Oltux72

On 1.12.2022 at 3:38 PM, kenod said:

Honestly, this. Scadrial's magic isn't too well-suited for conventional warfare, even if a couple parts are, but it's very good for unconventional warfare, such as secret ops.

Well, no. They have artillery observers. People who can motivate troops. Means to allow an HQ to think things through. People who are strong enough to wear armor that will stop a bullet. People who can walk through a cloud of gas without protective equipment.

Scadral is more prone to produce assassins if you look at it with individual combat in mind. If you look at it from the point of supporting industrialized warfare, which includes logistics and combined arms, things change again. The key here is industrialized. It is true that other worlds are better at supporting preindustrial warfare. But you are not going to Soulcast an artillery shell and railways to move canned food remove a lot of the relative advantage of operating without logistical support for food.

8 hours ago, CMac716 said:

So, what if it's a reverse loophole, a check-mate by none other than Cultivation. TOdium is still bound by the agreement he made with, well, himself. Odium the shard is bound by the agreement made with Taravangian that Karbranth and its people were to be left alone.

An agreement based on Taravangian serving Odium. He has done the very opposite.

10 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

mistborn, inquisitors, feruchemists, none of them was powerful enough to derail a plot.

Yet major plot points of The Final Empire revolved around hiding from them.

10 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

harmony is powerful enough to derail a plot. so is marsh.

So was The Lord Ruler. Yet he is dead and gone.

10 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

we though kelsier was also way too powerful, but apparently he lost his powers somehow, that simplifies matters

It seems to me that the issue arises from Brandon telling stories about near-normal people in clashes of titans, if you will.

Earlier stories, especially The Final Empire, were about people in hiding.

On 14.12.2022 at 5:58 PM, king of nowhere said:

as the cosmere progresses, it's gradually being filled by immortal people with awesome powers.

I worry that could pose narrative problems, of the "why don't they intervene" variety.

oh, for a story about something relatively unimportant that's not an issue. everyone could read alloy of law and accept that harmony is not going to personally intervene against a band of robbers, no matter how dangerous.

On Scadrial the number of extremely powerful individuals is going down. No more Mistborn, no new Steel Inquisitors, no full Feruchemists. In the wider Cosmere, the number of Shards is going down, too. On Roshar the Fused are a shadow of their former glory. A vessel is killed by mortal hands. Aluminium is spreading.

On 1.12.2022 at 11:17 PM, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Recommended strategies: Roshar excels in numbers and power, the most ideal strategy would be to either gather your army and crush your opponent in a single attack,

Find a native ally.

On 1.12.2022 at 11:17 PM, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

or otherwise hunker down and allow them to break against you. I think it's fair to say that Roshar is the most defensively potent planet so far analyzed, perhaps the most potent outright, most invading forces would break themselves to pieces before they cause even minor inconvenience to Roshar.

1. Strike at the oathgates
2. Isolate the perpendiculatities
3. Go for the Spren. Roshar has a lot of physical fighters and Investiture, but the Spren are not all that trained in war

On 1.12.2022 at 11:17 PM, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

However getting their investiture off world is not currently possible for Rosharans, which really holds them back as their investiture is incredibly powerful. If Roshar is to improve they will have to find a way to move investiture off world, unite at least a few of it's factions, and possibly find out how to recruit more Chasmfiends or Larkin.

Can Regals go off world?

20 hours ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

They can't take stormlight off world either. Yet.

If they can get Regals off planet, they can generate Voidlight in the field.

21 hours ago, Ati16 said:

It's possible that not every feruchemist was slaughtered by the inquisitors. Some might not have been in Tathingdwen when the inquisitors attacked or some might have escaped and Kelsier could have recruited them to make the bands.

The Bands require you to have Nicrosil. That means you need Nickel and Chrome. Metals the Final Empire did not know. This needs a serious industrial base. Hence I very much doubt they were available during the lifetime of immediate survivors.

They may have gotten new Ferrings through the collateral lines. But you have to find them. That means you have to seek out possible candidates and ask them to store stuff in hard to make metals. Consider what aluminium alone still cost in the time of Alloy of Law. And they need enough metal minds of even more exotic stuff to test thousands of people decades or centuries earlier, depending on when exactly the Bands were made.

4 minutes ago, DiePie said:

tbf, they already know who is/isn't an allomancer because of the mistsickness, they'd only need enough of each metal to try them out on an average of 16 people (less, since a lot of the mistings of more common metals were already tested). I think if they knew how to acquire the required metals it wouldn't be difficult.

