Oltux72

The Honorblades are weapons The Heralds got Surges from their Blades They were provided new bodies for each return Those bodies were very good bodies with superhuman abilities so useful in combat The Heralds get supplied with the current language upon their return (Taln speaks contemporary Alethi) They get a convinient head start to form and train armies in each Desolation The Dawnshards were available to them, at least for some time What does it tell you about the planer if what is called a backup plan for an eventuality is better thought out, better prepared and works better than the primary plan?

I am channeling my inner Jasnah and saying the unthinkable. It was necessary and therefore a good thing. What was the alternative? A continous Desolation? Mankind would have lost and become enslaved, possibly extinct. Yet let's look at the morals of this act. They abandoned Taln. And they did not obtain prior permission. But, and that needs to be made clear, they did not force it upon him. He could have yielded. So do we seriously want to argue that the Oathpact itself, which meant letting a small group bear the burden for all eternity was acceptable but letting one bear it alone for as long as he chose was utterly depraved? I think not. Who was the true villain of Stormlight Archive? I am going to be blunt: Honor The Desolations were planned for. I a sorry, but the Heralds are just too well equipped for war. Beyond their superpowers, they are even speaking the language of the time they are returning to. They were meant to be leaders and generals. I am sorry, but Honor planned this. He plunged a whole planetary system into eternal wars for his own goals and in contrast to Odium, he did not admit his own goals. He deserved his ultimate demise.

Taln is worst and he was tortured the longest. It should be noted that his spren was likely already bound to him during the Recreance. That may be what "living in death" means. The alternative to abandoning their oaths was driving their spren insane. And you forgot something Fear of Death. - All this time they knew that if something fatal happened to them they'd either face eternal torture or causing a Desolation That is not a contradiction. It is perfectly possible to be unable to fix a problem because you have that problem. They have lived millenia with Taln being tortured and fearing what the next Desolation will do. Inconclusive. There is a basic problem with this assumption the Heralds got weapons the Heralds got Surges the Heralds got a repeated facility for making bodies the Heralds get bodies with superpowers I cannot help myself. The Desolations were forseen and planned for. And these features came from Honor himself. Do we really wish to assume that Honor forsaw the Desolations but thought they could go on forever? It rather looks to me like Honor started living in denial when he made the Oathpact and doomed himself thereby.

Do we not have multiple quotes from Waxillium that he can defend himself against bullets only if he knows they are coming before they are fired? Well, this is what I was touching upon. They have armies, albeit small ones. Is there a real difference between large scale combat against, for example, bandits and a small war? Is that what is currently going on in Syria a war? Were the countless colonial military campaigns in Africa war? I feel forced to make a salvage attempt. Did Waxillium actually shoot him, or did he kill as a Coinshot and merely created an unopposed projectile against another Coinshot by explosive disassembly of a cartridge?

I am afraid that is just not true. If you throw a Shardblade out of a window without knowing where it will land, it will still be fatal to somebody on whose head it lands, totally without any Intent.

A coin has far worse aerodynamics. Furthermore from a viewpoint of a coinshot, you can get far more energy into a slow, heavy projectile. The internal ballistics of a coinshot are the same as the external ones. His barrel length depends on the distance he can push on an object for. That in turn goes up with mass. True but at least the effect is predictable. True but that has diminishing returns. Once you are below human reaction times, you are done. Depends on what you mean by war. The great houses definitely have troops. Scadrial has weak governments and a very armed nobility. Nobility in turn means allomancers.

Yes. There is considerable variation, but it can still be explained. I was looking for patterns. BTW can we conclude from their helplessness when finding Kandra that they do not have X-ray machines?

That is a strange conclusion. The weak handguns in the video went through two plates of pine at an optimal angle. The rifle destroyed the thing. Yes, Waxillium is using a revolver. That tells us something about the gun. But what does it tell us about the ammo?

