Returned

I've had fun too! This seems tricky to me. We've been operating under the assumption that the invaders just have some baseline intelligence before transiting the spawn point (otherwise it's a lot harder for their invasion to be viable), without worrying too much about how they obtained it. If we're talking about the invaders being on Roshar and conducting more surveillance I start to question their ability to be hidden. The Stormfather sees nearly everything, and given the Singer invasion (impending or in-progress) I have to think that something large and mysterious is going to draw attention and comment. An aircraft carrier seems impossible to hide to me, and something like an airstrip more hide-able but still difficult. Each reconnaissance flight increases the chances of some Rosharan observing the aircraft, though if the invaders already know enough of the geography they could probably mitigate this a lot. But, as my view of the invasion is that it depends heavily on the surprise of the first attack, any observation of the invaders starts to jeopardize that. Seeing an aircraft carrier would greatly disturb any Rosharan, being almost unimaginably large for a vessel but not having most of the things they expect a ship to have (like sails or oars). Seeing something move as quickly as an airplane through the air would be mind-blowing. I have to think that those would prompt changes that would lessen the initial strike's impact and/or accelerate the Rosharans' ability to deal with some of the formerly unimaginable abilities the invaders have. The intelligence the invaders gain is important too, but much harder for me to parse out in my imagination. I don't know that they would be able to track key, individual Rosharans or learn much about the mechanics of how Surgebinding works or about what spren are. But they probably could learn about the Oathgates and other things that would be useful to them. After posting this bit I thought more about it and I don't think that the Rosharans would be able to use Radiant spren for this, at least not very easily. They can only move so far away from their Radiants which would require the Radiants to be pretty close to the fleet for the duration of the operation. I'm not confident that they could do that well. The secretspren we see in Kholinar could do it, but they're not likely to work with the Radiants. Outside of those I don't know if there are actually spren available to do it at all!

Honor's number is indeed ten. Honor said:

Does aluminum do anything to spren? I'm not aware of any effect outside of encasing a manifested spren in a perfect aluminum shell, which isn't at issue here. All I could find was this WoB: But the soldiers have one week to get used to it (tough, given that the spren could also change the noises they make), ten days at the most (how Rosharan!). And their capacities degrade a lot over that timeframe, very quickly. If they can't adapt successfully, they're toast. Have you ever seen the game show Awake, on Netflix? I liked it and was disappointed it stopped production. If it's focused on key officers or technical specialists the invaders could find their ability to use their equipment or coordinate and execute strategies could even be crippled, which is an interesting wrinkle. My point, which I did not make very clearly, is that this is a lot of land to cover and secure. The concentration of forces, intelligence, and military capacity is pretty important for the invaders since it's key to their ability to overwhelm the Radiants. It will take time for those movements to occur, more time as more forces are dedicated to each area, and that will create a lot of situations in which most dramatic advantages the invaders have are lessened (if they can be maintained at all). If I were a modern soldier I really would not want to engage in urban warfare against the Radiants, nor would I want to be alone with my unit/battalion/whatever with inadequate cover from a Highstorm and/or little to no contact with the main forces who provide support and resources. Are you, then, defining out any possibility of a Rosharan victory? We've already got the invaders coating everything they can with enough aluminum to matter (a thin layer isn't going to do much) despite not plausibly understanding its relation to Investiture, unreasonably precise and comprehensive intelligence in the hands of the invaders before ever going to Roshar (and nearly perfect knowledge of anything of any size or composition above ground or in the water, across the entire continent, in real time), zero invader morale problems, no particular invader goals, nothing that will ever stop or dissuade them from attacking, and an initial, surprise, global barrage that almost certainly kills hundreds of thousands (if not millions) immediately. If the invaders lose one million of their personnel (50%!) it doesn't count for anything, but if the Radiants utterly destroy the invaders they still lose because of the death toll from the first attack? And all of this in a setting where the world has undergone dozens of invasions so destructive that they were called Desolations and which killed as much as 90% of the world population each time? We need to make some assumptions to approach the question at all but at some point we're just asserting that the invaders can't lose and the Rosharans can't win, which makes details like invasion and occupation plans superfluous. Maybe I'm trying to answer the wrong question. What even is a Rosharan victory in this conflict, in your estimation?

I don't think that's the case in this scenario. Given the setup the only possible definition of victory for the Rosharans is to shatter the invaders' military capabilities until they can't support their forces. The invaders have no territory nor infrastructure at stake and are monomaniacally fixated on controlling Roshar, while the Rosharan resistance (distinct from most of the people that live there, who are going to be in a lot of trouble) has almost no need for infrastructure nor territory in the ways that usually matter for military action. I will agree that Urithiru (the tower) is gone and that the Rosharans can't secure anything above ground reliably, and with little reason to bother trying I don't think that they would. I'm skeptical that the invaders could control a continent and archipelago as large as Asia meaningfully, outside of establishing air superiority and being able to blow up any part of it should they think to do so (the phrase "never start a land war in Asia" comes to mind) but I don't think that that matters very much. So the only thing that should matter to the Rosharans is that they preserve their ability to strike at the invaders, specifically their core assets, and burrowing deep underground does that while also negating the most acute advantages the invaders have. Holding Azimir or wherever provides almost literally nothing for either side of the conflict. Similarly, I don't think that the Oathgates are all that important, though they would be nice to have, because movement of large numbers of people doesn't seem like something that would matter, militarily, to the Rosharans unless and until they take out the invaders' ability to bombard them. Until that time I just don't think that they would ever engage the invaders in the field with anything other than Radiant strike groups (excepting the case in which Lightweavers are able to specifically deceive IR sensors with false readings, rather than just blocking them, which I'm trying to avoid assuming). The Rosharans can tunnel deeper than the invaders can affect. I cited upthread the recent experience of the U.S. trying to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities deep underground using quite a few missiles specifically designed for that exact task, which was somewhat less than a total success. A pile of C4 detonating on the surface of a four mile stone barrier isn't going to cut it. They can create new egresses when and where they want and seal them up afterwards, so it would be very difficult for the invaders to gain access to the burrows at all (though it would quickly become one of their top priorities to do so, I imagine). Long-range travel would probably always involve hiding inside of a Highstorm (I can't think of anything better), so the risk of exposing an egress could be managed pretty well (spren as invisible scouts counts for a lot!). This strikes me as a really, really good plan. While I had imagined the initial raid as a one-off, destroying as many obviously major assets as possible in that time, any surviving carriers (plus other significant assets) are probably too important to ignore. So even if the Radiants suspected, or were certain of, a trap they might not be able to leave those assets alone. Radiants are, as you noted above, a precious and essentially irreplaceable asset and losing a strike team like this one would be devastating. And the sheer size of the invaders' fleet means that they could afford to sacrifice quite a bit to kill Radiants. Plus, with how dangerous these mixed Radiant groups would be it might even be worth it to sacrifice every carrier to get rid of them (we've been discounting the Fused so far, so we might as well continue to do so). The Radiants might come up with alternative plans for approach and attack but eventually they're going to run out of novel ideas, and/or the invaders will eventually have prepared for some attack which the Rosharans launch which will make that cost very high. Attrition is what Rosharans would need to win, but they are much more vulnerable to it themselves. I'm not sure the Rosharans would surrender but it hardly matters if their ability to resist, through insurgent tactics or otherwise, is broken. The only hope then would be massive resistance, as ~200 million people might be too many for the invaders to control, but with the invaders' monomaniacal focus there isn't any way for them to be dissuaded from the invasion. I do wonder if I'm overcomplicating everything. If the Rosharans could marshal a bunch of spren to travel to where clusters of important invader personnel live, like those that operate the important ships, and just scream loud, high-pitched noises constantly, the invaders never get to sleep. This seriously degrades people's ability to function within one day and kills them in about a week. The spren can't be seen easily (or at all, in many cases) and options to limit their access to places are limited. I also have other fun ideas, like monofilament Shardwires, but most of them boil down to attrition anyways because of how dangerous it is to engage.

