arandomperson1234

On 9/7/2024 at 9:10 AM, Xiahida said:

They obtain Voidlight by singing the Song of Prayer, essentially drawing Odium's attention to grant them Voidlight. Venli comments about this interaction in RoW.

My point is that the throughput of voidlight generation seems fairly low, as we don’t see the Fused soulcasters completely revolutionizing the economy with infinite transmutation.

On 9/7/2024 at 10:00 AM, alder24 said:

How would you gather and transport all those created materials when flying away from the storm, towards desired locations, when some of those things fall in the middle of the enemy territory? This would be a logistical nightmare, which would pull precious very rare resources (Radiants) away from duties that are vastly more important (idk, fighting in the end of the world for example).

They don't need anything like that, they don't have any raw material supply issues or shortages, their Soulcasters are doing a good enough job providing what's needed. Creating more than is needed is just a waste of time. You don't need any material to create a city, just soulcast an entire building out of air (shown in the book), but truthfully they don't need any new city. What's good of all that new material when it would be just endlessly taking space because there is no need to process them? Why would you need raw material when you can just soulcast an entire object or its components instead? Just create wax molds of wanted elements and Soulcast them into specific material, then assemble it into a clock for example. That's cutting the workload.

And if you think flooding the market with unlimited resources will do any good to society then you're mistaken. People will just lose their jobs and source of their income.

Lastly, Highstorms are still dangerous, even to Radiants. There is a lot of debris being thrown up and it just takes one stone to knock a knight unconscious and potentially kill them. The winds are ridiculously fast and unpredictable, throwing people around like rags. Even Kaladin struggled with navigating inside Highstorms, narrowly avoiding collisions with fast moving debris on multiple occasions. And you want to create new projects in the middle of the storm. That's just a very bad idea. 

However, I'm interested in how a massive Soulcasting of the air would affect a Highstorm. You need a huge volume of air to create a solid matter, which creates a vacuum so how a massive vacuum in the middle of the storm would affect it? A storm is a low pressure system, so would lowering the pressure even more make the storm more intense? On the other hand you're robbing the storm out of its energy as you are literally deleting fast moving air, so would this cause the storm to cease? No idea, but it's an interesting situation. Fortunately, there aren’t enough Radiants to affect a Highstorm, but theoretical questions are still fun. 

You can restrict your soulcasting to while you are over friendly areas, and have people haul the stuff back to a city.

There isn’t much combat occurring in the middle of highstorms, and most of the lightweavers weren’t frontline fighters, anyways.

Raw materials do seem like an issue. For instance, in real life early modern warfare, even basic infantry typically wore mass-produced half- or three-quarters plate (munition armor). In contrast, Rosharan soldiers only wear a breastplate and cap, which leaves the limbs and stomach unprotected and indicates a lack of metal (perhaps most soulcasting fabrials are not tuned for making iron/steel). Also, aluminum does not seem to be that common, though the human side should know of its existence due to the spears of the Heavenly ones. Giving the soldiers a thin sheet of aluminum coating on their gear would make them more resistant to fused Soulcasters, and coating the walls, floors, and ceilings of all forts and important buildings with aluminum would completely screw the deepest ones.

Freeing up laborers for conscription is of immense use. They are in the middle of a war, and every farmer, miner, woodcutter, etc. who is rendered jobless by mass soulcasting can be turned into an additional soldier. Numbers are very useful in wars.

You also completely overlook a lot of the implications of being able to rapidly conduct architectural work. A few radiant soulcasters could probably set up an aluminum-coated fort that overlooks a major roadway (perhaps place it high up, with no ground-level entrances, and use flying radiants to lift soldiers and supplies in), fortify an existing settlement, put up a bridge to cross a river, surround an enemy force with aluminum coated walls, collapse a bridge relied upon by the enemy, seal a mountain pass with a thick aluminum barrier, etc. being able to build buildings and destroy enemy buildings overnight is an incredibly useful capacity. If nothing else, dropping a giant slab of rock or metal onto an enemy warcamp would be a good way of squishing everyone there into a pancake. 

I’ve read all the books, though some were some time ago, but I recall Kaladin flying several others through the storms for a long distance without much issue. And Radiants are fairly tough, as Shallan survives getting hit in the head by an arrow. If you chain them down and have them stay highly infused throughout the process, they should probably be fine, whether in the ground or in the air.

