king of nowhere

chaos already gavve you the rigth answer. he just sets up to write a book of, say, 100000 words, then if he has 24000 words written he says 24%. then he regularly overshoot his target, so sometimes you see the bar going back when he needs to add more chapters.

so, there must be some epic ruling on the agricultural countryside? Because it is mentioned that several cities have one epic ruling them, but I doubt many epics would have much interest in the fields surounding and feeding the city. even steelheart wasn't caring much outside the city, if i remember correctly. From what we see of the world, most of the land is abandoned. It is possible, indeed it is likely, that mmodern facilities survived in many more places than just newcago. the fact that every kind of technological product can be found with the right contacts implies that there are still somewhere the means and capabilities to produce that technology. That does not mean most of the world population is dead. there is still agriculture done somewhere, probably even with modern machinery, but only in a few, limited places.

Raoden has charisma. No, he has Charisma. No, he has CHARISMA. The day they were giving out the charismas, he was struggling with Carrot to arrive first, and no one knows who won. HE has so much charisma, that if he went into our world and run for the election with an independent party, he would become president with 100% votes. Even the republican and democratic candidates, in the secrecy of the urn, would vote for him, because he is that much of a leader. If would then move to sicily and get a private talk with mafia bosses; half an hour later, those bosses would be crying and swearing to never be nasty again. And then he would move to the middle east, and two days later israel and palestina would be signing a mutual agreement to everyone's satisfaction. And so on. That's how he's awesome. He has so much charisma, that you know he is awesome while you don't even understand why. Because, really, he was cursed and sent into a city of crazy living dead, with no resources whatsoever, and he managed to convince those feral people wanting only to find some food to temporary placate their perennial pain to follow him, and he managed to convince them to give up their food, and there were many gangs trying to kill him and he managed to convince all of those gangs to side up with him. All of this in a few weeks. With enough spare time to figure out how to fix the magic that got broken ten years ago. And then he trained his cursed followers in magic, and in one month they were skilled enough to repel an invasion of superpowered monks. And he fixed the curse.

right, i forgot to mention that part: either there is all the infrastructure that i said, or they have epic powers for doing pretty much everything. which is still possible, i suppose, but it would require hundreds of powers very carefully oriented towards technology. I was going to dismiss that as impossible, because there would be too many too specific powers involved, but on the other hand, they had 13 years to accumulate them. maybe the right answer is a mix. there is still enough civilization clinging in some places, and they have epic powers for what is not covered. maybe they got one epic power that fixes machinery, that would go a long way on making them independent rom spare parts.

No, that argument I don't buy. Regalia had cancer. Regalia wasn't afraid of prof jumping in and killing her a few weeks before she would have died anyway. In fact, regalia planned her death: after prof unleashed his power, a screen (set in the place in advance) showed prof exactly where reglia was. and since regalia knew prof and was likely to figure out his weakness, you can be sure prof would have killed her after talking to her. maybe before talking to her. So, whatever her reasons were, she certainly did not attack the reckoners for fear of being killed. In fact, that's pretty much why I am ascribing complex and possibly pseudo-altruistic motivations to her: she knew she was going to die and didn't care much anymore, did she really go through years of planning just to have a last laugh at an old friend-turned-rival?

But my point is that you cannot be a highly advanced technological organization in a vacuum. To have present-day technology, you don't need just an advanced factory. You need hundreds of advanced factories and dozens of rare resources. For example, just to have computers they need to have a microprocessor factory, which among things needs a level of clean air much greater than that of a surgical room; so you need special filters and technology for cleaning the air, and your personnel must wear special protective clothing, all of which are high technology. You need ultrapure silicon, which requires very special processing and is done in very few places in the world because few people havee the know-how to make them. And that also requires special machinery, which will wear out. And to make that you will need special metallurgical alloys, which require special machinery. So, if they knighthawk foundry is the only high-tech organization left, one day someone will run out of ion-exchange resins, without which you can't separate the rare earths into single elements, and some of those elements are needed to make touch screens, and the foundry won't be able to make mobile phones anymore. And 13 years is a fairly long time; most advanced stuff doesn't last that long. So, my argument is that if the knighthawk foundry can make mobiles, there must be someone in the world mining rare earths, someone making ion exchange resins for purifying rare earths, someone with complex chemical factories to make the aforementioned resins, someone digging oil because that's where we get most of our organic chemicals, someone producing all kinds of industrial machinery needed for the aforementioned productions, and someone maintaining a wide transportation network. It means there are plenty of organizations with access to high technology and the world is in a better shape than it looks like from what was apparent in the trip. It''s like seeing an animal and figuring that it must eat something, which must eat something else, and it must also mate with something, and so if you see one single animal you can be sure there must be a whole ecosystem somewhere.