You are conflating two technologies that are related but not precisely the same. Wooden armour against longarms was hopeless even as early as the 18th century. But that is not what we are talking about in a saloon fight. They were using handguns. As far as metal armor is concerned, the idea that it totally vanished many centuries ago is false. Breastplates remained in use on the battlefield into the 19th century. Why did shields vanish? Because armor you can wear is superior in terms of mobility and allows both hands to be used.

Sure, but why? Because 1850 or so it had a decent chance of working. It seems to me that we are approaching old movies with an attitude of hubris. They were made by people whose grandparents still had memories of using weapons powered by black powder. Remember that muzzle energy goes up with the square of velocity.

Or are they? Compared to our firearms they are. There is no question about that. @SkipMage and @mathiau are likelier to be able to give more examples than I but Skulls thick enough to stop a bullet thieves considering an oak table sure to stop bullets are not realistic with modern firearms. But are we looking at modern firearms? I would say we are not. And that cleans up the discrepancy. I would say that Scadrian firearms match ours in performance somewhere around 1800 in terms of muzzle velocity. But this is not a technical oddity. It makes very much sense in their terms. Hence I did not include this in a thread dedicated to technological oddities (and frankly, it had enough examples). I will allow myself a slight discourse into the philosophy of engineering. If you build a gun and its ammunition you have competing design goals muzzle energy stopping power accuracy rate of fire reliability durability price And possibly more. But Scadrians are in an environment where fights against allomancers are a possibility. Hence they could never switch exclusively to guns. Crossbows and wooden clubs (they call them duelling canes because it sounds better) are still a thing. Against a Coinshot a gunfighter is at a disadvantage. The Coinshot can carry more ammunition, does not need a rifle, is quieter and, most important, can sense and disarm you. Are you at an incurable disadvantage? Well, no. You do have one major area in which you have a potential edge: accuracy You have gunsights. The Coinshot has not. More important, your accuracy allows you to outrange Coinshots in a sensory sense. Waxillium when flying up a highrise is limited to using the structural steel in it. He cannot push on the streetlights on the ground. His range against objects in that size class must be below 200m at most. That is well under the range of our rifles. It is not well below the range of historical firearms. Hitting somebody with a standard military gun made around 1800 at a range of 200m is outrageous. But not because the bullet would not fly that far or fail to kill you at such range, but because your accuracy was hopeless. They did not even try in military tactics. That has consequences. The main design goal of firearms development is shifted. Muzzle energy is pointless, if using it means coming so close that you will already have been killed before you are in range. Your primary design goal is now accuracy at range and secondarily rate of fire, because you surely won't live long enough for a lengthy reload against a coinshot, nor is the stopping power to reliably drop a Pewterarm with one bullet within easy reach, nor will you hit an electrum allomancer without a hail of bullets. Remember that Wellington, Blücher and Napoleon still fielded riders whose body armor was expected to stop a longarm's bullet. Complaints about performance are - I am afraid - anachronistic and not adapted to circumstances.

For over 300 years? OK, maybe my views on human nature are more down to Earth. And it wouldn't require him to move at all. There are very good rational and ideological reasons to bear a Mistborn's child, especially in the South. Other Cognitive Shadows are also bound to their place of origin. Putting the blame for that onto the Oathpact is the less likelier option. Furthermore, the thing that binds Odium himself to the Rosharan system is still active. Nobody claimed that it has ceased to exist. It merely has stopped working. Maybe it can even be fixed, but for now it is no longer working and cannot be made to work again by just ending the Desolation. Shards can bring back the recently deceased. Why would transporting somebody over interplanetary distances be hard?

Yes. During the party Wayne impersonates a scientist at Shadow of Self, chapter 9 Then And that is the Stark (No, not the one with the implanted power plant and the flying armor. Professor Stark was from Hamburg IIRC) effect. I had to look that effect up. We call this a spectrogram and not a spectral field, but at its core it is a plot of intensity vs. frequency/wave length. Calling that a field is not unreasonable. You could even say that it shows yields at certain frequencies. And a magnetic field splitting up spectral lines is what the Zeeman effect experimentally speaking is. I am afraid finding another explanation for this exchange is extremely difficult. Somebody called Higgens or working for somebody called Higgens discovered the Zeeman effect within the last few years.

