ScadrianTank

My read of that line is that it used to be that Invested arts and arcana were limited to a select few, but in this age of technology, any mortal can use one (or something with an analogous effect) in one way or another. Even if the fabrials/medallions/spikes/etc are uncommon and/or expensive, they're obtainable in a straightforward way. Allomantic medallions themselves aren't a surprise, given the Bands.

Feel free to call whom you want, however you want. And certainly don't stop on my behalf. It's your read of the story, and it's no less valid than what anyone else here said. I just find it frustrating to disagree about what I used to believe was such a straightforward section of text. To be clear, I'm not challenging this position here. You've had this argument for 5~ish pages of this topic, and I doubt anyone wants to restart it. It's just my brain can't fully grok it, and that's why I say it bugs me.

Two Mistborn eras showed that the greatest threat of breeding programs and eugenics will always come from other Scadrians, not outsiders. It's the central problem of their magic systems, and we'll see them attempt to deal with it throughout the books and eras. In a similar way to how Rosharan magic naturally presents questions similar to animal rights. And I have to say, the continued use of the term "children of Ashyn" bugs me a lot.

Even if we wanted to, there's not really a good way to impose the same rules/guidelines on Shards because of their different Intents. Anything more detailed and specific than "Shards should(n't) interfere in mortal affairs a lot" is inapplicable. Best we could do is come up with a list of things no Shard should be allowed to do, I think. Prohibitions on the level of no smiting mortals or killing planets.

Slightly off-topic, but I find it strange that none of the Shards created an artificial afterlife for their followers in the Spiritual realm. Something like what Taravangian did to Kharbranth, but styled up similarly to Vorin belief in the Tranquiline halls. "You serve as my operator and devotee, and I will give you a functional heaven in SR after death until I need to call on you and my other champions when the need arises." That is, unless the theory about Threnody originally being Mercy's world, forests of Hell being forests of Heaven, and Shades being benevolent ghosts of the ancestors is correct.

I don't. But out of all the options available to the Shards, this one seems to be one of the more humane ones. Autonomy's model also appears to be a good one, at least in principle. (now that I remember she exists)

Personally, I'm the sort of person who finds the idea of G-d more disturbing/uncomfortable the more I think about it. Abrahamic-like divinity has a problem of "if you're all-powerful, why is there suffering and death and such? seems like bad design." Divinity that actively shapes destiny messes with my perception of free will, which I instinctively reject. That's part of why I find the whole premise of the Shattering one of the more interesting parts of the cosmere — because I am the sort of person who would absolutely get behind the idea of killing god. I would say that the original seventeen didn't go far enough. They should've splintered all of Ado Devotion/Dominion-style and spread it evenly through the cosmere. If G-d is bigger than Wind/Stone — kill it. All of that is why I consider Saze and Endowment the more preferable of the Shards we've seen so far. If Saze wasn't Intent locked, his philosophy of letting people make their own choices is better than what Taravangian came up with. And I personally believe Sazed to be one of the most moral and wise people in the books so far, so there might be a little bias here. Endowment came up with the best system for interfering with mortals while still allowing people to express their free will. She presents people with problems down the line and offers them to be the ones to solve them; a helping hand, not a guiding one.

Duxredux said something interesting here. Wax is a coinshot, investigating an explosion of godmetals. He would be burning steel, looking for pieces of the metal and destroyed equipment. I don't remember anyone mentioning it as a possibility before. What if whatever the explosion produced reacted to Wax burning metal? If you recall, in the final empire, atium crystals had to be found by hand because they exploded when someone burned close to them. What if that exploded harmonium or its byproduct reacted similarly?

But it's still not confirmed if they can turn that attribute into usable Investiture.

The first part was surprising to me, especially given the comment earlier in the book that Scadrian, Rosharan, and Dhatri tech families produced working spaceships independently from others. Like, I can see zephyr aether being the best propulsion source in the cosmere, but using spores for power broke my brain a bit. My current guess on the steelfield is that it's a combination of Feruchemical speed, weight and Allomantic duralumin fabrials, deployed on a large scale, with anchors using F-iron to become perfect emplacements. The levitating platforms were specifically called out as being used only in cases when they can't set up steelfields. And I'd note that it's probably worth specifying that everything we've learned applies only to Malwish Scadrians. Hopefully. I really hope that the Malwish expansionist policy is what is driving them to use only the cheapest, most mass producible means of accomplishing their technical goals. So democratized metallic arts, spaceships that run without aethers, more people using magic are there, just in the other parts of Scadrial. Fingers crossed, I guess

Alejandro Ruiz voices Renarin in SA Thomas Penny voices Lirin and Amaram Richard Rowan only narrates RoW, otherwise, his big role in SA was Taravangian Odium is narrated by the same actor as Marsh in Mistborn, but I'm having trouble tracking the name

If the fabrial tech progressed quickly enough in Era 3, it wouldn't surprise me if all modern military rifles were hypersonic. Maybe something similar to AAI's flechette rifle prototype.

One theory I had was that whatever interstellar megastructure Canticle is a part of would require the creator — presumably Invention — to act in different ways across vast distances, so Canticle would beam the power to different parts of the machine wherever they are without additional conscious work from the creator/operator. If different parts were sitting in separate star systems, Invention either couldn't simultaneously power them all, or if they could it would tie them to their current location — preventing them from moving on to other projects. But if they set up a battery that would function independently without further involvement, all they would have to do is hook up Canticle's core to whatever needs the power.

I wrote an entire post on that, thanks... Identity contamination might be the cause of the problem for the Set. The only time it's explicitly mentioned in the book is by Marsh in relation to why the Set can't Compound. Their main problem was as you mentioned — they expected raw Investiture to grant power without shaping or coding it in some way. Regardless, the Set's method has no relation to what I'm talking about because they are taking the same thing multiple times from different sources in the same spike. I need to have different parts of the spirit web, which are stolen with different metals, into a single spike. Again, Identity is not the issue here. If an origami can walk it can tear itself in half. I assumed that if an entity can grant a power, it can take it away or destroy its contents. Good points, I suck at phrasing.

Scadrians have an Awakened Steelmind in TSM. So we only have to wait a few centuries, I suppose.