king of nowhere

I cannot see kelsier with blond hair. for many other characters i can't keep a good mental image of them. that's why i'm ggrateful to movie adaptation, even if they do nothing else: i have a visual image to link to the people and settings. And I never bothereed with accents. Just for once, brandon is american, and I have really big problems with the american accents. I talked in english with people from england, france, spain, germany, finland, italy, sweden, east europe, russia, india, china, south corea, and I could understand pretty well all of them. In new york, I wouldn't have been able to ask for direction in the underground without my brother or rather, I would have been perfectly able to ask, but I would have never understood the answer. In washington, little better. So I don't read the characters with the voices brandon uses for them. If I did, I would not be able to understand them.

you forget tyndwyl, or how was spelled her name. the terris keeper who taught elend to be a leader. and spook's love interest, she seemed a stereotypical damsel in distress, but she was a coinshot. I'd say in all of sanderson books there are societies that are strongly gender stereotyped. but the characters are not.

True. But on the other hand, a civilization with the tech level for space flight has also the tech level to wipe out itself. so a civilization cannot be too warlike when it reaches space travel, or there won't be any civilization left to do the space traveling. And it is a cheerful thought, at the prospect of meeting an alien race, that any race capable of traveling through the stars is a race peaceful enough that it has managed to not destroy itself. The very concept that conflict increases scientific advancement is debatable. Some theorize that the reason the industrial revolution happened in europe was that europe was made by many warring states, while everywhere else in the world those warring states tended to be absordeb into continent spanning empires. Some others observed that switzerland had 500 years of peace, and all they invented was the cucoo clock. as a theory, it is certainly possible. for sure, many technologies developed for war turned out to improve the lives of people in times of peace, rocketry being one of the most notable ones. BUt then, europe almost destroied itself in the second world war, and the united states became the dominant power by being a united continent-spanning state. In the last 20 years, with the fall of the soviet union, there was almost no conflict in the industrialized world, and yet our science advanced as fast as ever, with information technology and renewable energies coming out almost of nowhere and becoming main parts of everyone's life. So, advocating strife as a way to advance society is a risky business at best. Even putting moral issues aside, i would not encourage it unless the situation was really desperate. Speaking of morals, if saze was "nudging" towards a war, I don't care that people still have free will, saze would be corresponsible for it. If he wants to be a "good" god, he cannot encourage war just in the hope of getting some scientific development. I could only accept it (omniscient morality license) if he knew there was an alien invasion in, say, 200 years, and scadrial needed to be ready to face it.

on a related question, i wonder how much mass they could shed while retaining humanlike intelligence. could they impersonate something as small as a mouse and retain enough brain cells to be themelves? that could have more applications than becoming giants. also, could they shed the excess mass and leave it aside to reabsorb it later, without needing to eat? that would help

an introverted nerd, who is also a very straightforward person, as a soother/rioter. really, i can barely function normally in most social situations with non-nerd people, but i wouldn't be able to llearn reading others and manipulating their emotions if i had years to train and my life depended on it.

I suppose you meant everyone would know at least one metalborn? because people normally know 100-150 other people, and coinshots are one in sixteen, so if there was a great likelyhood of there beign at least one coinshot in 150 people, it means there's one alomancer every ten guys. if we assume it's metalborn, then it would mean there's at least one every 100 people. probably a bit more

huh, i had assumed from your reputation and your post count that you had been a long-time sanderfan. now i see that you joined us one year ago. and you made 8000 posts in that time I upvoted just for that. congratulations! also congratulations on finishing your graduation despite reading most of sanderson books and having that kind of activity in the forum.

I'm quite confused. you are one of the main posters in this site, and you haven't read all the sanderson books yet? how can that be?

deathpoint was doing something really dumb anyway. if he had managed to kill steelheart, then the soldiers would have killed him easily since he had no defensive abilities. so, i would not put too much deep thought into his actions.

As a discussion goes, the chance of someone making a reference to terry pratchett approaches one. I'm hardly the only estimator of sir pterry in thhis forum. In fact, I don't think it exist a fantasy-related forum where a significant amount of the posters aren't also pratchett fans.