There are a few that I've found, but the most recent answers indicate that iron Feruchemy does change your mass, but not only that, and not in a way that fits real physics properly. More revisions may be forthcoming.

Is that effective during a hurricane, or through the walls of perfect darkness? Would the defenses really be turned on their own ship with zero visibility? Can radar meaningfully penetrate something like a Highstorm to detect human-sized objects within it? Could ships as massive as the aircraft carriers dock in a Rosharan dock? I don't know enough to feel confident of the answers. The rest of the operation I imagined should still work similarly well with the other details. I mostly posted the mission outline because I had fun thinking it out and wanted to post it, so thanks for reading Excellent point that I had glossed over. With one captured invader a Bondsmith could overcome this for limited periods but otherwise I think you're right-- the Rosharans are not going to be able to speak or understand in the field. The closest they could get might be a cryptic memorizing phonetically and bringing the exact sequence of sounds back to the Bondsmith to "translate", but that seems to have a huge number of serious limitations. Also, great catch on the lack of Elsecallers available. Even if they had more of them I also think that Jasnah is uniquely capable and I would not expect the abilities of a generic Elsecaller to be as useful as what she can do. I don't think this is sound. One of the arcs of Words of Radiance involves Renarin foreseeing the return of the Fused and the coming of the Everstorm months in advance, and even provides a countdown to the exact day that it occurs. I wouldn't want to rely on it but if we're tapping Renarin's abilities we should give them their due (though I am on record as thinking that futuresight in the Cosmere is radically overvalued, those deficiencies probably don't apply to the invaders very much). We don't know the content of those particular visions, so maybe they're not specific enough to suggest specific actions, but in Oathbringer his visions seem to be very specific representations of the dangerous events (he distinctly sees Jasnah killing him and Dalinar falling in the field). The lack of specific knowledge about the mechanism is difficult to deal with but even if it can't predict the invaders' futures it should still be able to predict the Rosharans', but I suspect that applications of Investiture should work on the invaders because we know that normal Earth-people are (potentially Sanderson has left some wiggle room) just like drabs on Nalthis. He was definitive that an Earthling could be cut with a Shardblade the same way as a Cosmere native, rather than as an object, which suggests that Investiture can work on the invaders to at least some degree and that they could not themselves make use of it: As to the rest, I still say you are overestimating the abilities of the invaders' bombardments (earlier this year it took the U.S. military four missile strikes to destroy a single small boat all alone in uncontested waters with no countermeasures of any kind, but for a general-devastation bombardment of a large area that's not really an issue) and just going underground seems like a very reasonable defense to a variety of forewarnings (and certainly after one strike). The specificity of Renarin's visions would of course be key to whether or not they take this particular action before the initial bombardment so I don't think this is a guarantee that they would be able to deal with the event effectively. Urithiru is built into a gigantic mountain among a range of gigantic mountains and already has a good deal of tunnel infrastructure deep within it, and it wouldn't be any harder to move the population deeper there than out to the Oathgates, and Dustbringers, Skybreakers, Stonewards, and Willshapers can trivially excavate more very quickly. Your point that the Radiants would probably stay to help the civilians is a very good one, though-- that exposes them to the maximum amount of danger from the bombardment, if any evacuation takes place during one. But the refugees' survival itself is not relevant to the military response to the invaders, it's relevant only to the degree that it causes Radiants to expose themselves to danger to accomplish it. We see many examples in the books of the Radiant coalition ceding territory they know they can't defend or retake, so while they'd want to save as many as possible they might have a very practical definition of "possible". We also see in RoW that they are prepared to take their highest value people away from danger (Jasnah transferring Dalinar to Shadesmar if their field operation goes poorly), so I wouldn't assume Dalinar is going to stay put through the bombardment. Nonetheless that significantly increases the likely damage of the initial barrage to the Radiants' most vital resources and crippling any response. And that initial strike is by far the most important operation for the invaders, so even marginally more success there might matter a lot. This doesn't fit in anywhere in the responses but it's a fun idea (like the carrier raid), so I wanted to mention it here: Shardcages. With enough cooperating Radiant spren, they could form a gigantic, fine lattice or cage surrounding some volume of space. Since Shardblades are indestructible (excepting Nightblood), this takes anything so enclosed out of the fight for the duration (the gaps between bars of the cage I am imagining to be too small for missiles, vehicles, and larger projectiles to get through). If they could identify the spawn point and form a small cage around it they could immediately destroy or at least negate anything coming through. There isn't really anything the invaders could do about it once a cage is formed, and if the spren can coordinate the change they could contract (potentially, I have some questions about Shardmetal's state when shifting forms) and just crush everything inside. They wouldn't be able to cut through any aluminum but they could still crush it.