So, the world seemmed in a pretty soorry shape when they traveled between cities, but it appears someone has still access to transoceanic transport. Interesting. Maybe the former usa had more epics than other places, so they collapsed worse? Maybe civilization has survived in a significant number of places? because Crossing the oceans requires a wide net of support. you need plenty of oil, which implies someone is still running the oil rigs. even if you had a solar-powered electric boat, you would need spare parts over 13 years. It's quite difficult to figure out exactly how broken down that world is.

ok, all things considered, my theory seems much more shacky now. Still difficult to accept that she restrained herself for years, and she went to such effort, just to mess around with one person. I still think her behavior fits better if there was a part of her trying to resist, at least for a while, but that part was probably much smaller than I previously thought, and maybe it was definitely gone when she started killing people again

@ twylight, you bring up good points. she certainly shows sadistic glee. On the other hand, she repressed those for years. That's quite difficult to understand. if she liked to hurt people, why repress it for years? Maybe she was only somewhat in control of herself, and had to figure out a plan that could satisfy both her desire to protect some people and her epic instinct to kill. @ surgebound: I was actually referring to the chance of success. If they weren't the protagonists of the story, I'd give the chances of the reckoners being able to repel every attack on their city as virtually zero. On the other hand, I give prof a more than even chance of ruling a city until he dies of old age. I mean, steelheart managed to do it for ten years, and he was far less powerful than prof was. even if prof hadn't been able to bypass his prime invincibility, he could have just confined him into shields capable of stopping a nuke, and let him rot there.

I've been wondering about her and I believe she had deeper reasons for setting up prof the way she did than just "she succumbed to epic crazyness like everyone else". Let's consider the facts: - she takes over new york, but after a few years of terror she suddenly reins in and stops killing people. she even stops her minions killing people. She only restarts to draw prof in. - She talks down david for killing steelheart because in newcago civilization had mostly survived. - she also criticize prof for bringing down epics because epics keep order. as a formmer judge, she probably cared about order a lot - the land between newcago and babylon is a post-apocalyptic wasteland - megan describes epic crazyness as the kind of selfishness of children. children wouldn't care of setting up a successor - regalia knew of calamity's nature So, I think regalia was still mostly in control of herself. she was crazy at the beginning, but then at some point she took control of herself, possibly even conquering her fear. And then she began to plan. She knows that calamity is an epic, and every other epic got his power from him. She knows that epics age. So, eventually, calamity will die of old age, and no more epic will spawn, and after all those died of old age too, there would be no more epics. That's a breaking of the world style scenario, only instead of crazy saidin channelers until they all die you have crazy people with superpowers until they all die. The end result would be the same. the few survivors would come back from hiding and would rebuild all from scratch, but with every knowledge lost, they'd be back to stone age. And since our civilization mined every valuable mineral easily mined, burned all the oil and coal close to the surface, and exploited all the non-renewable resources that were easier to exploit, a new human civilization would never be able to get past the stone age. We'd be stuck living in huts until the sun becomes a red giant and destroys the planet. But! It doesn't have to end this way. Civilization can survive under tiranny. It must survive. The good thing is that it doesn't need to survive everywhere. Just a single city that retained technology could, after the death of the last epics, restore that technology to the rest of the world. Humankind can rebuild, and in a few generations it will be as if the epics never existed, if only there is an electronic memory device fillled with science, and an electric source, and someone with the capability to understand it. But that one city must survive. And in order to survive, it needs to be protected against marauding epics. Regalia was doing just that to new york; a place where enough technology survived to rebuild after the epics. she was even trying to attract people with specializations. But then she got cancer. Without her, new york would fall to anarchy. It needed a new protector. Not the reckoners; eventually, they would be killed. If humankind could not stand up to epics when it had organized armies, what are the chances that a bunch of individuals can do better? David himself is pretty lucky to be still alive. No, the only way to defend a city is with a powerful epic taking residence there. So she devised a plan to get the mmost powerful epic she knew to take the city. One epic who already had shown a remarkable self-control and goodwill. And at the same time she would get rid of the reckoners, that in the name of unrealistic ideals threatened the precarious balance on which the future of the world hunged. And this is a book, so the reckoners will win in a good way, but if it were the real world, I'd give regalia's plan a much better chance of success than david's.