On 9/8/2024 at 6:58 AM, hwiles said:

Unfortunately, no, not really. Massive feats of soulcasting still obey (more or less...) newtonian physics regarding action and reaction. Jasnah soulcasts a boulder to smoke with explosive results. Soulcasting a massive pocket of air into solid matter should therefore probably be expected to cause a massive implosion and vacuum.

 

Amazing feats like soulcasting a giant stone slab into crystaline glass or solid gold should be possible using the methods described, but producing food in large volume is basically a no-go considering that the weakest highstorm is stronger than the strongest hurricane, creating large permanent shelters/buildings out of air would likely be accompanied by reactionary pressure waves powerful enough to immediately implode and crush said buildings (and kill every living creature in the vicinity who isn't totally drunk on stormlight), and soulcasting complex constructs (multi-ingredient food, machines, and complex assemblies) is only possible for soulcasters who intimately understand the object that they wish to create inside and out still, no matter how much investiture they can command or control at any one time.

I...could imagine it maybe being possible for an individual soulcaster to transmute a fully-assembled and functional Abrams tank out of thin-air if they studied their designs with unfettered access to all of the processes and infrastructure used to create them normally for a couple decades for example, buuuuut...even with unlimited resources, they could probably never ever transmute even a single next-generation stealth bomber since, as a simple matter of security, they're sort of designed to not be fully reproducible by an individual person within a natural lifespan no matter how well-connected or good at spying one is.

So...I'm gonna say 'definitely not' to the question of post-scarcity roshar. But, it should absolutely be possible for Radiant soulcasters to level entire cities like something straight out of full metal alchemist during a storm, and extremely (EXTREMELY) well-connected and educated ones might be able to manufacturer moderately complex 20th and some 21st century hardware and machines out of thin air if they evacuated the area and controlled the environment properly.

strictly speaking, roshar kind of already is post-scarcity in the sense that their non-working disabled and poor technically have the option to be fed, housed, and cared for by the vorin church indefinitely with no obligation to beg or serve in any form of labor capacity. This is arguably a better state to be at than any actual real world civilization has reached in my opinion. Buuuut...it's still not post-scarcity; their society is just extremely robust at keepin all of its people as alive as they care to be, it's nowhere near to perfect at fulfilling all of their wishes or helping to actualize and uplift every individual as far as they can each and everyone of them dream of.

Whether soulcasting is volume or mass-conservative is inconsistent. It does appear mass-conservative when Jasnah soulcasts the rock, but if it was mass conservative, then how would humans soulcast into statues not turn into shrunken and misshapen lumps?

And no, I doubt they will be able to make anything that complex, but they could probably pump out lots of raw materials.

And highstorms probably aren’t that strong. Like, wooden wagons are able to survive them without much issue, and the Parshendi (who are tough, but not tougher than infused radiants, can walk around once the stormwall has passed).

By WoB, radiant soulcasters can create literally anything during a highstorm:
 

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/390-stuttgart-signing/#e12723

Wouldn't this allow for a more or less post-scarcity environment on Roshar, more or less immediately? When a Highstorm comes, get any Radiants capable of Soulcasting outside, perhaps behind a wall to break the winds and secured in position with chains or something, and have them Soulcast as much as possible before the storm passes. This would allow for the production of massive amounts of raw material and the construction of entire cities from Soulcast air. Grain, oil, and glass might be somewhat hard (the first two would get waterlogged and the glass would get shattered, unless it is possible to Soulcast through windows placed on the leeward side of buildings and covered with metal slabs during Everstorms), but creating virtually unlimited amounts of whatever metal, wood, rock, or meat you want is easily doable with minimal infrastructure.

For increased throughput, have Windrunners (or Skybreakers) lift the Elsecallers/Lightweavers into the air at the Shattered Plains Oathgate, then they can continuously soulcast air into whatever you want (as long as it is fairly durable) and let it fall to the ground as they fly across Roshar all the way to a western Oathgate under your control.

To me, this looks like it has the potential to greatly reduce the size of the workforce required for most primary resource acquisition (greatly increasing societal wealth, allowing for more specialists to emerge, and vastly increasing the manpower pool for available for war). It also is not possible for Odium's forces, as they use Voidlight for Fused-based Soulcasting (and that apparently does not come from the Everstorm, though the specifics of how they do things is unknown). So why do we not see the human side rushing all their Radiant Soulcasters outside during Highstorms? 