The Allomancers are not the problem. The feruchemical parts of the Bands are the issue.

4 hours ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Alright, that's  fair but here's my question: What is the Evil?

We do not know. Neither would an attacker.

4 hours ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

I can't make a full analysis of the Evil if we don't know what it is. Can the Evil leave its continent? Is it even sentient in the first place? We just don't know enough to say, so I don't think I can go into more detail than I have.

That suggests that you are missing a category of analysis indicating the quality and quantity of intelligence an attacker could gather.

10 hours ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

The Maskless and the Malwish interact to a much greater degree than they do with the North, Allik mentions that they have wars against the Maskless in BoM.

And given the map the Malwish have probably been acting as a barrier between the Maskless and the Basin.

Yes. So you have a nation that is hostile towards another nation on a different continent, yet none of them uses its navy to seek island bases in the ocean to fight the other nation from? Why?

10 hours ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Could you elaborate further? I'm afraid I don't understand what problem this causes.

Because if you attack Threnody, whom will you fight against? The Threnodites? The Threnodites and the Shades? The Threnodites, the Shades and the Evil? That is if you decide to only invade the Forests of Hell and the Evil decides that it is not OK with an alien beachhead on its world even on another continent and comes to fight you, your war plans have just been seriously derailed.

11 hours ago, Ati16 said:

They had a lot of allomantic metals stored up in the Urteau storage cavern.

The metals known and producible in the Final Empire. To make the Bands you'd need Bendalloy, Chromium, Nicrosil, Duraluminium and Aluminium in the quantities that allow you to test the population.

On 7.12.2022 at 3:07 PM, Ati16 said:

Spook wouldn't need to be a fullborn to make the bands. He could just spike himself to give him f-nicrosil and do the same thing to <fifteen other ferrings. Kelsier could have had multiple people working on creating the bands.

I am afraid not. It would take metals that had an astronomical cost at that time to identify the Ferrings.

16 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Probably the Maskless.

And that is a deeply problematic explanation. The more human peoples you add, the less likely is that none of them is nautically inclined. So I think it is likely that the factor we are not getting is not human, or at least not fully human as seen in full Koloss.

On 7.12.2022 at 6:22 PM, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Armed forces: Threnody mostly uses medieval weapons due to the three rules, and as a consequence of the Evil has a relatively small population, but they do know about gunpowder, and may make use of it if they go off world. There are several small forts acting as government, but no groups we know enough about to list as notable.

That is true for the human Threnodites who fled from the Evil. We have no idea how sapient the Evil is and what become of the people staying on the old continent. And that is the major problem of the rest of the analysis.

On 7.12.2022 at 6:22 PM, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Notable uses of investiture: Nahz has guns that shoot shades, if these are able to be reproduced it turns Threnody into a serious threat.

Provided it was developed there. For all we know it was made in Silverlight.

On 7.12.2022 at 7:04 PM, Ookla the Observant said:

It is implied in Secret History that shades exist in Threnody's subastral and are considered an active threat, at least to the Ire. In fact, the Ire (and shadegun) imply that those shades might be able to leave Thenody's subastral. Lastly, the Homeland's Cognitive Realm reflection is dangerous due to the presence of the Evil. 

They mistook Kelsier for a Shade. Now we do not know how a Shade looks in Shadesmar, but there is a very good chance Threnody before the Evil had other Shades than current THrenody.

18 hours ago, Treamayne said:

I would imagine that since both continents lost 75+% of their population an that hundreds or thousands of miles separate the settled areas of North and South, 300 yrs seems a short amount of time to rebuild infrastructure, regrow population, innovate technology and explore the new/unsettled areas. SA Spoilers:

  Reveal hidden contents

After all, the Listeners settled the Shatterd plains and wastes of former Natanatan for at much longer (4 millenia~ish) without ever encountering the humans to the north, south, east, and west until Eshonai met Gavilar's hunting party.

 

They wanted to hide, at least their ancestors wanted. And it is inland. I am afraid I have to point out that the first circumnavigation of the Earth happened centuries before, for example, the sources of Nile were scientifically explored and published.

14 hours ago, Jofwu said:

measurements. So anyways, let's assume that Scadrian miles are the same distance as a standard real-world mile. Which given the whole "Scadrial is like Earth" premise is probably a safe assumption?

Which real world mile? Why not nautical miles or the Scadrian equivalent?

Yes, Scadrial is an analogue to Earth. But the Earth is larger than peoples using customary British units.