I was wondering about this the other day and couldn't come to a fully satisfying answer. Taravangian's intelligence is obviously incredible, if uneven, but on his famous day of brilliance he was almost transcendentally intelligent, enough so to contend with a Shard (and win!) via leaving notes for himself. He made connections between concepts and intuitive leaps so precise that he was able to foretell the future, and this was "honest" brilliance, no access to Fortune involved. That's amazing! He was then variably intelligent, at random, as he oversaw his plan over the course of a few years along with small circle of confidants. Rashek, by compounding zinc, can become incredibly intelligent as well, up to some maximum level we're not aware of. He, too, contended with a Shard (and won!) through the accuracy of his knowledge and foresight and the depth of his planning. Since he accomplished this through zinc (presumably, I don't think it's actually stated anywhere that that's how he did his scheming here but it seems reasonable) it seems like this was also "honest" brilliance and did not use Fortune. Rashek was as intelligent as he wanted to be at any given moment over the thousand years he had to carry out his plan and almost nobody knew anything about it (save for a few Obligators who handled the atium ruse). I'm not aware of any statements or good way to compare them directly, so whom do you all think is the smarter one? I, personally, lean towards Rashek but I can be convinced in the other direction. I choose Rashek because he worked directly against Ruin while under Ruin's observation and constant opposition, and his plan was effective and did not require tweaking along the way (though it didn't quite work out as he had expected, and he did die to Ruin's own machinations). Taravangian worked more around Odium than against him (and Odium knew about at least some of what was going on but didn't care), and his original scheme (king of the world plus getting Odium to spare his "kingdom") failed. Both had some sort of planning from other Shards overarching their own schemes, so that seems like a wash to me.

Agreed, 100%. One thing to note (I couldn't think of a good way to fit this in elsewhere, so it's here) is that "common knowledge on Roshar" seems underdefined. I very much doubt that the typical person in Azir knows much of anything about Radiants, Fused, their powers, or how fabrials work, certainly not in any detail. How much the invaders know about Surgebinding and fabrials seems like a really important detail, especially when the Rosharans are stuck knowing nothing about the invaders. I remain unconvinced that the invaders' victory is guaranteed, though. There is visual evidence enough to reason out the broad outlines of what missiles and bullets are: contrails from missiles, ballistic traces from bullets, and so on. I would even argue that there is more evidence of those things than of the magical mechanisms Rosharans use. You don't need to understand the details to know "fast", "damaging", or "explosive" and then choose to avoid open confrontation. If someone showed up and started pointing a stick here and there, and everywhere the stick points someone gets bloody holes torn in them, you know enough to avoid situations where the stick can be pointed at you. It's not even that shocking, given that we know they use lashed objects as weapons. Evidence of a bombardment suggests shelter, and missiles are not fundamentally different from trebuchets or catapults (which we know they had at Rathalas) or even manually hurled boulders in that regard. Your arguments all seem to depend on the speed and range of missiles and aircraft, but those are straightforwardly dealt with by going underground or deep into a mountain (where they can remain indefinitely and with no support). Radiants and Fused are minutes away from getting to those places, deeply enough to avoid the missiles and bombs, at which point I'm not sure how much good the missiles and aircraft do for the invaders. Lightweavers aren't needed for that at all. So the main factor is how effectively the initial strike kills key people, before they have the chance to go to ground (if you'll forgive the almost-pun). That seems essentially random to me (because the invaders have no way to track individual people with that precision) unless you're suggesting that the initial salvo basically levels everything on Roshar, which doesn't seem in the spirit of the question. Once underground the Rosharans have as much time as they want to gather information because the invaders can't reach them nor monitor where they go. They can use spren invisible to the invaders and poke around in the cognitive realm to learn all sorts of things about the invaders' positions, capabilities, and high-value assets. The Rosharans are unlikely to expose themselves above ground often, and ironically (Alanis-style) the more devastating the initial strike the more cautious they would be, leaving them that much more unreachable for that much longer. The Rosharan counter-strategy seems obvious to me, to take out the central assets of the invaders rather than bothering engaging soldiers in the field. I'm imagining that that's the aircraft carriers, though I don't think it matters if it turns out to be something else. Specific tactics are probably outside of the scope of the thread, but I can imagine an operation like: ----Begin fun speculation section---- A group of Radiants emerges at the front of a Highstorm, Windrunners and Skybreakers lashing a collection of other Radiants along with them, to travel inside of the storm until it reaches the fleet. The Highstorm provides functionally unlimited Investiture to use, makes it much harder for the invaders to operate while outside, and complicates if not neutralizes radar/sonar based air defenses. Lightweavers create a thin, tall wall of pure darkness around the aircraft carrier(s) being targeted along with illusory invaders dropping from the sky and racing around the ship distractingly. Elsecallers conjure molten bronze which rains down on anyone on deck and then thick metal domes from the air, dropping over relevant portions of the ship (weapons, sensory equipment, doorways and hatches leading from the interior of the ship to the deck if possible) just ahead of the Radiants landing. Once landed, Edgedancers move rapidly around the ship and remove friction from semi-random parts of the deck as well as ladder rungs, railings, and anything large on the ship (like the landing gears of airplanes). Cryptics spread out across the deck and move to the interior of the ship if needed, emitting piercing screeching noises to distract and impede communication. Windrunners have stones and lash them repeatedly, moving as fast as bullets, and Skybreakers shatter them into smaller, sharp projectiles (if they can use Division at range, I don't know if we have information on how that Surge can be used). Other Radiants bring picks and hammers (or Shardpicks/Shardhammers from their spren) and strike anything that seems like it's coated in aluminum to expose what's beneath and allow magic to penetrate. Elsecallers move across the deck, sealing any door or hatch they see by Soulcasting thick slabs of metal over them, preceded by spren who seek out anything that might be worth barricading. Any surviving soldiers on the deck are enclosed in blobs of total darkness created by Lightweavers and then pelted from above by stones lashed from within the storm or crushed by metal conjured above them (or just encased in more domes). Elsecallers and Skybreakers move below the waterline and start damaging the hull (lashed objects, explosive/corrosive Soulcastings), constantly trying to apply Investiture to it until they are successful in affecting the ship itself. Then they go nuts, Soulcasting portions of the hull or shattering them with Division and soon the ship is taking on water. Edgedancers increase the abrasion of the ship's propulsion, ruining it with its own motion, or Elsecallers just encase the system in solid metal. Now massive things are sliding all over the deck, airplanes especially slide off into the sea, soldiers on the deck are dead, incapacitated, or having trouble moving around and finding targets to oppose, soldiers inside of the ship are trapped, and the ship (or ships) is (or are) sinking. If the Radiants are interested in getting into the ship they have some options for doing so, more than the soldiers have to get out, and even a pinhole-sized opening lets Elsecallers turn the air in a chamber to oil which they then ignite, which is bad for anyone inside. If they find the airplane storage hangar or munitions/fuel storage, the air turns to oil which is then ignited. Windrunners and Skybreakers lash anything that seems useful or interesting (like the invaders' guns or armor) up into the storm, where waiting Windrunner squires collect anything that makes it through for study back in their bunkers. They also lash any soldiers that Lightweavers might be able to imitate (I'm mostly thinking about height) similarly. Most of the Radiants then withdraw, having seriously degraded the invaders' abilities with the raid in less than half an hour (or some span of time that makes more sense, it just can't be longer than the storm). Some Lightweavers remain behind, disguised as abducted soldiers to be "rescued" later, perhaps feigning concussions. They can then gather further intelligence or carry out assassinations, their cryptics slide all around the invaders' domains and eavesdrop, learn voices of key officers, read operational manuals, sow confusion, possibly sabotage very small things, or any number of other tasks, vanishing to Shadesmar in the blink of an eye if they think it necessary. Things get worse for the invaders from there, having lost assets that are difficult or impossible to replace and the support capabilities that go with them. They've lost a lot of supplies and materiel, including aircraft. Their remaining forces and weapons can be baited with non-specific illusions (just blobs of blackness, attached to spheres which are lashed by Windrunners to fly menacingly wherever they want). The Rosharans now have guns and other equipment to study, and once they learn the basics they can manufacture their own, potentially even higher-quality versions almost for free, which they can also use to develop more specific counter-strategies for on their own schedule. The invaders still can't reach them, the Radiants still get to engage at their preference, and are able to equip mundane Rosharans with modern gear which they increasingly understand how to deal with. They whittle down the invaders' remaining assets, focusing especially on supply caches. Without support and resupply 2.1 million soldiers will see their combat effectiveness only degrade, and eventually they'll starve (or, in trying to secure enough land to grow crops, spread themselves thin enough to become vulnerable-- Roshar's main continent is massive, about the size of Asia). ----End fun speculation section---- Obviously not a guaranteed-successful mission, and not the only way things could shake out, but such an operation would seem to address a lot of the invaders' advantages and play to Rosharans' strengths while also being very hard to deal with. Rosharan victory being non-viable strikes me as an extreme overstatement. But I do think I've been too cavalier about the Rosharans-- there's a lot that could go wrong for them every step of the way, and you're right to point out that every one they lose is a huge blow that they can't really recover from. That plus the initial missile strike (which would be bad even if not catastrophic) doesn't give them a lot of space to be ground down.