How much food is available to support the world population? With hunting and gathering, the planet could only support a few million people. To feed more than that, agriculture is needed. In the ancient age, agricullture was done manually, and hystorians estimate the world population before the industrial revolution to have reached close to one billion people, most of whom worked on the field to feed themselves. Modern agriculture started with chemical fertilizers and, later, machinery, and allowed the demographic boom that we had in the last century. now (before calamity) we are 7 billions, and we can only eat because of fertilizers and oil-driven machines. MInes extract millions of tons of phosphate minerals to provide the phosphorous component of fertilizer, air liquefiers separate nitrogen from air, send it to factories that convert it to ammonia with hydrogen (which itself is oobtained as a byproduct of oil reforming, done in even different plants), and the ammonia is converted to urea, and other minor elements are also extracted and thoroughly worked for fertilizing, and agricultural machinery is produced, and oil is extracted to empower all those processes, and a huge transportation network ensures that all those millions of tons of material get moved from their origin to the various factories and then to the fields. The collapse disrupted all of this. While some people may still work in the mines, I doubt the factories are still functional, and certainly, given the state of the roads, there is no way to transport all the wares around; certainly not the millions of tons the world uses. In the world of the epics, modern agriculture is impossible, except for a few isolated realms whit really good connections, or where epic provided food. Newcago is such an example, with conflux providing all the energy needed for the various processes. It would still be awfully difficult to find and import all the phosphate required, but for a single city it can be done. In new york, dawnslight makes food for everyone. However, those are exceptions. when david travels, he sees a desolated wasteland. No intensive agriculture is possible there. MAybe some basic subsistence agriculture, no more. Most fields are abandoned anyway, for fear that too close a concentration of population will draw epics. And the storages of canned food should have run out long since Which means that the world population cannot be much higher than 500 millions. The other 6 and a half billions are dead. Over 9 people in 10 died following the collapse. And not much for epic attacks, but because the subtle and complex mechanism that brings food to our tables and we take for granted and don't even think about got broken. That makes me look at the setting in a different light.

When you read the following quote from carl sagan And you immediately think

I don't know where the idea that elendel is the origin of polar coordinates came from, but it cannot be near a pole. modern scadrial has a climate close to that if real earth. it is the closer earth analogue in the cosmere. So, in the poles now there are ice caps. It is theoretically possible that scadrial is in a greenhouse state with temperate climate at the poles and no icecaps (earth itself had been that way for, like, 80% of the time in th last 600 million years. the current situation, where there is permanent ice both at the north and south pole, arose 20 million years ago and it never happened before in that timeframe. look "azolla event" on wikipedia for some interesting facts on how global climate cooled down quite suddenly 50 million years ago). However, brandon said that scadrial is the most similar to earth, and I suppose he referred to the earth as it is right now. he said that we can assume that if something exist on our world, it exist on scadrial too, and I take that to mean that yes, scadrial has polar icecaps. Now, in the case the city really has polar coordinates, it is fully possible that it is because they haven't explored enough of the land to make it worthwhile to adopt a normal frame of reference. if they are all living close to the city, using the city as a center would make sense.

basically, it seems the definition of high epic isn't clear-cut, while the definition of prime invincibility is.

Lightsabers and shardblades would just pass through each other without harm. shardblades are physical manifestations of cognitive ideas, and therefore are not cut by physical means like a shardblade. shardblades are a bunch of plasma in an electromagnetic field, the shardblade can pass through it, but so what? the plasma is still there, the magnetic field is still there, the lightsaber is no more cut that a pool of water would be cut if you run a shardblade in it. As for nightblood, difficult to say. it disintegrates matter in a radius over one meter, possibly based on cognitive connection. so it may be that nightblood passing through a lightsaber would disintegrate the handle, as it is cognitively part of the lightsaber.

