ScadrianTank

On 2/5/2026 at 4:47 AM, Trusk'our said:

251: Dajer claims "any child with a coin" can now fly as dragons have. Is this a severe exaggeration? Because other signs point to medallion use being a bit more limited than that.

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.

7 hours ago, Aliroz-The-Confused said:

I'm sorry.  I'll call them Rosharans (or the humans on Roshar, or the Rosharan humans) from now on.  I didn't mean to bother you.

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. 

15 hours ago, Duxredux said:

until we want to get into Shardic international policy which I don't really want to at the moment. 

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.

2 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

I am not looking to go to Hell or something. I think creating such a place, or letting it continue to function, is a kind of moral failing. I also think we should strive to abolish all prisons, so maybe I am just morally weird.

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.  

3 hours ago, Qianweilian said:

How do you see the approach of being solely a helping hand and letting people deal with problems as significantly different from that of the Abrahamic God? I see a lot of the challenges in the world today as things that can help us learn and grow so we can all be saved.

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? 

On 7/12/2025 at 11:53 AM, Oltux72 said:

Why would they need to? Feruchemy can already turn heat into Investiture.

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

On 7/4/2025 at 9:36 PM, therunner said:

• Scadrian ships use Pushes and Pulls, but only in prepared 'Steelfields'
  • Is this Allomancy used by non-living object, like Malwish ships used Feruchemy?
  • They are reliant on steelfields, otherwise use Aether-based engine. Suggests either Aether's are much more efficient, or their rocketry is a bit behind what we would expect
• Scadrians rely on Rosharan tech for levitation and anti-gravity

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.
 

Quote

Dajer jogged toward her, then gestured toward the cargo ship, which was hovering into the air to leave, its delivery made. It had left a small crew of engineers, who guided the large device—which did look something like an old-fashioned cannon, though several times larger, and with a narrower front—on a hover platform to join the main complex. She noted with amusement that the platform was Rosharan tech. The Scadrians couldn’t help using the tools of their enemies in situations like this, without a steelfield.

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.

14 hours ago, AltonicKeys said:

Also, why would a shard, a being made of investiture, need a store of it? I guess it could make sense if the energy was meant for something/someone else, or maybe a backup plan or something? The battery planets would be really long term investments, since it probably takes a lot of investiture to make them, and it would take a while to break even. 

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.

54 minutes ago, alder24 said:

But going back to the core of this idea, it's not true. You've seen in TLM, a single spike can collect multiple spirit webs at once. Set was making a single spike out of 20-30 people. But they were able to make it grant only 1 power for a short time. The problem with stealing from different people is identity contamination - each fragment has a different identity and it doesn't mix well with others. The second one was that they were stealing raw investiture, possibly hard-coded to different powers - what powers lay in your genes is determined at birth, thus it's hard-coded into your Preservation's fragment, likely even if you don't have enough to actually be Snapped. You would need to code this investiture to a specific power - so you are on the right track.

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.

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

. But in general it can work, but it's a very overengineered solution to something that can be partially achieved by blanking identities of your donors.

Again, Identity is not the issue here. 

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

And how can an Awakened object destroy itself?

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.

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

I doubt what you proposed as the Command to actually be a Command because it doesn't really mean anything. 

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

But why" I"? Just "live" as "you-the-spike live." Vasher doesn't Awaken Lifeless with "I Awaken," it's just "Awaken to my Breath" - you're Commanding the entity and investiture, not yourself.

Good points, I suck at phrasing.

1 hour ago, Treamayne said:

Remember, a Spike is metal, so you already need to be Ninth Heightening or more, and it would require many more breaths than Nightblood needed, because it is already invested.

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

The Set's method of creating spikes non-lethally — potentially even completely synthetically — focuses on expanding the pool of conventional Metalborn.
The method I propose here attempts to bypass one of the fundamental limitations of Hemalurgy — that a spike can grant only one power. I theorize that it can be achieved by transforming a piece of a soul trapped in a spike into a kind of spren via Awakening.

The core of this idea stems from the belief that while a spike can only transplant a single piece of spiritweb, so long as that piece is singular it can grant multiple benefits.  For example, if one stole a spren bond, they would still be able to use both Surges that the bond grants.

