forum. Plus, this is like the kindest community around. I sometimes read youtube comments, and I'd never want to go there to have a debate of any sort.

another thing that may help is that you could strap a kevlar armor over shardplate. I mean, shardplate gives you enhanced strenght, and the limitation to how much armor you can wear normally depends on the fact that it is heavy and you are supposed to move around. if you can wear 50 kilos of kevlar over youur shardplate, you really become near impervious.

I was also thinking on making Vasher with the abilities: "Vasher, awakener comes into play with 3 Breath counters on him. {0}: Put a Drab counter on a nonartifact creature you control that hasn't a drab counter. Put a Breath counter on Vasher, awakener. {0}: Remove a Breath counter from Vasher, awakener. Put a 1/1 lifless token into play. {0}: Remove X Breath counter from Vasher, awakener, and put them on an artifact with converted mana cost X. That artifact becomes an X/X artifact creature as long as the Breath counters stay on it. You may return those Breath counter on Vasher at any time any player may play a sorcery." but again, that's too long to fit into a card.

I was thinking of a different mechanic for szeth, that would make his oathstone more important: "when Szeth comes into play, put a legendary artifact token into play named Szeth's Oathstone with the following ability: whenever szeth's Oathstone is the target of a spell or ability, counter it; the controller of the spell or ability takes control of Szeth's Oathstone. At the end of every turn, remove Szeth from the game; then, if Szeth's Oathstone is into play, return Szeth into play under control of whoever controls Szeth's Oathstone." Kinda hard to fit all that into a card together with his other abilities, though.

actually, deflecting bullets by a small angle takes less energy than simply blocking them, because it needs to alter their speed less. take the case of a bullet moving at a speed of 100 m/s hitting an armor and stopping. the bullet is accelerated by 100 m/s, and for the principle of action and reaction that force is imparted on the armor. actually a bit more than 100 m/s, since the bullet is not just stopping, it is bouncing back; if it bounces back at fulll speed (completely elastic situation) then it will be accelerated by 200 m/s. Now think of the bullet being deflected at an angle of 30 degrees. That equates to changing its speed components from one completely along the x axis to one that is partially along the y axis too, which translates to imparting an acceleration along the y axis. if my calculations are correct (they may not be, my trigonometry is rusty) that can be accomplished by redirecting 37 m/s of speed along the x axis on the y axis, so that the bullet would only be accelerated by 74 m/s. therefore the armor would need to impart much less acceleration to deflect a bullet rather than to stop it, aand that equates to less force being applied to the armor. my numbers may be a bit wrong, but the principle is sound nonetheless.

or, radiants could just adapt by picking up a rifle themselves. a shardplate would still give huge advantages over even modern battle gear - stronger than a bullletproof vest, covers the whole body, offers superior protection against explosions too, you never tire in it... a soldier with rifle and shardplate is much better off than the soldier with just the rifle. really, deciding to charge with a sword at a guy with a machine gun is pretty much the only way you can lose the advantage of plate. just because jedis prefer to get killed charging dozens of soldiers on open ground rather than simply carrying a ranged secondary weapon and shoot them from cover, it is no good reason for radiants to do the same. the shardblade won't be much use, except maybe in urban fighting (where you can even disable a tank if you can hide in the buildings to sneak close enough), but you can tell your spren to form a shield. apparently a shardblade is much stronger than a shardplate, since plate shatters after a few blows from a blade, but a blade can take any amount of punishment from another blade. as far as we know, a shardblade-turned-shield could even survived a direct hit from a cannon - though you'd surely at least shatter your arm from the blow. all things considered, i can still see a shardbearer with modern equipment being superior to a platoon of regular soldiers, as long as he uses his advantages in a smart way.

from my limited experience, every store is different, so it depends on what store you used. also, nowadays many sellers don't let you download stuff anymore, rather asking you a price comparable to a paper book to give you nothing but the permission to read the book online, possibly for a limited time. I already ranted about how unfair that commercial practice is, but apparently most people are fine with it.

I disagree with that. sure, if i punch you with full steel speed i shatter my hand, but i can just use my superior speed to dodge your attacks and punch you softly with steel speed - which equates to a good punch at normal speed. Or, better, i could use my speed to stick a finger in your eyes. The advantage of speed is not about hitting stronger, it is about hitting without being hit.

well, as for that, the kinetic energy of a human body falling can be surprisingly high. let's assume that kaladin hit the plate with the speed he would have if he had fallen 5 meters, because 5 meters (earth gravity) is the kind of fall that will break your leg but likely not kill you. the kinetic energy of that is equal to the potential energy, which is M*g*h=70*9.8*5=3500 joules. more than a bulllet, although the bullet has a greater penetration power because it concentrates the energy on a smaller impact surface. the steel armor of a middle-age knight would be crushed by such an impact. in fact, maces were quite effective at crushing armors, and they had nowhere near the same kinetic energy. Overall, I would say that plate is much more effective than a steel armor, but it only seems supernaturally effective because there is a lack of advanced weaponry on roshar. swords and arrows are good against unprotected flesh, not to deal with armored targets. when pitted against modern weaponry - especially anti-armor weaponry, which is made to pierce thick plates of advanced material - shardplate is probably not so much better than kevlar. It would be like the shardbearers were driving world-war-2 tanks, and were slaughtering infantry armed with swords and spears, and so we'd ask 'wow, those tanks are really powerful, but could they hold up against modern weaponry?'. well, of course, because they are weapons of this time and therefore we have made guns specifically to deal with them.

but if yu do that, you'll influence what he'll write, so he may want to write something else - if nothing else just to contradict this annoying guy who keeps tellling him what he'll write. so this will generate multiple atium shadows, and you won''t be able to keep predicting what he'll write. Bonus uselessness!