I'm not sure that's sound. Item one: Infrared light was discovered in the 19th century using methods that we have (mostly) observed Navani use, with prisms, light, and thermometers (the thermometer part is the reason for the "mostly", but fabrials should be able to do this well enough). In other words, Rosharans already have the science to discover IR-spectrum light and the prism experiment Navani does she describes as a simple one she already knows about (implying that any engineer or scientist on Roshar might be similarly familiar). Even if they only theorize about its properties, knowing that light outside of the visible spectrum exists might be enough for a Lightweaver's illusions to handle IR however they want, including packaging it into illusions as a matter of course. Similar to how Shallan's image of Sebarial in the carriage was realistic in details she did not draw nor think of, like the pores of his skin. "Wouldn't know IR wavelengths exist at all" is too strong, I think. They can and might already, as they already have all of the technology that was used to discover it in reality. Though, as above, learning that the IR sensors exist and how they work well enough to meddle with them specifically would take some doing. Item 2: We know, for a fact, that solid Rosharan Lightweaver illusions utterly block light (human-visible light, if we're being pedantic, which I guess we are here ), such as when Shallan hides behind an illusory wall or inside of an illusory boulder. It violates parsimony to assume that the illusions split light based on the Lightweaver's understanding and then just are partially opaque. An illusory wall or blob of pitch darkness should destroy an IR sensor's ability to "see" beyond or through it just as it would for a human or a Fused, which suits what I had in mind for "defeating" IR sensors. More complexity is certainly possible, though tenuous in this specific case. I feel confident that Vathah knows nothing about material science, light, and optics, but his illusions look as good as Shallan's (as far as we know). He wants the illusion to be real-looking, so the magic does that. The only Cosmere mention of IR I know of is from a WoB relating to Warbreaker. It's not the same magic system at all, of course, but it's something and it indicates that Cosmere magic at least can work on the whole spectrum: Item 3: This one is just an aside and is broadly unrelated to the Lightweaving/IR issue, but Steel Inquisitors see the world through the blue lines connecting to every metal around them, including trace metals. It's very different from how other Allomancers perceive the metal lines, and Inquisitors actually do seem to see them all (to some maximum resolution, I imagine). As much as I hate to fall back on it, this seems like the realm of Intent in Cosmere magics. If the Lightweaver's intent is to create an image that will fool observers by appearing realistic, the magic does the work of making that happen. They aren't engineers nor physicists, they're wizards (except for the ones that are also engineers and/or physicists). Insisting on this limitation for Lightweaving doesn't seem based on any actual evidence in-text or from WoBs, as far as I know and can find. Do you have any evidence that Lightweaving is limited in the manner you describe? But all of this is tangential and you are demanding too much in service of the invaders' technology. I'm already on record as saying that countering missiles one-by-one is an inferior strategy for the Rosharans, so they'll do something better instead (like hiding underground). I just don't see the "eventually" here. The invaders get one salvo, which may or may not obliterate the key Rosharan figures, and I can't imagine how the invaders would be able to locate those key figures without giving away their presence and surveillance. People anywhere near the target site will be aware of how little warning there was and how devastating the results and spread the word. People who know will respond, because Rosharans are not only not stupid they have a lot of really excellent military thinkers and strategists. They adapted pretty quickly and well to the formerly incomprehensible changes brought by the return of Surgebinders. "Stay underground unless there is a Highstorm" would be both simple and effective for them. Rosharans don't need to know the specific capabilities of the invaders to resist-- knowing they can lob a bunch of missiles to nearly anywhere they might go, they have guns, fast vehicles, and similar seems like enough. And I think you're overestimating how much the invaders will know about Rosharan capabilities. Realistically, how much are they going to be able to learn anything about the cognitive realm, realmatic travel, Investiture, specific capabilities of the Orders and the Fused, Rosharan politics and military organization, or anything else, and by what methods (particularly those which will not tip off the Rosharans to the presence of the invaders)? We haven't even touched on some of the craziest things the Rosharans conceivably could do, like manipulating Connection among the invaders or forcing materiel and personnel into the cognitive realm. I maintain what I said before: if the invaders don't win very quickly, they will have a hard time winning at all.

It's definitely a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency tactic. I wouldn't want to have to do it!

I love them! I have two. Nine animals must keep you busy.

There is some asymptotic limit which hasn't been clearly defined yet but it's well above 200% because it can stack, as you've outlined. This happens in some of the books (spoilers for some events in Mistborn era 2):

Welcome! How many cats do you have?