The curious thing is that, while very few of us would enter into that machine, most of us here do their best to spend as much time as possible connected to it. We have several models of machine that make us happy by simulating a different reality; depending on the model, we call them "computer", "books", "movies", "porn", or many others. the point is that the real world is boring. ok, it has plenty of interesting stuff, but very little exciting things happen in it. and we strive hard to keep it that way, because in the real world "interesting" often translates to "life-treathening" or other possibilities of very unpleasant stuff. while in those simulated world, we can have exciting things happpening on a regular base with no personal risk, so we can get the exciting without the terrifying. Of course there is a vast difference between spending your free time connected to the machine and spending all of your life into it. But I find it quite curious that we would not want to live in a virtual reality, but we plunge into several virtual realities every day. Thinking about it, I believe a realistic scenario could be that no one would want to enter the machine at first, but people would start passing a few hours in it, then they would like it and spend some more time, until eventually many will enter the machine forever, wondering why they ever tought there was anything wrong with it. assuming of course that the world is run by machines, so you don't have to worry about life support. last point, no matter the similarities, I wouldn't call it proof of an influence. After all, it's nothing that one could not conceive on his own, and phylosophy has produced enough ideas that even when you are trying to be original, chances are someone thought the same before you.

so a college is like a university, but it does not do research? so strange to hear of it. in europe they don't exist. if it gives university-llevel education, it also does research. anyway, while most sanderfans seems to be in the 20-25 age range (or in the 15-30more broadly) there are plenty of them from every age. myself, i am doing a PhD.

Actually there is. We could steal his money, so he would be forced to keep writing to pay his expences

"What doesn't kill them, will make them stronger" "It is killing them!" "Technicalities"

Brandon can imagine a story too long to write. And then he can write it anyway. The encounter of an unstoppable force and an unmovable object happens when a sanderson book is dropped... onto another sanderson book. Yes, they are that big. . Brandon can write a better brandon fact than this one.

Even splitting his time in many projects, he still writes more in the stormlight archive, by word count, than most writers write in their whole career. I mean, most writes would be hard pressed to pull out one stormlight book every few years, without publishing anything else in between. Anyway, creatiive work is not something you can command easily. Sometimes you are inspired, you feel the words rushing through you and you wake up in the night to put them on paper (or, rather, on a screen). and sometimes you just can't think of anything meaningful to write, and you spend hours in front of your pc without writing anything. just be glad brandon has so much inspiration that his version of "writer block" is "I need to write another book before I come back to this one"

in order to spoiler you can write like this [*spoiler]spoiler text goes here[/*spoiler] without the *. more simply, you can select special bbcode (just left of the font menu) and select spoiler from there. anyway, sanderson is occasionally bringing back characters thought dead, but he does so rarely. just enough that you can keep hoping they are alive and suffer more when they aren't

the frame of reference is that you don't move faster, you let your muscles move faster. so you can run faster by using those muscles to push on a surface (i.e. running), but it won't arbitrarily change your orbital speed.

BUt whatever the case, there is no connection between earth and roshar, because earth is not part of the cosmere. the connection is with the more earth-like planets, as scadrial sel, and maybe yolen before the skullmoss appeared.

the problem with it is that no matter how strong he is, his muscles don't move faster. say your leg muscles can contract at 30 m/s, then if yoou jump up you can achieve 2 m/s because you are heavy, if you were lighter than that you'd be able to achieve those 30 m/s, and if you were even stronger you'd be able to achieve 30 m/s while carrying stones, but no more than that. Feruchemical pewter does not increase muscle speed. Although steel does. So steel plus pewter would maybe achieve the trick. problem then is the atmosphere. I'm sure everyone here has seen enough spacecraft reentering atmosphere to know what happens when an object moving at 8 km/s comes in contact with air. It is, however, theoretically possible that tlr could survive that heat by filling a brassmind very fast. interesting possibility

they are getting sloppy, letting such a clue lie where hushlanders can see it. they must be growing complacent with their power. and when their guard will be at the lowest, then the revolution will strike. I'm already amazed that they let me post rebellious messages with just the trick of masking them for discussion of a fantasy book.

