Frustration

So I made a Kaladin build. V-human for polearm Master 5 Levels in Hexblade Warlock, picking up Pact of the Blade, Fly, Spider climb, Eldritch Smite, and Thirsting Blade. And taking Great Weapon Master at level 4. This does mean we have to use a glaive instead of a spear, but the loss of damage without it was rather large. Next 4 Levels in BattleMaster Fighter, grabbing namely Precision attack, and the Sentinel feat. Next 2 Levels in Paladin for that sweet Smite power. From then on it's 9 levels of Storm Sorcerer to maximize spell slots progression, grabbing Levitate. And the ability to create a frankly absurd number of spell slots by taking short rests after turning Warlock spell slots into sorcery points and back into sorcerer spell slots, allowing us to smite a lot more often. I'd rather take 3 levels in Sorcerer and take the remaining 6 in Graviturgy Wizard, but that's campaign specific. So what do you think?

I'm well aware, all of which were addressed when I originally made that post, things have just gotten lost as the discussion moved on and this got brought back up. I'm apparently not very good at asking the question I'm thinking. This is what I'm seeing: we have an equation that describes the process used to transfer matter via Oathgates, portals, Aon Tia, whatever. This equation is balanced such that the energy needed to transfer matter is equivalent to what is put in. You are then looking at the starting and ending states of that matter, and seeing that it ends with more potential energy, which you then are ascribing to the transfer process in order to balance the equation, and I don't understand why. My question is this: Why do you assume the energy comes from the transfer process? What about the translation requires more energy to move something 100 feet up, as opposed to moving something to the same elevation on the other side of the planet? I hope that makes more sense. If I jump holding a five pound weight I won't be able to get as high as I would if I wasn't holding that weight. Not because of conservation of energy, but because of Gravity and Inertia. Conservation of energy is a consequence of that, not the reason. What I'm asking for is the reason. Fair enough I guess that's possible, but that feels more clunky than just swapping places with the other Oathgate.

That's why I specifically said fission it back into Hydrogen, IRL we would have considerable loss, but if we didn't, and ended with the same amount of Hydrogen as we began you could continue the process ad infinitum. Oh it would, likely based on the mass transfered, or perhaps the amount of investiture transfered, as non-living matter doesn't seem to have the same cost. But let's say a transfer is made that increases the potential energy of the payload. If the investiture powering the device is what is providing the excess potential energy, why does it do that? If the only reason is to balance the equation that doesn't work, reality doesn't bend to conform to laws, the laws are made because reality already obeys them and we just observe that. So something must be requiring that additional energy in some way. Additionally how is that energy being provided? When I lift something up here the energy is being physically transferred between my arm and whatever I am holding, in this instance how is that transfer coming to pass?

Wouldn't that be retroactive though? Shouldn't the reason for the increased investiture use come into effect before anything went through the portal?

If there is an answer it shouldn't be in the stream questions to begin with. Which is the one downside to this proposal, being that it would require higher levels of moderation to remove such questions.

The energy that causes you to fall is different than the energy that brings you up. The portal is bending space allowing you to skip distance as you travel. Where you are going doesn't matter. We can see this in the Oathgates, there are a lot of things that determine how much Stormlight is used, the oath level of the radiant using it, the number of people being transferred. However the location does not have an impact, despite the vast differences in distance and elevation. Actually mechanical ones would follow conservation as mechanical uses of Feruchemy consume Harmonium, biological ones on the other hand do produce energy from nothing.

Then pointing out where the holes are so they can be fixed would make the world better than just pretending they don't exist. But where would that energy come from and why? Why does sending something through a portal at higher elevations require more energy than at lower elevations? And where does the potential energy go when you send something to a lower elevation?

But he admits it doesn't work The reason is gravity, what's the reason that leaving the spiritual realm to appear in Roshar's Stratosphere is more difficult than appearing on the surface? Just saying the law of conservation of energy means that an external force would have to be require more energy in order to prevent a violation, rather than a law that could be observed and studied.

Brandon straight up says that at some point it breaks down, and that he breaks both thermodynamics and causality. So some intelligent force is manually requiring more energy out of certain actions?

These are questions not a headcanon. How does it know how much potential energy to give? It isn't traveling through linear space so how is it calculated? And why is that? It isn't distorting space any more, so why would it require more energy? So if we stop in the SR on the way why does it require more energy to place an object in certain places than others when the spiritual realm is all places in one?

How would more energy be used to give it potential energy? Why would it require more energy to open a portal at a higher elevation, despite them not being bound by gravity or linear space? It creates more problems having the portal provide the potential energy. That would just be mass teleportation, not a portal.

It doesn't matter, the power used is not what is creating the additional potential energy, only maintaining the portal, which violates the conversation of energy. Considering it's how the WoT portals work, and how much fun Brandon had writing them, I think it stands to reason Cosmere portals would work the same way.

Personally I view older questions getting more attention being a feature, now true that those threads would require more attention to remove already answered questions, I don't see that as too much of a downside.