Unless they have Feruchemical iron...

My point in bringing this up is that it makes their strongholds more or less invulnerable to the invaders. Living there forever isn't any good, but they're barely hampered from launching strikes while quite well protected on their own. Stormlight supply is an issue, but not an insurmountable one (especially if we tweak the assumptions we've been making). This would seem to violate one of the original assumptions: the invaders know only what is common knowledge on Roshar. Some know of aluminum, but vanishingly few, mostly the Fused and a handful of spren. It seems unreasonable to me that the invaders would know much of anything about Surgebinding or investiture based on any conceivable method of observation or intelligence-gathering; too few people know the details and they are unlikely to discuss it in detail in some way that the invaders can intercept. And it's hard to say how much use they could get from it when the Rosharans aren't limited to directly affecting those things which can be made of or coated in aluminum. Additionally (I clipped the quote to keep the post size manageable), I really doubt that the invaders can plausibly disguise themselves effectively-- they won't know the languages or other other common knowledge items. Maybe they can pass a quick visual inspection with limited equipment and being careful not to let the equipment show. But maybe. It's not a sticking point for me. I will, however, say that the CIA making contact with and training sleeper agents seems to go well outside of the scope of the question. Of course it could defeat IR sensors. IR is still light, even if not in the visible spectrum, and the Surge of Illumination covers light, sound, and waveforms generally. The only limitations are Rosharan knowledge of its existence, which they may or may not have, and awareness of its use in mechanical sensor equipment, which seems like a pretty brutal obstacle. We don't hear about it, but the top-flight scientists and spren might know enough to figure it out and may already be aware of it theoretically. I would bet that Raboniel knew about it. It explicitly is not. It primarily changes reality, not (just) the minds of observers. It's magic, which is about as much detail as we can get on how it's created. Lightweaving is 100% guaranteed to be able to produce actual sound out of nothing and we have many observations of this happening in the books. Do these apply to what we're talking about, though? My comments on this were mostly about defending a high-altitude position with clear visibility in all directions, like Urithiru, plus constant watchers (including spren). Sound is fast but light is faster, and seeing a missile or aircraft approach you seems like it would give ample time to magic a barrier in front of it. If we're talking about bullets or darts I'm not sure I buy that those would be in play in these scenarios. But as before, I think that trying to defend a position that can be bombarded is not a worthwhile goal for the Rosharans, which they would recognize pretty quickly. That's fine because they don't need those as much as a real military would. So this seems (to me) to matter if and only if Urithiru is bombarded immediately, before the Rosharans even know about the invasion. And after the end of Words of Radiance I think that literally everyone would listen to Renarin's warnings of impending destruction. Any survivors of the initial bombardments will fortify themselves behind mountains' worth of rock, travel via magic (one way or another), emerge during a Highstorm, travel along with it, and then strike decisively at the invading assets while drawing from nearly unlimited Stormlight. I don't know how much the invaders can do in the midst of a hurricane but we know that Rosharans can do a lot. An operation like this might even be enough to take out an aircraft carrier, or even a whole fleet (depending only on about a million other details ).

No worries about hand-waving, there's no other way to do it! The issue is that the assumptions we make about support and resupply are pretty important, almost as important as the assumptions we make about how quickly/well each side can learn about the capabilities of the other. A similar set of assumptions dictate how well the distance-from-conflict capabilities of the invaders are preserved. Structures like radio towers seem a bit brittle and short-lived to me (how would they fare in a storm, and how well can the invaders construct and secure them as they move inland?) and the radio waves themselves might be within Lightweavers' ability to interfere with (though, as above, they'd have to learn about radio first which seems like a big leap. As an aside, might the Singers be able to learn about or interact with radio waves more easily? They're very tied into sound, rhythm, and tones, but it's not clear to me that that would translate that far up the spectrum). Some resupply can be taken for granted (like guns and bullets, probably), but losing an aircraft carrier or a long-range bomber is very difficult to recover from-- they take years to build, and until then you have that much less capacity to project force. The situation is similar, though less severe, for other ships. Those seem, to me, to be at least as important as the Rosharans losing an Elsecaller, if not more so. So assumptions that obviate these kinds of issues are really key to the whole experiment. A lot of other stuff is so deep into the details of the situation that I don't think we can do a good job of evaluating its likely efficacy without just asserting it. For example, people have seemed to assume that airplanes in flight are impossible for Rosharans to counter. Maybe. But, taking Urithiru as an example, any airborne approach seems like it would be pretty visible from a great distance. A cryptic could probably calculate trajectories and speeds pretty well. So upon seeing an approaching aircraft or missile, the cryptic calculates the right spot and then a Lightweaver or Elsecaller turns a small volume of air to metal right in front of it at the appropriate time, and now your supersonic jet/missile has slammed into a wall. Or simply has a very non-aerodynamic metal shell appear on it, forcing it down immediately. Or Lightweavers create illusions that fool visible-light and IR sensors, which seems well within the scope of their powers. Would those defenses work? Maybe, I don't know how we can be more precise than that. Is it realistic to think that Rosharans would not be able to locate the spawn point? I don't think so, but again it's all assumption based in any direction. How quickly and effectively can the Rosharans learn about the invaders' equipment and methods? As soon as they understand what modern combat armor is like they can manufacture their own, they would probably have access to guns better than those the invaders have within weeks of getting one to study. The Rosharans need no industry nor supply chain to manufacture things. I question how well invading special forces can function. Spren are perfect spies and sentries, being nearly or completely invisible at will, and the invaders aren't going to blend in well while also having to sneak across a lot of open ground. It seems very unlikely to me that they would be able to get to a high-value target this way. The situation also seems ripe for disinformation: your radio squawks with new orders, in a perfect imitation of a relevant officer's voice, possibly even providing appropriate codes, ordering you to immediately do something that creates a tactical vulnerability or ruins the mission. Radiant/Fused spies and assassins seem like they would be very hard to deal with. And while the destructive capacity of modern ordinance is impressive, how long would they be able to use it? After a single bombardment I would imagine the Rosharans would just go underground, miles deep. They have tools and magic that would make this much easier to do than it would be in real life, and have almost no need for infrastructure to persist there indefinitely. It was just earlier this year that massive bombardment with specialized bunker-buster ordinance failed to destroy underground facilities in Iran, so this isn't even speculation. Ukraine has seen a lot of bombardment over the last several years, including Kyiv, but it's not like they've had their high-value targets picked off so easily or have every city reduced entirely to rubble. Believing the Rosharans would work together was me misreading the original post. I'm sorry both because I missed it and also because my most key tactic involved the Deepest Ones and Radiants working together, so losing that is a blow! Stonewards and Willshapers might be able to do similar things but I was really counting on the magic of two-solid-objects-occupying-the-same-volume-of-space, and losing that really weakens my case. In summary (my posts have gotten really long in this thread!), most of the key capabilities people assume the invaders would have seem like they would not function well (or at all) on Roshar, many of the remaining ones could be countered or subverted very flexibly by magic-capable Rosharans, the destructive capacity of the invaders' ordinance seems overstated after the first use, intelligence-gathering capability is seriously asymmetric in favor of Roshar, and the magic is powerful, flexible, inimitable, and in many cases cannot be countered. If the invaders don't win quickly (as in, right around the first strike) I don't see them as likely to win at all. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the scenario is not a fair one. If Roshar has no possible way to damage the invaders' production or population, no way to address the "spawning" of invaders and equipment, and the invaders are 100% committed to deploying their full capacity to conquering Roshar no matter what the cost or facts on the ground, then the situation is one that Roshar literally cannot win because they can never stop additional invasions. It would be a lot like the Desolations, really. I guess eventually the Earth will simply run out of resources so support the invasion while Roshar never would, but that is a very bleak strategy. Thanks for starting this thread and engaging with me, this has been really fun to think about!