Yeah. This is brandon sanderson we're talking about, so 400 pages count as short story. in the end it will be 1200 pages against 2000 for the original trilogy.

when you think that's sweet. I don't remember the aons by memory (not sanderfan enough for that), but if a girl attempted that on me, and i recognized she's drawing aons, and recognized the one she's drawing when consuulting my copy of elantris, then there's a good chance I'd reciprocate her just for that.

In modern time, a common soldier with a machine gun already stands a good chance. the surge to attract small objects is unlikely to deflect a bullet very much, and a full volley would hurt him enough, if not to kill him despite stormlight, to disable him long enough to change the magazine and finish him with headshots.

At first I assumed those bands held nothing more than tlr's storage of youth, so they would be of little value to anyone else (except for the part that they are made of atium, of course), but if they are hemalurgic spikes that changes everything. Anyone putting them on ould become superpowerful. Or he could just sting himself, if he fails the proper binding points, but that won't happen because, you know, story. But still, my biggest wonder is the woman. She's clearly steris, unless some other blond stern-faced character is introduced, which is clearly unlikely, and the steris we know would never go on an adventure. I have no idea how much development she needs to go from her current self to the one on that cover. I'm all OMG! I never liked her as a character, but if she loosens up a bit she may become ok. Good spotting that the writing must be from the southern continent. The words of founding include the recording of alll the keepers copperminds, so even pre-ascension writings would be readable, with the help of the right scholars. Also, Wax is sent south to investigate, and the cover depicts him in the snow, which sort of implies the southern emisphere - south of elendel they are unlikely to have winters harsh enough for snow, although it could still be a high plateau. I just wonder, if the southerners ffound the bands, why they wrote something and left them there, considering how much they're worth (and if they didn't knew what they are and how much they are worth, why write something in the first place?). ARG! I'm becomiing as bad as the other epilectic trees around. Not long ago, I would have said that the most likely explanation was that the bands are rusted to nothingness (atium was sensitive, to the point that keeping it in the stomach for a few hours would damage it), and even if they exist they are useless without the knowledge of hemalurgy, which nobody has*, and the writing are likely a gang of teenagers drawing graffiti around, and the cover depicts wax and steris in the snow because they went skiing for their honeymoon, and absolutely nothing spooky is happening. Because, in the real world, that would actually be the most likely explanation. * and even if someone knew how to spike himself, tlr was already a fullborn himself, so he only loaded the spikes for some spectacular powers, but he was relying on hi own power most of the time, so the bands are unlikely to have a complete collection of powers and anyone having them is unlikely to become that powerful

And how are 63 billion KJ and 63 trillion J different? You do remember what the prefix "kilo" means, right? Or, you could go scientific and directly say 6.3*1013 J As far as I know, the nuke releases a huge amount of heat, and that heat makes the air expand (air heated to 30 thousand degrees occupy a volume 100 times greater than it does at room temperature), and that expansion causes the shockwave. The explosion mechanism is therefore completely different from that of a chemical bomb, where a compund decomposes into smaller gaseous molecules, increasing its volume and therefore creating a shockwave. But any release of heat big and sudden enough would cause an explosion. obliteration likely released his power gradually, so there was no explosion You are doing many things wrong in your calculations. First, the degradation temperature of concrete is not an energy. to obtain an energy, you need to multiply a temperature for a heat capacity, and that for a mass. Once you know how many tons of concrete are in houston, you can multiply that for the heat capacity of conccrete to know how much energy you need to heat them all by one degree. Multiply that by the difference from the decomposition point of concrete and the room temperature, and you have the energy it takes to melt all the concrete in houston. Also, the conversion degrees-to-faranheits is not what you said. I don't remember what's the zero point, but I'm fairly sure one Celsius is equal to 1.8 Faranheit. But anyway, that's moot because, when they said that he destroied houston, they did not mean that he melted each and every single building completely. If nothing else, plenty of people run away to tell the story, otherwise the protagonists would not be discussing it. Also, there isn't a clear, well defined limit to what "houston" is, except on paper, and I doubted he looked at the maps before deciding which buildings to burn. Furthermore, he seems incapable of that kind of control required to heat each building individually, or he would have used that to melt David, or to melt the ground under his feet. So the most realistic scenario is that he just released a big heat blast from the center of the city, and that melted everythng in a radius around him and gradually lost strenght as it got farther away. the release of heat wasn't instantaneous, but gradual, so there was no exxplosion. the city center was completely devastated, while the damage was gradually less when moving outside. only buildings close to the center were melted completely, and the people burned to death too quickly to do anything. farther than that, there is a range where it got very hot but people who were fast could still run away. wood and paper may have caught fire, so the whole city burned anyway. And plenty of the heat got wasted heating the sky, or the ground, so there's no way to make an accurate calculation. The energy released could have been anything from 10 kiloton to 1 megaton.