Then the power needed would be different based on elevation, which doesn't make sense based on the fact that it is bending space. We have artwork of the portal in the books, and it looks like the ones from WoT where you can see Ashyn behind them.

Alright, so if I have a Bondsmith and Elsecaller make two portals, and one is at a higher elevation than the other and I push something through them, where is the new potential energy coming from? Or better yet what happens if one faces down towards another that faces up? Any object dropped inside would need to be given enormous sums of energy in order for it to continue, but if I placed them horizontally facing each other and threw something into one being given the exact same amount of potential energy would cause just as many problems. On order to resolve the issue without creating free energy, some intelligent force would have to be manually correcting the system. Therefore, conservative of energy cannot reasonably exist within the Cosmere, unless you have some way to explain what is deciding when to give an object passing through portals additional energy and how. But he did mention that the Atium was renewed. The metals do reappear according to some WoB's. Now there are newer ones that suggest otherwise, but at one point they did, and might continue to do so.

We know that the Atium that was used by Elend would eventually reform. We know that the breaths of people who die go back to Endowment, we know that Stormlight fades back to the SR. Yet at no point have we ever heard anything about loss in any of these processes.

We saw the machine, there was no perpendicularity. And even if somehow it was drawing power from the spiritual realm, that's where all expended investiture goes to, so any investiture it used would simply return there to be drawn from again.

They aren't gone. As seen by spren's reaction to anti-investiture, when you start consuming them they disappear fast. The Father Machine was powering and controlling the shroud over an entire planet, and all the Hion lines for almost two thousand years, and yet all of the spirits are still there, and can immediately go back to doing exactly what they were doing before.

That is not them leaking investiture, but rather a passive effect that they have. They never lose breath by that as can be proven by the fifth heightening. At the Fifth heightening people become biologically immortal, and at that point holding more breath does not extend your lifetime. If they lost breath overtime holding more past that point would extend their lifetime which is not the case. I have never once said that, a breath is a discrete unit of investiture. Breath is different than stormlight, it is attached to the soul. It does not line up with how we see Awakening work. Vashers ropes don't require charging, his shirt doesn't require charging, lifeless don't require charging, why is this one the only difference? Wood needs sunlight to grow, the commands probably used this as a base to create the board using far fewer breaths than were otherwise needed, just like Lifeless with ichor alcohol. It is The breath never runs out of power, more is simply needed to move the lifeless as it's body breaks down, be that from injury or natural process. Not once do you have an example of a lifeless ceasing to work because the breath simply ran out of energy. If a machine takes in hydrogen, fuses the hydrogen into larger elements, and then fissions those larger elements back into Hydrogen, and then that hydrogen was immediately sent back to be fused, and that gave it enough power to not only continue running but also power an entire country, that would be a PMM. What I think you are overlooking is that the spirits never left the system, they were all trapped by the machine, that's why they needed Yumi to get them out, they couldn't leave.

Which statements in the text prove that the Father machine was not a PMM? The spirits are in many ways part of the machine. Going along with your reactor analogy, if we found a way to fuse Hydrogen into larger elements, and the fission those larger elements back into Hydrogen and gain energy from that reaction that would be a PMM. And we know that the Father machine acted like this because it captured all of the spirits, released them and then caught them again. They never wore out, and no new ones were ever made, this is confirmed by the way that the machine knew when one of the spirits escaped. The machine itself supplies the power as its stacking rocks is what draws the spirits. You yourself admit that the machine would run forever, and since the spirits aren't used up, and are caught again. Only in Returned. Do you know that? Can you prove for certain that that isn't just one of the requirements that needs to happen for that particular awakened device to work? Lifeless do not need to charge in the sun, but if you want to awaken one using a single breath you have to use ichor alcohol. And you have to reapply the alcohol if it is lost, despite not being needed to power the lifeless. There are a lot of strange quirks to awakening that do that. No we do not. The only awakened objects that we see stop functioning are Lifeless, and only when their bodies decay to uselessness. Source? I don't see any real effort on his part to avoid it. Just about every major magic system has some way to do it. See this is where we differ, I find great enjoyment from breaking things like this, it's why I min-max in TTRPG's I enjoy seeing things work together in ways that allow things that shouldn't be possible to work. I don't see it as trying to ruin what Brandon made, but rather as part of the experience. If the rules can be broken they should be, we don't learn anything new about them otherwise.

A huge thanks to the mods for moving this topic. Given how in Yumi we saw the first perpetual motion machine on screen I would like to know if that changes anyone's perception on a Roaharan version.

Having read all the sample chapters and the post in question, you have nothing to worry about, there's nothing substantial there. That said I do think that having something like a SA 5 forum or the like could be useful.

They would definitely cut through souls, all Shardblades do. Additionally spirits definitely could form Shardblades, they meet all of the requirements, they are highly invested, Sapient entities that can take physical form. I agree that a sheath makes the most sense for what the second form would take, especially considering how Nightblood's sheath functions.