That changes things yet again, if the Rosharans cannot strike back against the invaders' production in any way! The specific details still matter a lot (as I mentioned before, how much stuff can be transferred to Roshar in some span of time could be a significant bottleneck). I'm skeptical that it's a fair question if the "entire U.S. military", including all materiel and personnel and all ancillary equipment (it's definitely a cheat for satellites to be transferred through the spawn point but also be in orbit in appropriate patterns), can just be assumed to appear and get established immediately. Like, you have until the first Highstorm to get all of your storage built (at least), and all that stuff and people are not going to fit into laits for natural protection very easily. As for the rest there is a lot of hand-waving for all of use since so much is impossible to predict outside of asserting it. I'll go to the high-value target soulcasters as an example. After even a brief set of encounters the Rosharans would appreciate the ability of the invaders to destroy single targets, and as a consequence I don't think that they would ever expose them casually. Could the invaders identify one real soulcaster among 10,000 illusory duplicates, and could they do it in time to prevent devastation? How often would the Rosharans even deploy a soulcaster in the field in that way, as opposed to something like a commando raid, and why? I, personally, would use magic to deliver the soulcaster to, say, a fuel depot or munition storage (Deepest Ones might be 100% undetectable while moving through the ground, which would make it impossible to stop or even be aware of a soulcaster arriving until they've completely annihilated their target). So much turns on whether or not we assume that the invaders can learn about the full properties of aluminum (which seems almost impossible to me), or how much Rosharans can know about how the invaders' equipment works or what parts are important to the invaders' capabilities. I would be very surprised to find that the invaders could feed their 2.1 million soldiers from Rosharan farming-- even Rosharan militaries don't do that, with much smaller numbers. It's not a guarantee of victory, but a single Rosharan specialist getting near any of the invaders' core assets a single time can easily devastate those assets permanently. Sinking the carriers seems like it would be paramount, and obviously so to the Rosharans, and very achievable in ways I'm not sure the invaders could counteract (at least not before a critical number of the ships were destroyed). The Rosharans would have an incredible intelligence advantage: could the invaders prevent Sja-anat from observing them in any way, can military ciphers defeat a cryptic who also can observe one-time pads, etc. There is a lot of assertion that these things won't work, and if that's the standard then by definition the Rosharans can't win because you've declared that they can't. As an example, my mention of Shallan soulcasting a ship to water was meant to emphasize her lack of experience and knowledge still allowing something so dramatic. Jasnah casually transforms people directly into fire and the books suggest that that is harder than transforming any object. Asserting that soulcasters simply cannot transform invaders' materiel is akin to asserting that the invaders' aircraft can't fly, a completely arbitrary and unsupported nerf. How good are tanks going to be on Roshar? If chulls can survive Highstorms tanks might be able to, also. But one Skybreaker or Dustbringer could make an area impassable for them pretty quickly. But in any case what I was imagining is something like a Windrunner's hand popping out of the ground and suddenly making the treads ultra heavy in directions perpendicular to the ground or changing the gravity on part of an airplane such that it can't fly properly. Or an Edgedancer radically increasing the friction of the rifling or interior of an artillery barrel-- hard to repair a barrel that's blown up. Or a Skybreaker/Dustbringer shattering the ground underneath the treads. Or large-scale illusions to obfuscate their forces, equipment, and tactics. Or a soulcaster turning the water around the ships transporting all of that equipment into oil and igniting it, or turning that water into a prism of iron, or turning their propulsion systems into smoke. Can an aircraft carrier be field-repaired with totally new propulsion? One of the key assumptions that you seem to return to often is that Rosharans will engage the invaders in the field in the open, which I think is unrealistic, and also that they won't do more than one thing at a time. A donut-like hemisphere of pure darkness, cheap and easy for a Lightweaver to create, is going to create a lot of cover for something like Windrunners dropping in and destroying equipment in irreparable ways. The Deep Ones maneuvering strikes me as basically impossible to deal with, especially if they don't understand aluminum's full properties (which, again, it seems very difficult for them to discover). All Cosmere-native living people (and objects) constantly exist in all three realms at once, physical, cognitive, and spiritual. It's an existential part of being from the Cosmere at all, at least while alive. It's not clear if a non-Cosmere person, with no investiture-related properties, would even fully "exist" in the Cosmere. But even if they can't be directly soulcast I'm not sure that's the obstacle you're suggesting-- that seems like an inferior approach for most things when, as an example from above, you can transform the matter surrounding an aircraft carrier's propulsion system into pure tungsten (or whatever). For that matter, a small lattice of Shardblades placed in the right spots will destroy any non-godmetal equipment pretty handily, tearing propellers and housings apart or blocking artillery barrels near the base. I definitely agree that the invaders have a lot of advantages which the Rosharans won't be able to match or counter very well, but most of the arguments in the invaders' favor seem to depend on the Rosharans being particularly incompetent in a lot of dimensions permanently and at once. That seems to run counter to what the books depict: many countries are described as having excellent militaries, especially generals, and the Fused are veterans beyond anything the invaders could imagine. I don't think it's a slam dunk for the invaders because they cannot protect themselves from magic very well and have some very hard-to-replace assets, and unless Rosharans constantly engage the invaders on the terms most favorable to those invaders attrition starts to look a lot more favorable for Roshar.

