Oltux72

That is true. The observed result is not uniform. Nevertheless the result is a physical object with measurable properties. Simplest example is temperature. So what determines the result of a measurement right after soulcasting? The Intent of the soulcaster? Or is it random? Or would it be result of a physical law, like temperature stays constant? Even if the soulcaster knew about it we have problems like the top a stick exposed to the sun being warmer than the bottom in contact with the ground. How much? Unknown. And if the stick were made of metal, the temperature difference were less. So what will it be right after soulcasting? This totally breaks down if we go to properties no native Rosharan knows about. If you turn a stick into a stone and try dating the stone by cosmogenic isotopes, what will be the result? The age of the stick, zero, or a typical age of rocks in the area? Or you turn a rock into wood and date it by radiocarbon, what will be the result? There can be no determination by intent if nobody knew what radiocarbon is or that it exists. The original soulcaster can be long dead by that time you measure. So like the Surges of Gravitation, Elsecalling or Adhesion can do slightly different things, soulcasting also has at least two modes?

But that is not the issue. In fact it is the very opposite of the issue. Kaladin had a problem fighting against his Singer group. In desolations you always fight innocents. The Singers are fighting to get their home back. Yet they are fighting on Odium's side. They do so because that is the side that fights for their cause. Honor's side is not the good side. It is one side in a conflict that can be partially mapped to ethics. The other part is a conflict about ownership of real estate. A Windrunner unwilling to fight innocents can just drop his weapons and go home. In fact, they did so. The humans and thereby the vast majority and leadership of the Knights Radiant are the invaders. If you go by pure untempered justice, Nale is right. Kaladin is not on the good side. He thought so, but he was mistaken. The Windrunners in general have the same issue. They are a military force. A soldier fights against other soldiers because they shoot back and they have their orders. Good enough for a private. Not good enough for an officer. Now I could quote Clausewitz at length, but basically you kill your enemies in war because they do not submit to your will. Hence the ideal is likely to be something like "Enemy combatants are not to be protected"

Therefore exactly you should use it before gems become scarcer. No, by your own reasoning. Soulcasters run on money. Deflation means that you get less money for the stuff you make. Hence you should sell as much stuff as you can before money becomes scarce.The premise is that you can operate at a profit. Use it to make money.

He did them little to no good. And his soulcaster was used rarely. They could have run it round the clock turning out aluminium.

Odium and the Unmade are on Roshar or at least the Rosharan system And at the risk of repeating myself. If you had very few soulcasters, would you really give one away for free to Lin Davar? (Scadrial) (Threnody) And artillery. Shard Plate against rifles may be unclear, but a shell will do the job. And they do not have all that many sets of Plate on Roshar. And whatever the ether in their collection can do. Quite possibly the earliest though. Acquire, yes. Control and monitor inconspiciously, no. You hardly can put a servant there. And Shallan is the most senior member of the order. If they wanted to get a spy into the Knights Radiant specifically. Shallan will be as good as it gets. That however is a reason they should have used their soulcaster there, economically speaking.

Now that is an interesting option. How good would you have to be at soulcasting? And would you get the primer right?

After how much maintainance and use? And which percentage is that old? Right, but she is a kind of high risk/high reward personality. She figures that they will all be sold into slavery, if this fails. So she can just as well spend what she has got. She is going all in in poker terms. Non-economic. Possibly intelligence, possibly political ... Shallan is effectively a tax dodger. The cost of gems is merely a lower limit on the cost of soulcasting. Scarcity of soulcasters has driven prices higher. You may notice that she intended only to make fairly precious kinds of stone. Again, the gun, yes. The ammo, no. If you got a blackpowder rifle, then yes, you could reverse engineer the charge on that. But not if you are confronted with modern smokeless powder in an encased round.

4. Imports 5. However Yelig-Nar makes gemstone grow on his (her?) hosts

Right. What you have is instead a kind of floor in the value given by the physical value. If the price goes too low, people will "burn money". The priesthood actually I suspect. They also set wages, if I understand the system correctly. I suspect that that is also a part of the reason Roshar does not advance faster. Too much government and administration.

Either you can choose not to preserve mass the statues are hollow the transformation uses ambient air as "filler material"

Let the brain hurt begin. How do you actually use your soulcaster and what are the consequences? Let's begin with what we know: mass is conserved (Adolin's observations as a wall is created from air) either heat or temperature is usually conserved (Jasnah soulcasting Shallan's blood into unpoisoned blood) The second point may be unobvious. So let's start with an obvious observation. Shallan survived the treatment. That means that her blood cannot have been heated or cooled by a lot. Unfortunately blood with poison and blood without poison have virtually identical physical properties, including heat capacity. Other transformations including drastically air into stone or stone into meat do not preserve heat capacity. It takes about five times as much energy to warm meat than it takes to warm stone. So either the meat would come out at liquid nitrogen temperatures or heat is not preserved. Now either a part of the mass is turned into heat or energy is created from nothing. As matter has fantastic amounts of energy nobody would notice or even be able to measure with Rosharan equipment the losses or gains needed for that. I think we may tentatively conclude that anything you soulcast ends up at the temperature of the stuff you created it from. (Excluding the essence of fire) There is also the issue of entropy. I guess it really has to go out of the window. You can reduce entropy by soulcasting. You can mix two substances, divide the result and soulcast both halves back into pure substances. Entropy is reduced. Now the elephant in the room, the essence of fire. Let's again begin with the obvious observation. Jasnah did not level a city block when she soulcast a would-be robber into fire. That is remarkable when you consider what should happen if you turn the mass of a human body into hot gas of the same mass and have it occupy the same volume. However, the temperature of the gas is of minor importance here. Soulcasting any large object into air or smoke, particularly in an underground location should already have been like a bomb going of. At that point I am stymied. Possibly the effects of the transformation actually take some time and the gas is released in the course of time? And where is the ash you should expect if you incinerate a human body?