The simplest approach to Awakening a spike would be more like a lock from the Ghostbloods hideout — a spike with a conditional off switch. Awaken a regular spike with a Command ~similar to "I Respect those who protect Scadrial." The idea here is that if the recipient of the spike believes that they are using the power granted to oppose Scadrial or hear its command phrase — Respect in this case — the spike would either go inert or destroy itself.

The more interesting approach would be to create a spike of several powers and attributes and Awaken it to be a spren. Since we would be transplanting a whole spren instead of a mishmash of Identities and souls, I theorize that a spike like that can grant multiple benefits. Given that the spike would be at least partially self-aware, you can give it commands and command codes like to a Lifeless, autonomy to revoke some or all of its benefits, and potentially mess with the bearer's soul like Aux does in TSM. It feels intuitive to me that a spike like that would grant either an Allomantic power and a spiritual attribute (like mental fortitude) or one Allomantic and one Feruchemical power. They seem balanced, for lack of a better word. Ruin's body as a spike, Preservation's soul as a power, and an attribute as a mind feel right to me. Just as Ruin's power, Preservation's power, and their combined power seem to fit well together.

I would start with a nicrosil or atium spike and a Command ~like: "I live to Protect Scadrial and empower my bearer to do the same" and go from there.

Immediate problems and challenges:
1. Figuring out a Command that works
2. Sourcing enough Investiture for Awakening
3. Figuring out the correct metal for a spike
4. Figuring out a correct bind point for a spike
5. Figuring out how to transfer different attributes and powers to a single spike
6. Creating an entity that's closer to Vivena's blade than a full spren, because it seems that a full being without their own, even limited, body can drive the user insane FAST
7. Even if that spike grants benefits, there is a possibility that they would be different from usual, in a regular Surge → Fused Surge type of way, because in a sense we are corrupting Ruin's art with Endowment's Investiture.
8. A Rosharan spren is made of a lot of Investiture, so the result might be limited by the spike's capacity for Investiture. Not that it stopped Nightblood

On 3/4/2023 at 10:04 AM, therunner said:

Additionally, he is trying to regain his powers so if he did create BoM he has little reason to just leave them.

You assume he doesn't have a copy. The Ghostbloods still think that Kel has powers. And the easiest way to keep up that lie is to use powers.

On 3/4/2023 at 10:04 AM, therunner said:

Additionally I would propose that BoM were created by Harmony directly, some time before he became too restricted to act.

I like to think that Kel made them with help from Spook and some Full Feruchemist. Mostly because I love the idea of a Full Feruchemist being one of the founding members of the Ghostbloods.

Someone on the Shardcast also proposed that Kel had powers but was slowly losing them and the Bands were an attempt to mitigate that. IIRC, the reasoning for it was that we now have a precedent for people briefly gaining powers - so might as well account for the possibility.

Something I only just realized is that we don't know if the Bands allow for Compounding or even storing attributes. Before TLM, I always assumed that they actually made one a Fullborn. But now they could just as well be a big battery charged with powers.

I still think that the Bands either allow for burning metals - and consequently Feruchemical storage - unlike regular medallions, or if you're correct that the powers come pre-keyed if that makes sense. By that I mean not keyed to a specific effect, not purified. Maybe coded would be a better term, like how the Set were trying to code a Metallic art into their new spike. It's strange to me that raw power would automatically convert to specific effects.

If the powers - and maybe the attributes - are already keyed to an effect, then the Bands might be charged with purified Dor. In this case, keying/coding it to specific effects would either convert it to Preservation's Investiture or just make it look and act like it.

9 minutes ago, Leuthie said:

Spiritual Healing uses an intact Spirit Web as a "blueprint" to rebuild the Physical and Cognitive damage. It doesn't rebuild the Spirit Web. The reason an arm can be rebuilt is because the entity still sees itself as having an arm. The Spirit Web still has enough Connection to the arm that the arm can be rebuilt. Even a long lost arm like Lopen's can be rebuilt because he still sees himself with an arm.

No, it does rebuild the Spirit Web. It is quite literally what happens after a person heals a cut from a Shardblade. The soul is not the blueprint - it's the "perfected" version of a person in the Spiritual Realm.