This changes everything, I think. Are we talking about a one-time transfer of soldiers and equipment to Roshar, and then the military is on its own with no (or very limited) resupply options? If so, how much is transferred before the conflict begins and how much can be delivered afterwards would radically change what the invaders can accomplish. Fuel and electricity might not be replaceable at all on Roshar, as well as high-tech items like missiles. Supply limitations would really put a clock on how long the invasion could take before most of their advantages evaporate. I'd also think that something like a carrier group on the water would be very vulnerable to magical commando raids targeting specific capabilities, like damaging a flight deck so that the airplanes can't use it. I also wonder if the invaders would ever learn about aluminum outside of its ability to block Shardblades. It seems like they'd have to know a lot about things like lashing or soulcasting to put together the broader picture in a way they could use. This raises an interesting question about how the invaders fit into Cosmere realmatics. Would the invading soldiers have cognitive representations? Would their equipment, coming from a place with no investiture component of matter, even have a representative bead in Shadesmar? If not, then no soulcasting would work at all on those objects. I don't think the rest would be as much of a concern, though. Living beings are hard to soulcast but still transformable. Jasnah does it in Kharbranth and near the Perpendicularity outside of Thaylen City she does it with trivial ease. Everything else doesn't seem to be able to resist her in any meaningful way. As far as I know the reason soulcasters don't liquify enemy soldiers and equipment is that Radiant soulcasters (the only ones who can soulcast so freely) have so far been rare, there would be a lot of things to transform, and it's easier by far to just ignite the air around them (or do something else instead, but I do think there is a lot of arbitrary fluctuations in what soulcasters like Jasnah can accomplish, so who knows what the limits are?). Just soulcasting the air into a thick iron shell around something might make it unusable forever. For what it's worth, we see an extremely inexperienced and low-Oathed Shallan transform an entire ship into water, which seems like a bad precedent for a carrier group. Why would they need to do this? We see a few large things lashed in the books (I think a boulder is largest?) but I'm not sure what tactics you're imagining or how they compare. For trying to lash invaders' heavy equipment I'd worry far more about lashing specific pieces of things to cause them to break more of the machinery or tear themselves apart. Better still, mess with their abrasion so that they won't work properly or as expected, perhaps disastrously so. I'm not sure the ships would be hard to locate in a Highstorm, or at any time. If the invaders have cognitive representations then they could be casually tracked in Shadesmar, where the open ocean is walkable. They'd probably have spren tracking them all the time, something they would not be able to prevent or even know about. Could they do this on Roshar, though? How much of that real-world capability comes down to satellites and high-bandwidth, near-instantaneous communication? Even for things that can definitely work locally Lightweavers should be able to casually destroy or subvert a lot of sensor system s(though they'd have to learn about them first, which seems like a substantial obstacle to overcome). I also don't think that the Rosharans would naively assault the invaders more than once. One disastrous sortie and then we might see Radiants and Deepest Ones moving through the ground instead of the air. Like the soulcasting above, if something is really difficult and expensive to do while not being especially effective there is no reason that the Rosharans would continue doing it.

Should we be more specific in what we mean by "take over"? I think that, in contrast to the Rosharan version of this idea, era 1 Scadrial has some much more severe limitations. Their industrial capacity is extremely limited (by design), their military seems relatively inexperienced (so not just low-tech but also maybe not flexible in responding to the invaders), the geography seems more compact and the terrain less forbidding even as food production requires a lot more land and labor (so it's easier for invaders to move around and they can dynamically choose weak points in the Scadrian economic production chain), the feudal power structure provides for a lot of weak links and potential traitors, and the entire socio-economic-political structure of Scadrial is based on bureaucracy (which does an awful lot of the day-to-day work of ruling and can be commandeered) and oppression (so one ruling group imposed on everyone is similar to any other). For all of the metallic arts' potential I don't think that they have much ability to imitate, frustrate, or counter a contemporary military as some other magic systems. Especially in era 1 they are primarily about "deluxe" individuals: the innate nature of being an Allomancer/Feruchemist makes them impossible to replace but their powers don't seem to me that they'd give all that devastating an advantage against guns and missiles. Soothing and rioting might be effective, but it seems hard to me: the allomancers have a range problem, broad emotions seem difficult to use to any effect, and aluminum helmets would be very practical and effective for such a narrow risk (if the invaders learned about their efficacy). Feruchemy is amazing but storing sufficient amounts of attributes takes a long time. Mistborn are dangerous but very rare and can be outthought (like Yomen with Vin) or eventually overwhelmed. Hemalurgy probably isn't much help against non-Cosmere people since it's the same as just stabbing them. Koloss are devastating but killable even by regular people, if not easily. I think they're not going to fare well against sustained gunfire. Kandra would make amazing infiltrators but what would they be able to accomplish? Stealing materiel to outfit Scadrians might be good and help even the scales a bit, assassinating leaders might be effective, and they could get excellent (perfect?) intelligence on invader movements and plans, even subverting them. I think that the Kandra would be Scadrial's greatest edge. So I think that Scadrial is uniquely vulnerable to invasion and devastation, has limited ability to respond to a modern military, has a competitive power structure that makes collaborators easy to find, and already has an impersonal system that keeps the masses oppressed by leadership. Scadrial's assets seem ill-suited to counter soldiers in the field but could probably cripple the invaders through disinformation, intelligence-gathering, impersonation, and assassination of leaders. If Scadrial can win I would think it would come down to the Kandra. As others have noted above, the Lord Ruler changes this situation entirely. With compounding he can devastate the invaders more quickly than they can react, and can personally achieve brilliance and insight eclipsing anything the invaders could muster while recording every detail of his thinking flawlessly down to the most minute details.

May I make an observation? You can say no (or simply ignore this post)-- I appreciate that this thread is mostly a conversation between people other than myself (I didn't like how my one post read and so I hid it, though you had already seen it and graciously replied).