14 hours ago, Jofwu said:

For the measurements we have, it suggests the longitude lines are spaced at 10.7-12.6 degrees... out of 360. Now, they could be spaced as 12 degrees. It wouldn't be the most unreasonable number to go with... But it IS odd. And we've been wondering about the possibility of Scadrians using a different number of degrees in a circle... Well, if we back up just a tad, what I'm getting is that there must be 28 and 34 lines of longitude (at 745 to 874 miles spacing).

Do we know into how many hours the Scadrians split their day?

6 hours ago, Jofwu said:

There was a Cosmere.es interview from a bit before the TLM release where Brandon said we would get a new map but it would NOT be a map of the whole planet. And probably by Era 3 we would. So there must be more. Now, it's possible the only thing left is the land at the edges of this map and no telling how extensive those get... Regardless, I feel like it must imply there's *something* notable out there.

I am already hard pressed to accept one people who are abyssimally bad at seafaring. Yet another?

2 hours ago, StanLemon said:

I'm not so sure the Final Empire region would be too big. It was described as taking months via canals to get from the western most regions to Luthadel. That would make more sense if the Final Empire was continental in scale like your second map presumes

Indeed.

9 hours ago, Ookla of axi said:

All excellent questions.  If the same geophysical laws operate as here on earth, then the Elendel Basin - at sea level and less than 10° from the equator - is in the warmest, wettest, and most consistent climate zone on the planet.  @Oltux72 is correct in comparing its location to that of Dakar on the coast of West Africa, which has average daily temperatures around 28 °C (83 °F) and average night lows of 21 °C (70 °F).  The all-time record low temperature in Dakar is 14 °C (57 °F).

Given that it does snow in Elendel, the warmest place in the world... most OTHER places on Scadrial should be VERY cold indeed.

Yes, so I think Scadrial is a lot farther out from its star, respectively that star is dimmer than our sun. We should also note that Scadrial seems to have a lot less land than the Earth, unless there are even more unknown continents. That should make ocean currents more effective in heat transport and storms not broken up by any land over three quarters of a planet should be fantastic. Brandon has a thing for storms. I do not want to live on an east coast on Scadrial.

9 hours ago, Ookla of axi said:

So the Southern Scadrians have lived for 300+ years in a place too cold for them, where they need magical technology powered by dedicated metalborn slaves just to survive... and never considered moving someplace warmer?  What's Kelsier been doing all this time?  What about Marsh, and Harmony, and all the Kandra?

The implicit assumption being here that major warmer places exist on the planet. If Elendel is what you get in the wet tropics, I'll not bet on that.

9 hours ago, Ookla of axi said:

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that both of these cultures, North and South, have apparently somehow coexisted on the same landmass for 300+ years without any contact.  I guess we are supposed to infer that there is the Scadrian equivalent of the Himalayas separating them... but both sides surely must have had boats for quite a while now, right?  One side has railroads and the other side airships, for Harmony's sake.  By 1850 on earth, people had explored (and colonized) every coastline not covered with ice.

We might assume that the oceans of Scadrial are a bit rougher than ours. In fact Scadrial seems to be on a different period of the supercontinent cycle. And in general has less continental crust.

9 hours ago, Werewolff Studios said:

There's some really fantastic observations here! Personally, I've always seen the Basin itself as magically Invested to create the most livable climate all year round.

I'd argue that it s too cold for that.

9 hours ago, Werewolff Studios said:

We've seen that the Roughs are warmer than the Basin, despite sitting at a similar point above the equator. 

Do we? They are separated from the ocean by substantial mountain ranges. We'd expect them to show climate a lot more continental. Thus the extremes of warmth will be above the Basin's. But that does not make them warmer over all.

9 hours ago, Werewolff Studios said:

Regarding the non-Interactions of the people, I think there are a few points to consider. For one, both societies were almost completely destroyed during the Catacendre, which would've taken a lot of time to recover from - both physically and culturally. We also know that the relatively 'easy' life of the Basin slowed their technological progress and, likely, their explorative progress as well. Why travel over the Himalayas or across tumulted seas when all the food and wealth is in the Basin? 

Colonists in North America in 1600 - a few hundred
Colonists of North America in 1900 - annexing islands in the Pacific and East Asia

The thing is that they have explorers and they do feature in popular culture. And they are mining the Roughs, transporting ores by rail. Shipping the would be a lot cheaper.

9 hours ago, Werewolff Studios said:

Another point to consider is that the Malwish Continent isn't a happy one. We know there's five main cultures throughout the continent, and it's likely they would've been fairly combative over the medallions during the past three-hundred years. Maybe that would've slowed their exploratory progress northward? We don't know how long they've had airships either - that might be a (relatively) recent invention. 