Does one need to touch the other person’s skin to leach their metal reserves? Or will grabbing someone by the arm allow you to leach them through their shirt?

I think it was mentioned that Szeth’s family was in charge of maintaining them, with Szeth wielding the Windrunner blade and his father wielding the Bondsmith blade. Were the other blades just stored somewhere, or were they all being carried somehow? Did others know they had the blades? I remember reading that Szeth trained with all the blades, which makes me think that at least some of the blades were not actively used (which would make swapping easier). How do you bond an honorblade, anyways? Bridge 10 was passing one around for a while, which implies the process is fairly fast, and Moash/Vyre is able to fly immediately after receiving that blade.

Can the surges granted by honorblades be used when they are not summoned? Did we see anyone using honorblade surges while the blade was dismissed, or hear about it in WOB?

In general, it seems like shards have the ability to see and hear most things that go on in their world (perhaps they can't see into an aluminum room or something), with some having extra capabilities (like Ruin being able to read and modify any text not on metal). However, they cannot look everywhere at once, and cannot read thoughts in general.

Evidence:

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/90-barnes-noble-b-fest-2016/#e4588 Shards apparently aren't always aware of the movements of worldhoppers.

Also, Ruin did not always pay 100% attention to Marsh, and he had some independence of thought at times.

Does a shard "record" the things they were not actively paying attention to, so that if they want to know what happened at some location a few days ago, they can "rewind" back to that point?

Can shards "look" at what is happening on other planets?

Some Shards are capable of smiting people. Brandon Sanderson said that Endowment could do this. Can they smite someone on a different planet?

Could Ruin look through the eyes of and control a steel inquisitor located on a different planet, while he remains on Scadrial?

How do shards fight? Is it always through proxies? Can unbound shards directly fight one another?

Can an intact, unsplit shard be held by multiple people simultaneously, somehow (maybe with Bondsmith powers)?

Would it be possible to use Bondsmith powers to somehow anchor a shard for yourself, while not assuming the shard at all times (in order to avoid having your personality distorted by the shard's Intent)?

In different places, Shards were stated to either have large, but finite amounts of investiture, or else infinite amounts of investiture. The fact that Preservation was stated to have slightly less investiture than Ruin because he put more into Scadrial's people makes me think that the first more accurately describes the situation.

Does empowering people take investiture away from the Shard? If someone took up the power in the Well of Ascension and used it to make everyone on Scadrial into a mistborn, would it weaken Preservation? If the Ghostbloods start exporting stormlight in large amounts off Roshar, would it weaken Honor? Would natural population growth and the development of investiture-based technologies (medallions, fabrials, etc.) drain the shards further? Do the shards have enough investiture to sustain civilizations with trillions, quadrillions, or even more people, with lots of power users and magitech?

When someone gets allomantic pewter via a hemalurgic spike, who powers the usage of pewter by that person, Preservation (because Allomancy is of Preservation) or Ruin (because Hemalurgy is of Ruin)?

Do you have a source (book or WOB) for that?

Brandon Sanderson has stated that soulcasting is mass-conservative, not volume-conservative:

Also, he said that there are strange things going on to prevent explosions.

Quote

Sorana (paraphrased)

Is Soulcasting volume- or mass-preserving?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

It's mass-preserving, but there are some strange things going on and that's why we don't get as much explosions as we should. You can see a bit of what is going on when Jasnah Soulcasts air, there are some little reactions, but not as strong as you ought to get.

However, these accounts do not seem to be consistent with what we have seen in the books. For instance, important dead people are often soulcast into stone, which is denser than flesh. Even if some "strange things" occur to prevent explosions, shouldn't the statues end up smaller than the corpses? Also, different parts of the body likely have different densities. I would imagine that the teeth and bones would be denser than the soft tissues, and maybe the tooth enamel and outer parts of the bone would be denser than the stuff inside each tooth and the bone marrow. How do these differences in density not result in the soulcast corpses becoming distorted, with different parts shrinking by different amounts?

Also, it was remarked at some point that a piece of armor was made by soulcasting clay into metal, as seen by the fact that it was covered in fingerprints. The fingerprints should be shrunken in this case, right?

If you soulcast something into something else, then does it expand or contract by the same amount in all dimensions? Can this be controlled?