This is a broader point, but I also think people are overestimating what the U.S. military can accomplish in general. Its ability to militarily control other countries on Earth has been mixed, at best, since at least the 1950s. Taking control of an entire continent, never mind planet, is orders of magnitude more difficult. While the military has a lot of destructive potential I think that key variables are going to be the size of the portal (how much of the U.S.'s industrial might can actually get to Roshar in some span of time) and how long they have to prepare before being noticed (can they be entrenched in a stable, defensible position before hostilities begin?). I don't know if we can game those out meaningfully here. But outside of immediate, overwhelming destruction (which I'm not sure they could achieve over all of Roshar) I don't see this as being a slam dunk for the invaders. Without constant resupply and reinforcement through the portal I don't think the invaders would have any chance at all. What about it has been ignored? The logistical capabilities of the invaders are seriously hampered compared to what they can do on Earth due to lack of infrastructure (no satellites, serious difficulties in requiring all materiel and most supplies to be shipped in through the one portal, difficulties in building and stationing due to Highstorms/Everstorm, and similar). There are adaptations possible for most of that, but those themselves become vulnerabilities upon which much of the invasion is depending. It's an interesting problem. As for "everything is made of aluminum", no it is not. A lot of things can be made out of it but there are reasons many things are not. The frame of an airplane can absolutely be made of aluminum (and basically always is, as far as I know). The machinery of a jet engine, not entirely. Your electronics don't use gold rather than aluminum because people want them to be pretty. The same goes for many munitions. Aluminum food or medicine? Not so good. There is certainly a lot of metal in modern materiel but it's not all metal. Aluminum coating could do a lot for a variety of purposes but isn't going to protect every possible vulnerability, and can't even approach something like the surrounding environment being turned to smoke or fire or exploding. Ditto for lashing boulders to fly over fortifications and then drop, or worse Cosmere-specific munitions like light/anti-light bombs. An all-aluminum airplane with no non-shielded surface (which I don't think could exist, with the engines at least needing a lot of air flow for cooling) is still going to struggle if the air around it becomes too thin for it to fly through or turns into something that ruins its engines mid-flight. I also think that far too little attention has been paid to the fact that Rosharans can imitate the technology they find while the invaders could not. Navani and Jasnah with a handful of guns and bullets are going to be able to create their own firearms in short order, and faster and better to boot. Simply observing an airplane for a minute would put Rosharan engineers on the path to powered flight. A Radiant can form a spren into any shape and configuration with a thought, creating an on-demand, instantaneous barrier which cannot be destroyed or even damaged. The invaders aren't likely to be able to imitate that at all. A pair of Radiants could create a tungsten slug or depleted uranium round and then lash it to extreme speed towards a target-- no preparation needed, no supply line, no machinery, just some Stormlight and a couple of seconds. There's not much defense against that. We've also so far ignored some key things which mattered a lot in the wars on Roshar, such as the Unmade. What is the U.S. military going to do about Ashertmarn, Re-Shephir, or Sja-anat inserting themselves into a invader's base? How well can Rosharans, via Moelach, Renarin-style Truthwatchers, or some Diagram-esque person, foresee the invaders' maneuvers and abilities, especially given that the invaders have no similar capability of their own to frustrate or counteract it? Rosharan spies, whether Lightweavers or Masked Ones, seem like they would be extremely difficult to counteract (especially with spren for support). With even a vague guess at how various sensor equipment works (like radar or sonar) a Lightweaver can really destroy any sort of surveillance/reconnaissance with ease while the invaders might never be able to fool, or even understand, something like a warning fabrial. They've already worked together to great effect multiple times. Navani and Raboniel, Kaladin and various Singers/Fused, Venli, Eshonai, and more (though those are the most significant ones). A military attacking them both would be a powerful motivation, but any alliance would probably be tenuous and breakable. If the invaders were able to capitalize on that it would be very helpful to them but it seems as though they would be enemies to everyone, so how would they be able to do so? I have to think they would invest in the effort, I just struggle to think of how they could do so successfully.

I think that there's nothing the U.S. military would be able to do, ultimately. By definition Rosharans have access to every mundane thing that the U.S. military would have, at least in theory (if not necessarily the specific knowledge, like engineering or software development abilities), but without the need for fixed manufacturing centers or supply lines. And then the Rosharans get access to magic which does lots of things that the U.S. military could never possibly do, like manipulate gravity or negate/promote friction, transform bullets and fighter jet fuel, create perfect illusions that fool all sensor equipment, etc. Spren are undetectable spies, and some of them can also manipulate physical objects (imagine a Cryptic slipping into a munitions warehouse and triggering explosives). And a huge amount of U.S. military ability is in logistics and infrastructure which cannot be duplicated on Roshar (they're not getting geosynchronous-orbit satellites and high-bandwidth communications technology to target precision missiles and munitions, etc., though there will be workarounds for at least some of the deficiencies). The Highstorms/Everstorm would be problematic for the invaders as well. The only hope for a more advanced, conventional military seems like it would be overwhelming force on limited targets (such as blasting a Rosharan soldier or position with thousands of rounds of ammunition per second, overwhelming healing, Plate, or disappearances). But I don't think that that would be something they could really bring to bear, since a handful of Radiants or Fused could annihilate any conventional position and/or destroy or sabotage most (if not all) of the materiel. I don't think it's plausible that the invaders would be able to protect their ingress portal, and with that gone so too is their invasion. Encasing the portal in solid titanium, messing with gravity, friction, pressure, heat, atmospheric composition, and so, so many other options would seriously complicate any ability to travel through it or secure it. Access to aluminum is another advantage the invaders would have but I don't see how it could be used in such a way as to negate all of the vulnerabilities that come with facing magic that you can't imitate. Not even remotely true, and a Soulcaster makes this beyond trivial. If the water surrounding the portal is transformed to various types of oil, or worse a highly reactive metal like cesium, and the base is on fire/exploded while the surrounding water burns.

For Sanderson I stick with the Cosmere (outside of Wheel of Time, which I already liked before I knew of Sanderson). The non-Cosmere works Sanderson writes have seemed to have a more YA slant to them, and those sorts of books are generally less appealing to me for a variety of reasons. That was my experience with the Reckoners, though I did read them all. I also prefer some of the older Cosmere works to the more recent ones, which kind of limits the options for reading. I have made more of an effort to read outside of Sanderson generally over the last year or so, to the extent that there are a couple of official Sanderson releases I still haven't read.

Could you expand on this? Hemalurgy doesn't seem meritocratic at all to me, especially since the majority of hemalurgists seem to have been spiked by someone else (you don't even need the knowledge yourself). It seems to me that this will only accelerate as the Metallic Arts become more commoditized and broadly available. I'll settle for discussion, or even mention, of what people mean when they trot the terms out or how they expect to achieve them. Just saying "I think the most ethical system is X" doesn't provide much to discuss or think about. The interesting parts of ethics discussions are why a person believes one decision to be better than another, and it's good to practice thinking in those dimensions rather than just asserting what "feels right" with little to no reflection. As for the Shaod, I would think of that as an aristocracy (per the original suggestions in the OP). That it's decided by lottery is an interesting wrinkle but doesn't seem to me to that it would change the system away from aristocratic rule. Once you undergo the Shaod you suddenly have radically more power than others and are immortal (so your social position is permanent). Do you disagree with that analysis, @Qianweilian (sorry, I messed up the quote box), or is the lottery piece the thing that you wanted to emphasize over the rest?

I was able to download it, thank you for the link!