Let's expand a bit the "depends on caliber" thing: a crossbow can get a significant dent in a shardplate. I googled to a crossbow shop, and I see that a good crossbow has a power a bit short of 200 joules, which is in the same range of a small caliber handgun. So, a shardplate could take a small caliber pistol with relative impunity - although the fact that you can shoot a pistol much faster than a heavy crossbow still means it will hold less long. a high caliber handgun has a kinetic energy over 2000 joules, over ten times as much as the smaller gun; that would certainly put a large crack in the plate, and i doubt it could take more than one or two hits in the same area. rifles are a bit over that, but not by much; that kind of energy is more than enough to penetrate a human body at range, so it's enough for most guns. but a high-caliber anti-materiel rifle (the kind one would use against a shardbearer) can have an energy upwards to 50000 joules. that's about the limit of what you can shoot with a rifle without shattering your shoulder with the recoil, and it should also be enough to punch through a plate with the first shot. I would be extremely surprised if a shardplate could take more than one bullet from such a weapon.

More BoM spoilers (sorry for those who'll see the entire thread as made of spoilers) . but just in case, someone must ask if not breaking your arms/burning up for friction as a result of steelrunning is a required secondary power or if it is just caused by the specific characters we've seen doing that having ways to cope with it.

More BoM spoilers (sorry for those who'll see the entire thread as made of spoilers) . but just in case, someone must ask if not breaking your arms/burning up for friction as a result of steelrunning is a required secondary power or if it is just caused by the specific characters we've seen doing that having ways to cope with it.

but yeah, it was a waste. sazed did not realize the power of steel. he did not realize the power of feruchemy in general. as you can see, brandon fully realizes how powerful Feruchemical steel really is, and every time he writes a major fight, he takes it away from the characters.

next turn: tap four swamps, sacrifice them, enter 4 darksteel colossus. yeah, definitely overpowered.

the primary female companion erasing some kind of dogs from existance is clearly from book 3, when moiraine used balefire against some darkhounds on the road just out of illian. i don't recognize any giant obelisks, black or any other color. anyway, the series is now finished, so if you are interested you can go read the part you missed.

i've seen a similar thread on the order of the stick forum, and i've seen clogging it into a specialistic discussion of which color fits which character or ability tends to remove a lot of the fun. then again, I'm going against my own suggestion to point out that a cost of 4 mana is definitely too small for some of those cards, especially for vin

i remember an old interview (can't find the link) where sanderson said that the cosmere as a concept was not done before, because while some other authors, like aasimov, worked out later the connections between their books, he is the first -to his knowledge - to have planned those connections from the beginning, planting them from the very first book. However, I realized that discowrld is a very similar concept; a world where several stories take place, mostly unrelated (or classifiable in a few sagas, like the city watch or the witches), but with some characters interacting from different stories. II'm wondering if there is some large conceptual difference between the cosmere and discworld or if brandon didn't think about it when releasing the interview.

yeah, but the other readers/watchers/players won't know where it comes from, so there is no conflict. even knowing it, it's not supposed to be an in-world connection, just something you did to come up with a name. and while i find it more difficult to take my campaign world seriously because i know i took half of the names from a set of instructions in norwegian and the other half from obscure references in the wheel of time, the players are fine with it, because they don't know where the names come from.

ah, you were trying to burn it. then i would still say no. you'd get the power more strongly while you're burning because of compounding, but you would consume the metal of the medallion.

good catch. I hadn't thought that with normal gravity the edges would stick out of the atmosphere. that article refers to a planet with the rotational axis passing through the corners, not the middle of the faces, but the part aboout the atmosphere is true. After alll, a cubical planet can be considered like a normal spherical planet with 8 mountains thousands of kilometers high.

why would swallowing a medalllion grant a permanent power? you'd just have a medallion inside your stomach, then inside your intestine, then yoou'd lose your medalllion. for all that time, you'd be unable to use other medallions. Not a good deal.

so, basically you are saying that looking at a norwegian text to find words with the right sound is actually a good way to come up with names. Pity. I was hoping professionals had some kind of secret. Ah, well, thanks anyway. Now excuse me while I copy this on google translate and try the most obscure languages... EDIT: I don't know, maybe the reason I never like names I pick that way is that I know exactly where they come from. If I forget I took them all from a bunch of instructions in a foreign language, they don't look any different from other fantasy names.

as a crystal grows in size, the gravitational force increases more than the force of internal coesion. that's a consequence of the square/cube law. astronomical objects larger than 500 kilometers are roughly rounded because gravity is greater than the material strenght. That applies to rock and ice. On the other hand, if a giant, planet-sized diamond existed, then maybe a diamond would be hard enough to not be crushed under its own wheight. i don't know how to calculate that, but it's the hardest material and also fairly lightwheight - less gravity to counteract. a planet formed by a giant diamond could be explained with the physics we know.