36 minutes ago, Leuthie said:

This is removing a Connection from the Spirit Web. Gold can do nothing about this. Investiture used in any other way in the Physical or Cognitive Realms can't correct this. You're removing a piece of a person's soul.

43 minutes ago, Leuthie said:

I'm not sure the loss is one of Investiture. "Supercharging" seems too easy a solution to rebuild a broken soul. I can't imagine the essence of a soul being an Investiture quantity issue. Souls are probably built from Connection and Identity. The losses would be the strength of that Connection and the removal of the Identity. Strength of Connection should require more than just a burst of Investiture to rebuild. However, combining multiple weak Connections could result in a stronger Connection.

Gold is Spiritual Healing. It functions the same way Stormlight healing does. And Stormlight healing can deal with Shardblade wounds, which damage the soul directly.

38 minutes ago, Leuthie said:

There is also always loss in any Hemalurgic process, so even if this spike were returned to the donor, they wouldn't be returned to normal.

They wouldn't be normal for a number of reasons, the first among which is that Hemalurgy always wounds the soul, even when done "the right way". And again, the loss may or may not be a thing in the present time

6 hours ago, Frustration said:

Spiking someone without killing them leaves them worse off that being a drab 

Very possible, but the Set's researcher's words left me with a different impression. Not sure how much stock I should put in the opinion of a scientist experimenting on people, especially about their well-being post "science". Even so, putting that spike back in the same person and maybe giving them a sip from a goldmind might do the trick. Maybe.

52 minutes ago, therunner said:

At best you are creating something similar to Drabs (permanently weakens immune system, more susceptible to depression, worse perception, shorter lifespan), at worst it is even worse.  Also note that Drabs apparently cannot Return, suggesting that person weakened in this way could lack something fundamental for creation of Cognitive Shadows.

Very possible. I was about to write that extra Preservation is extra and unnecessary for a normal functioning soul, but Preservation explicitly gave it to grant humans cognition so yeah... Still, the extent of the damage should be adjustable in the procedure.

52 minutes ago, therunner said:

And the recipient would also end up with damaged and mangled soul, repulsing e.g. spren (and possibly other spren-like beings) and possibly having other Cognitive and Spiritual effects.

The modernized version of beatings to Snap Allomancers. Now with body horror!

21 minutes ago, alder24 said:

They could also avoid identity contamination by giving Donors F-aluminum medallions, or giving them spike that grants F-aluminum so they can store their identity first and get spiked to stole identityless investiture.

Also true. Forgot about it.

Reposting my post here from reddit, just cause.

My theory about the translation tablet was that it's a regular computer as we understand it, but it has an Awakened chip inside that manages Connection stuff. Like a magical GPU, but instead of graphics and rendering in manages Investiture stuff. (Hoid called the things awakened circuits, I think.) So the computer is powered by electricity, that's what the solar panel is for, and so is the Awakened part since Awakened objects don't need to be refueled once created.

Kaladin because he's more of a duelist, and Shardplate is better in this scenario, especially against an explosive weapon. Wax has a better chance if the surroundings are more urban -- more metal to manipulate and cover to utilize. It's also worth pointing out that Wax is naturally a better killer. I might be wrong, but TLM gave me the impression that, only in his climb through the tower, Wax killed more people than Kal in his entire military carrier. It's also difficult to account for his Mistborn powers since we don't know how good he'll get with the rest of the metals.
So if we take them as they are by the end of their books - I say Kaladin. But if Wax has info and time to prepare and visit Ranette - Kal will be absolutely deleted.
Also interesting that at this point, in a broader sense, Wax and Kal fulfill a similar function on the battlefield. They fly in, draw attention, use their skills to deflect/block blows, and kill anything in their way.

15 hours ago, Frustration said:

Is that the difference? Honestly I've just thought they were two words for the same thing.

Missiles are smart; they seek and steer toward a target either on their own (like cruise missiles, for example) or are guided remotely.
Rockets are dumb; they're aimed before launch and will not correct for the target's movements.
If you're familiar with modern military shooters and/or weaponry it's the difference between an RPG(dumb rocket) and something like a Javelin(smart target-seeking missile).