well, depends. It is generally assumed, for the sake of an argument, that nuke=destroying a city. That's actually an oversimplification, because some nukes are more powerful than others (the tsar bomb was over 3000 times more powerful than the hiroshima bomb) and some cities are bigger than others (the hiroshima bomb dropped on new york would have only destroied downtown manhattan, which is a lot of destruction but nowhere near the whole city). However, as a general assumption, it works. the hiroshima bomb (15 kiloton, about 60 billion kiloJoules) caused widespread destruction in a few kilometers radius, which is easily an average-sized city, although many people and buildings outside the city center survived, so whether it counted as "destroy the city" is left to your judgment. The tsar bomb instead knoked down concrete buildings 50 kilometers away. In this case, to cause the level of destruction that obliteration is capable of, at least a few kilotons would be needed. If he wanted to destroy all of manhattan, more than that. EDIT: many ninjaas

I'll take technomancy. It's a minor magic system spanning all books but not discussed much, where you start with some few basic premises (called the physical laws) but you build up to very complex things. I want it because it''s the most flexible of all; it takes a lot of practice, but eventually you can do pretty much anything, from healt regeneration, to space travel, to watching naked women on a piece of glass. And everyone can use it. But, more on topic, my first choice would be to be a kandra, for the simple fact that kandras do not age and are extremely unlikely to die in accidents. I like my life already without fancy superpowers, I'd rather take more of it than add something to it. Anyway, body mastery would be useful too (look at me! I can build all the muscles I want, without getting up from bed!) Second choice would be access to tel'aran'riod. A few characters in the wheel of time remark that food eaten in TER won't fill you, so it's useless, and I always took that as a sign of how bloody stupid those characters were. I can eat everything I want without any adverse healt effect. I can see every place I want. I can do pretty much anything I can imagine, and I can imagine a lot. Ok, it won't have any effect on the real world, but all of fiction doesn't, and it's not less fun because of it. Third choice would be doing something for charity, but I can't really think of any power that can be used effectively to help others. Not in a world were "helping others" does not usually translate into "beating someone else"

the specific heat of wood is 1.7 J/g according to a table i found. so, if he can drain all the heat from 300 K to 0 K, he should get 510 kJ for every kilogram of wood (of course that's aa gross approximation, as the specific heat varies with temperature, especially over such a huge range of temperature, but I can't be more accurate with the data I have). which is about the energy released by burning 20 mL of gasoline. So, considering the plant was small enough to grow indoor (a few tens of kilos) he should get an energy equal to a few liters of gasoline. Which is not so small, when released all at once; a hand granade has less power than that. So, I don't remember exacctly how big was that blast, but it seems the energy was roughly conserved in that scene.

a possible interpretation, however some of those explanations were quite far-fetched. If one tries hard enough, he can always find a correlation between the powers and the fear, but that doesn't mean the correlation is real. the correlation between fear and weakness is, instead, much more direct. Too bad we never knew what regalia's weakness was. Also, is there an official definition of "high epic"? Because it is often meant as "one possessing a prime invincibility", but the blurb for firefight said "they told him it could not be done, that no one ever killed a high epic", which is clearly false, because the reckoners had killed epics with prime invincibilities several times. So the actuall meaning of "high epic" is undefined.

If it contains a story that was not published on the internet, then I would like one. otherwise, not really. So, I suppose the original MAG has the story "the 11th metal" in it, which was resealed with the steelhunt ccontent, in which case I don't need it. I'd like to read the letters of that crazy tineye in the AOL era instead.