in theory it's possible for him to go to space, but in practice it probably is not, at least not practically. For ccertain he cannot do it by jumping; you need a speed of some 8 kilometers per second to attain low earth orbit, 11 to escape the earth's gravity altogether. plus you have some attrition with the atmosphere, and gravity drag (you have to give extra thrust to compensate for gravity pulling you down before you reach orbit). Overall, to place something in low earth orbit at a speed of 8 km/s it takes some 9 to 11 km/s of rocket thrust. Now, even vin was only able to jump a few hundred meters, maybe a kilometer, with duraluminium. she reached a few hundred meters per second at most. trying to get that push towards high, you will be far too high to keep pushing before you are somewhere close to orbital speed. and even then, your speed is upwards, while you need a lateral speed to orbit earth. if you only go up, you either escape earth altogether or you fall back eventually. The way it would be theoretically possible to do it is with rocketry. you have this big rocket, only instead of filling it with liquid oxygen and hydrogen you fill it with metal dust to push on. your push speeds the dust away, and propels you forward. there you go, a metal-powered rocket. However, the problem with a rocket is that the thrust you get is limited by the speed at which the exhaust is leaving, and by how much you have. the equation detailing it is here, and unfortunately I don't know how to write an equation on the forum or i would do it. anyway, rocket fuel is expelled at a speed of 4.5 km/s, and applying that equation you see that you need hallf of your rocket to be fuel to gain 3 km/s. so in order to gain 12 km/s you need half your rocket to be fuel for the first 3 km/s, then half of the remaining to be fuel for the second 3 km/s, and then half of the remaining and still half of the remaining, and in total 15/16 of your rocket must be fuel. And the remaining 1/16 mmust comprise the rocket and the fuel tanks. Although with multiple stages you can improve a little bit, because after you discard the first stages you don't need to accelerate them anymore. Anyway, that equation is the reason it takes a rocket of a few hundred tonnes to send in orbit a satellite of only a few tonnes. So, the question to do it allomantically is, how fast can a pushed object go? And the answer is, much less than 4.5 km/s. duraluminium pushing a coin does not make it catch fire for attrition like a railgun projectile. It appears there are speed limits, and no matter how much you push, you can't push an object more than that. All considered, what we see in the books make me believe a coin pushed can go no more than 1 km/s. So, applying that equation, it turns out that to achieve a speed of 9 km/s (let's assume minimal drag and going to LEO) you would need a mass of propellant 10 thousand times greater than your payload. However, it is not completely hopeless: the lord ruler can decrease his own wheight to be nothing. He also can keep all the metal dust together (except the one he's pushing) by pulling on it, so he doesn't need the extra wheight of fuel tanks. All in all, he probably needs a few tens to a few hundreds kilograms of metal to eat and metalminds, plus a bit more of metal dust to slow himself down and deorbit, because if he went to orbit and found himself stuck there without a mean to go back until his metalminds run out it would really be worthy of a darwin award. So, if we assume he has to carry with him 500 kilograms of useful payload into orbit, that would require him a "rocket" of 5000 tonnes of metal dust. That's about as much as the saturn V rocket; only, that one got like over 100 tonnes in earth orbit, while tlr would only be able to lift himself and some metal. Also, to lift all that stuff from the ground, the lord ruler must be able to provide push worth over 5000 tonnes all at once. I don't know if there is a limit on how much metal you ccan push at once, or if the only limit is that your own body must be able to resist the stress. Neither we know if even pewter and gold compounding can let your body survive when you push several tonnes of metal away from you at one kilometer per second, while pulling 5000 other tonnes of metal dust towards you to keep them together. But if those conditions are met, then yes, then theoretically the lord ruler could have gone to space. And once there he could have used tin to act as a spy satellite. And it would have taken, like, years of work of the whole empire to give him the means to do so.

ah, well, he will finish in his own time, when he feels like it. It's not like we can complain he's too slow. He mentioned an epic that shrinks on twitter. I wonder if the square-cube law will still apply. a person reduced in size that way would suddenly have superstrenght, at least compared to his size, because the muscles are still the same size compared to the rest of the body, but instead of needing to move a person by one meter with a contraction, they only need to move him a few millimeters. That's the reason insects can carry around hundreds of times their wheight, and they have smaller legs than oour in proportion. I wonder if you can use that concentrated strenght to tear up someone from the inside. Actually, probably you'd be suffocated by a drop of blood that just happens to cover you whole because of surface tension. there are downsides in the square cobe law.

I can imagine your students spending a lot of time facepalming. the ones who are not sanderfans, at least.

Gavilar wasn't a main character when he died. the fact that he's becoming one postumously doesn't change that,