If you so desire. Apparently you can make any organic matter.

On the floor? They are apparently not all that great at aiming, at least in the beginning.

To isolate an area. An exchange at exactly the time somebody is leaving or entering a teleport area may lead to a fatal bisection. They would need a mechanism to curtain off the volume inside both places before the transfer takes place.

Then they should have labels. The consequence of two people elsecalling to the same area is unlikely to be pretty. Yet the dimensions more or less are a reminder of the human body. They may just be 3D-screens. But then conference rooms should have multiple of them quite in the center of rooms. If however, they are supposed to serve physical transport we would expect that important rooms may have multiples, but they should be along the walls to not take up interior space.

How can we know that the device could make only marble? The argument of economics still applies. Is there any other kind of stone that would be economic to make? And it had sockets for three gemstones. Furthermore how sure are we that the jewelery made from aluminium Shallan got was actually purchased in that material? It still seems inconsistent to me that a group able to make a new fabrial for smoke who can afford to just use it to run a fire in a basement would have difficulty with a soulcaster. I suspect they just took one out of a storage bin for standard equipment. Fortune. At least a plausible answer and better than many others. He had the advantage of being an unobvious candidate. Or they asked their oracle based on Fortune: "We have this scheme to make a house material for blackmail with a soulcaster in order to gather information among aristocrats. Whom should we pick? ". Answer: "Davar". They just assumed it was Lin Davar. The oracle latched onto Shallan.

They got Classical mechanics - the stuff Navani makes and the sewers she understands are very hard to explain unless she knows Newtonian mechanics geography - they know Roshar is a sphere. They also have a lot of shipping. Heliocentric model? Laws of gravity? Navani can draw water from the air - she understands state diagrams and probably gas laws confirmed by knowing barometric height formulas (they determined the elevation of Urithiru that way) ecology - Shallan understands prey/predator relations optics - spy glasses But they are weak in applied chemistry - no explosives chemistry and atomic theory - the ten essences just mess you up geology - no natural examples evolutionary biology - mixed up biota thermodynamics - heating fabrials and too much magic, in particular, physics on Roshar is just not a closed system - get onto a spring, summon and banish your blade - perpetuum mobile All in all, about the level of Europe in approximately 1650

Short range versions of oath gates?

Hm. We have seen few of them outside the Ardentia. In particular none of the universal kind. Shallan never really had experience with money. Well, if they wanted to maximize the monetary gain from the device by the marble scheme they would have made multiple mines in a short time and repeated the scheme at multiple locations throughout Roshar. You would also pick locations that allow shipping the marble out by ship easily. And you wouldn't train local people in the use of a soulcaster. And foremost, they would have kept the device. Would you really leave your only soulcaster in the hands of a man of ill repute and questionable economic sense? And why operate in the Vorin east, where the Ardentia is a problem and soulcasters are more common? Plan B I suppose. Why interact with the Davars in the first place? That they selected a man with political ambitions indicates political goals. EDIT: It is very much of a coincidence that they picked the family of the first Lightweaver. But they were not the only ones. Hoid showed up, too. And he did not know who would be the Surgebinder. It is quite possible that the Ghostbloods also can use Fortune. In that case it is possible that they do not know what they want. In that case killing the Davars is not an option. Putting pressure on them to do something unusual or spur a third party into doing so is very much an option. Assuming you care about the device. If you are running some political scheme, you can continue it that way. They wanted to become powerful people. It looks like "The Manchurian Candidate" in an aristocratic version to me. (Scadrial spoilers) And if you are going up against Shardbearers, assassination is exactly what you want. They cannot wear plate 24/7. They could always hire mercenaries. And employ really new tactics. Like a chull cart full of explosives.

Yes, I am sorry. Still they cannot be repaired by lay people. Yes, but how are the rates? Again their aim is not economic. Either they just want to cover up loose ends or this is blackmail and they seek concessions rather than the device And they have access to (Scadrial spoilers) as well as ethers. Whatever be their ultimate motive, if they wanted to rule, they could.

For all we know the official reason Szeth being in jail is failing to deliver a revolutionary weapon to his commander.

Sorry for being unclear. To be perfectly blunt: You are looking at spilled milk. They knew before the start of TWoK. Anything else would be too big a political risk.

No. If I may quote: It has three gemstones. For the rest we need to speculate. The Ghostbloods have a connection to places where mass manufacture is known. They are very good at making fabrials. That they make Soulcasters for their own members as tools is likely. What do you put into a soulcaster used as a survival tool? Assuming that you are sure that your people do not end up in airless places, you'd have to cover: water shelter heat defense communication Ideally you'd want also food and healing, but that requires extensive training. So I would include water stone for construction (metal and glass are options, but given lightning and stealth, worse options than stone) fire (heat and defense) Water and fire are reasonably suited for removing obstacles, too.

The problem with that is that is twofold. First, it applies long before he went to the Nightwatcher. In fact, even more so. Them not knowing the truth gives every potential enemy a weapon against House Kholin. Second, she was a traitor. She tried to help and everything, but it cannot change one basic fact. She made an unauthorized peace offer. That is treason. Again, you cannot spare the boys, because an enemy may make that allegation and they have to know that they may come into a situation where they cannot refute such an allegation.

His deal with Taravangian is hard to explain if killing most people were unimportant. In fact, he would have made the offer to Dalinar. It looks to me like (near)eradication of man on Roshar is a necessary but by itself insufficient condition for his success. Possibly he intends to cause so much destruction that Cultivation has no choice but to come out and fight in person.