Odium himself: For centuries? Kelsier is a great man, but he is a man.

To be tortured to save a whole world is one thing. To suffer it after the scheme designed to render your actions moot is sure to be soon implemented is another far less desirable thing. In addition, as far as he knew the Rosharans needed to be warned. All you need to explain this is for Taln to be able to sense the coming Everstorm. That is plausible. Many Spren were able to do so. In fact the Stormfather had started talking to Gavilar. The same way Raboniel got her answers within a few hours? Why would the exact method matter? Well, the basic problem remains. Testament bonded Shallan before Shallan killed her mother. Yet the bond is supposed to have triggered the killings. And these bonds were supposed to be a recent development in response to a looming Desolation. There is a basic contradiction. Or Thaidakar. We are talking about hundreds of years and a public figure with a large number of admirers. Frankly, this is nigh inevitable.

If you were ruthless enough, emotional allomancy would have incredible usability in everyday life.

Do need to channel my inner Steris? People do have affairs. My inner sense of fairness is stirring. Have we ever heared Gavilar's side of the story? He could not admit that he is literate. Somebody has to been seen reading to him and his letters cannot be by his own, unknown hand. How shall I put this, in other cases being a warlord and burning your wife is not seen as an issue that could not be fixed.

They are rings in terms of topology. The shape they are depicted in those charts as cannot be based on the Surges themselves. The shapes of the symbols are based on symmetry, yes, but that may just as well be a cultural convention. Those Vorins have a highly contentious relation with symmetry. We have seen the symbols of the orders. But those are of orders, not Surges and may well come out of whatever Ishar did to establish the Knights Radiant. After one year we can be pretty sure that Navani investigated a security risk. If his healing were all that different fron what the other Truthwatchers or Edgedancers do, she'd know. The only other things we know for sure is that he cannot make Lightweavings and that he sees the future and that he can make strange lights and visions. Now based purely on abilities I would call Futuresight a major ability and call that a void. It is also vaguely related to imaging. Lightweavers make images; Voidweavers see images. Yet I must admit that relevance is hard to objectively grade. And Renarin should have a resonance. In fact a resonance seen in nobody else, as until very recently he was the only one of his kind. A combination of Surges has so far been only observed in Windrunners and maybe in Dalinar "healing" temples. Both orders have Adhesion, which by now we must conclude is exceptional. Now, if we come back to the core topic we must say that hatred is an emotion. Honor is not. Honor is a concept of binding oaths. None of the Surges is about emotions. Yet a Void may be about emotions. Which Surge it is equivalent to is based on too many factors. Maybe it is at the place of Adhesion?

Right. You can have the simple solution. We have three rings of ten members. One ring associated with each Shard. The Surges are assigned to Honor; Voids belong to Odium; and there are likely to be another ten "Lifes" associated with Cultivation. He must have a novel resonance.

They do, well some do. The problem is that they have never seen a Voidspren (unless you count the Unmade). And you cannot explain what Renarin does with any of the ten Surges. He has to have something else, the voidish equivalent of Lightweaving. We know that he can heal. But he cannot lightweave. You cannot explain his visions as just a resonance. You must have two powers to have a resonance. He must have something else that is not a Surge.

Mraize's trophy room had faynlife. I am afraid Yolen has to exist at least a few decades until after the end of the Final Empire. And Roshar does not have enough gravity. By the same logic they could be from Cultivation. Chanarach could not have been surprised with a Shardblade. That is the logical conclusion. She wants a Mistborn in the family. There must be some truth to this. Honor expected the Heralds to return and fight. Why else give them superpowers? But Cultivation is in on the scheme. Breeding supersoldiers must look brilliant to her Intent.

Waxillium chasing the Marksman, Chapter 3 of Shadows of Self: