ShardlessVessel

I don't have a theory, I just wanted to put this out there. Wax is impossibly good at shooting. I know, this is fantasy, Wax is a good shot, all that stuff. Thing is, it's not glossed over. Both the narration and the characters remark on how good Wax's shooting skills are all the time, and he's constantly doing things that do not make sense. He can hit the head of every bandit in a ballroom, or shoot a bullet off another bullet into a dude's head from inside a time bubble. THIS IS NOT NATURAL. So I wonder: is Harmony guiding his shots? Is his (near-)savantism (savanthood? savantness?) interacting with his shooting? Is he really just that good? Is this Destiny with a capital D at work?

On the one hand, I'm amused by "Plate would resist a bullet well." followed by "Wax could break a section of Plate with two or three bullets". Note that the chest is a single section of Plate. On the other hand, that's actually really good protection - real-world armor plates also only block a couple of shots - especially if it's living Plate with a good reserve of Light to regenerate quickly (or an equivalently improved suit of dead Plate, assuming such a thing is possible).

Out of curiosity, I grabbed a kinetic energy calculator on the web and did some highly unscientific calculations: Triple-Lashed Kaladin (estimating 70 kgs at 20 m/s): 14 KJ .357 Magnum (according to Wikipedia, 8g of mass and 440 m/s muzzle velocity): ~774 J There's the matter of the .357 concentrating force on a much smaller area, and also that I'm not sure whether Kal should be heavier or lighter than an Earth human, but I don't think it's entirely fair to use Kal body-slamming a Shardbearer as a comparison for the effectiveness of guns. You make a good point, however; I may be severely underestimating firearms. I don't like the thought that some Scadrian could just travel to Roshar with a Gatling gun and mow down Shardbearers, though..

Plate would block firearms pretty easily, though more technologically advanced higher caliber firearms may crack Plate by sheer blunt impact, so they could be effective. Shoot, kill. Augmenters to make armor more resilient, attractors and/or repellers to change bullet trajectories, Regrowth fabrials for a healing factor. We know they will - we've seen them (won't say where because Cosmere-wide spoilers) They probably won't ever be firearms, but they will exist. How will they work? Your guess is as good as mine, but here are some possibilities: Repellers can be used to simulate a railgun; essentially, a steelpushing crossbow. Attractors can pull a bullet down a barrel for similar effect. Illumination fabrials could be used to project powerful lasers. Division/Transformation fabrials may be used to create disintegration rays (I'm very unsure about this, but including it anyway). Gravitation (which may or not be the same mechanism used by attractor/repeller fabrials) can propel bullets, as we've seen Szeth do with knives. Finally, use Stormlight itself as a weapon, shooting a concentrated beam of Investiture.

I think this depends less on how the Feruchemist sees the metal and more on how the metal sees itself. Perhaps if all the metal dust comes from the same metal bar, they can be "convinced" to take the charge as a single unit, but I'm not sure if or how that can be done. Personally, I envision Feruchemy being sold as individual standardized metalminds rather than power lines. Either that, or wanton abuse of ettmetal.

Keep it. What would you do if you found 7 billion Breaths in your pocket?

My understanding is that the spiritweb is the various Connections between you and the world around you. Removing them all would kill you. Or not. The Spiritual Realm is still so vexingly vague.

Or from a different perspective, they are already savants.

I don't think the Heralds' insanity is a universal phenomenon that afflicts all cognitive shadows. I've always assumed that it's specific to them and linked to whatever is wrong with Roshar as a whole.

My own thoughts are similar to yours. I think Nomad is bonded to a deadeye, and is sufficiently Invested to be something similar to a Radiant, but not a Radiant. I'm pretty convinced that Aux and Nomad have a sort of inverted Radiant bond. Normally, the surgebinder uses the power and the spren just acts as a mediator, but Nomad asks Aux to do magic for him, as if the Blade were the Knight instead. And Aux does call himself a knight...

No. That would require a duralumin spike. But yes, that should work. I wonder if it would be possible to steal the ability directly, though. Every WOB that I've seen regarding stealing surgebinding talks about stealing the bond; is it really impossible to steal, say, Gravitation instead of an honorspren?

I have a pedantic quibble regarding the use of the word "energy" in this thread. Investiture is not energy. It is its own thing, an extra parameter in thermodynamics. Our world has matter, energy and momentum. The Cosmere has matter, energy, momentum and Investiture. Investiture can be converted into energy, but it is not, itself, energy.

Can you provide me a quote for that? I'm not doubting you, but I don't remember the specific instance you are referring to. Agreed on the language, though. According to the Hemalurgy table, atium "steals any power" while aluminum *removes all powers", so it might be that just having an aluminum spike in your body makes you unable to Invest.

That depends on how aluminum spikes actually work. You may need to place a spike in each bind point for each power you want to remove, and for Hoid that would be a large number of spikes in non-standard placements (as his spiritweb is warped from being a Dawnshard).

I think the correct answer is somewhere between these.

Little nit-pick, but I want to point out that Rayse is the one who keeps trying to make Odium be seen as the god of Passion. The one glimpse we get of the Shard itself near the end of ROW, it looks like this: Rage, vindictiveness and destruction. The pure, isolated hatred of a god. This detail aside, I agree with you, and I think Rayse's characterization of Odium as Passion was used to manipulate the people of Roshar, both singers and humans.

Sounds like a question about koloss-blooded people to me. As for the rest, here are my impressions: Firstly, I think there's a Physical component to the genetics of the Metallic Arts. If there's an actual set of chromosomes that is associated with the Spiritual component that gives Allomancy/Feruchemy, then just splicing the spiritual "gene" may not be enough to pass on the ability to children. Secondly, and possibly alternatively, spiking may not actually merge the stolen soul piece into the spiritweb. It would be like holding Breaths: it changes you in significant ways, but the Breath/spike is not actually a part of you. This is actually evidenced, to me, by the fact that you can safely pull out a spike (your mileage may vary on that) to swap powers.

Without further information on how Kelsier acquired his new body, I assume that he exists independently from the body itself (as he was transformed into a shadow without a physical body, unlike a Returned, for example). Thus, I assume that killing him in regular means (i.e. no anti-Investiture, gemstone raysium dagger, Nightblood, etc.) will simply separate the shadow from the body and he will survive in the cognitive realm.

And now every line by Fuzz makes twice as much sense. Twice as much sense isn't much sense at all, sadly, but it's something.

I think it could be all of those things. We know telepathy through Connection is a thing (Shardblades, and I also think there's a WOB on that). Maybe the Hemalurgic effect of trellium involves the kind of Connection that permits telepathy - it's probably the same mechanism that lets Harmony speak to the spiked, which may be the same mechanism that lets him control the intensely spiked.

It was a joke. I'm thrilled for a new Hemalurgy table.

I was thinking of the process they use in airships. They seem to somehow consume ettmetal in place of steel for flying, so I imagine you may be able to rig it to fill spikes with the Investiture from ettmetal.

Your ideas are interesting, but hear me out: duplicating spikes. Instead of using ettmetal to boost a single spike, use it to charge extra spikes using the first one as a blueprint. Multiple spikings for the price of one death - and that's assuming they haven't figured out how to do hemalurgy without killing yet, which IIRC is possible.

There can never be a complete Hemalurgy table. It would be a mile wide. I'd really like a more detailed table, though. Ooh. That's an even more interesting idea than my idea of spiking a metalmind.

She can't, actually. That said, the ability to use Stormlight and Lifelight would not necessarily imply the ability to use Towerlight. She might be able to produce it without being able to use it.