That is more or less the opposites of what we've seen in history. The countries with most wars sent out out most explorers. Cook, La Perouse, Bougainville, Drake ...

By this point I think we need additional parties to explain this. If I may propose

1. Sea monsters - there must be a reason the Malwish went for airships in a big way
2. Koloss - we may be drastically underestimating the number of Koloss. Voyages between North and South over land may run into culinary difficulties. With ordinary people no longer at the food chain's apex
3. the unknown metal constructs mentioned in one of the broadsheets of The Bands of Mourning. Travellers may meet entities that do not want to be met and reported on

3 hours ago, robardin said:

Nobody... What? Nobody from Bridge Four has their tattoos any more? They all Stormlight healed them off as their Identity no longer includes those Ideals?

That would make me quite sad.

Optimist. They are all dead but Sigzil. Now you can be sad.

2 hours ago, Ookla of axi said:

Back to the original discussion, the Basin being tropical does make some sense in terms of 1) a very mild and hospitable climate,

It snows there. Not a lot, but it does. How high are the mountains where the Bands were kept supposed to be to have that harsh a climate?

Why do their houses have fireplaces? And they are wearing suits and vests? In what is geographically speaking Dakar?

Marasi was buying locally grown apples. In central Africa?

On 7.12.2022 at 10:17 AM, therunner said:

Strictly speaking original method to access Surgebinding is something from Ashyn, possibly facilitated by Odium and/or some Dawnshard. They did wield Surges back then and destroyed Ashyn with them.

I would doubt that. It is quite clear that the Surges are original to the Rosharan system. Whatever the human immigrants to Ashyn had, it probably wasn't Surgebinding. It was some other system. Yes, the Eila Stele spoke of Surges. But that is meaningless. They knew nothing else.

On 7.12.2022 at 10:17 AM, therunner said:

Honorblades would be the second method then.

No. We have seen this music method of using the Surges the Singers are still using. And there is obviously the Stormfather. And we have no idea how old Regals are. And, obviously, the Singers and animals of Roshar themselves. The reduction of mass Chasmfiends and other animals show must be old.

Where would they go? The gas giants? It seems to me that a driving force behind our space programmes was the existance of the moon. Scadrians by now know that other worlds are inhabitated. For them it is FTL or they will at best use a few staellites.

On 4.12.2022 at 3:24 AM, Ookla of axi said:

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/508-dragonsteel-2022/#e15856

 

Trust me, I promise it's not spoilery at all.  But just in case:

  Hide contents

apparently Elendel sits at just about 10 degrees north latitude.

@Jofwu @Oltux72 @cometaryorbit

Yes, I need to conclude that Scadrial is in a wider orbit than the Earth. And that raises the point why they still have seasons in the Basin. Axial tilt must be extreme.

10 hours ago, Werewolff Studios said:

Gotcha - wasn't sure if you were referring to the bond or the spren part of the statement. 

I suppose it would be accurate to say it's 'one' magic system if you phrased it more like this; All Rosharan magics are linked to the spren, with mortals being able to access this magic via a bond with certain spren.

I am afraid I need to remind you that the original method to access Surgebinding were the Honorblades and that the Heralds had bodies with magical capabilities long before Spren were involved.

17 hours ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

The Spoiler stream reveled that they have a magic system we have seen.

Does that tell us much? If Odium can make you a Surgebinder, we must assume that Bavadin can make you a Sandmaster. That is usable for combat.

2 hours ago, Treamayne said:

So, most likely somebody unknown (and unlikely to be Terris - due to description) - but possibly Spook.

The problem I have with that is that I do not understand how one the greatest Tineyes would let an amateur teenage assassin surprise him.

11 hours ago, StormingTexan said:

All the speculation on this and it was debunked in the TLM Spoiler Stream 

Edit: Nvm as usual I am late to the party and someone already posted about this. 

Brandon was oddly specific. He said that safe for Hoid nobody with a bond to a Spren got off Roshar with his powers intact. That leaves two loopholes

• unbonded Spren
• breaking your powers by leaving

(Secret Project #4)

I must also note that an unbonded Spren for some reason leaving Roshar's astral has a much greater incentive to bond. There are no Spren cities on other astrals. You'd be at best an exile among aliens. At worst you'd sit alone on bare rock.

What we saw from Scadrial's astral in Secret History was essentially a desolate wasteland. Granted, 347 years is a long time, but still whoever lives in the presumptive trade posts that must exist for canned food to go over the mists replacing land, it won't be Rosharan Spren.