Heilven

Okay are you talking about this WoB? Because the questioner absolutely does not ask if tapping weight lets you punch with more force, first of all. Second of all, he doesn't say that tapping mass doesn't allow you to tap with more force. He says: Which, first of all, doesn't make much sense as a sentence. Likely because it's something he said offhand and we are reading far, far too much into it. Also he explicitly says that he doesn't quite know the math and it needed to get figured out later. Also this was from 12 years ago, before he decided a lot of stuff about F-Iron. Okay, reading into this quote too much though, loosely translated he says "When a feruchemist punches, he doesn't punch with a thousand pounds of force". There are a variety of reasons that this could be true. Tapping mass does make you move slower, and so without pewter it's mostly useless for fighting. If you are twice as heavy, but move at 3/4 speed (for example) you are barely punching any harder than normal (9/16 * 2, or 12.5% harder). This likely compounds with higher masses, meaning that an iron ferring has little use for iron in a combat situation. Also, punching someone twice as hard as normal is not as big of a deal as you are making it out to be. A basic human punches with around 1000N. A trained kickboxer can punch with 5000N. So Sazed tapping mass to make himself 5 times as heavy (which he doesn't have much stored mass for), even if he uses pewter to make himself able to move with the same speeds, only hits as good as a normal person with high end training. In this situations where Wax is in melee combat, he is absolutely not capable of these feats. Liquidating Miles might have been valuable, but would have required him to put himself in a risky situation, if that is something he is even capable of (seeing as gathering the mass required would make him very slow). Also, he couldn't liquidate Miles, only punch a hole through him. Still possibly useful, but now your arm is stuck in a guy who heals almost instantly and feels no pain. He would simply die. And if he tried using mass to help himself in the fight on the train, he would have broken the train. At the very least he would have been thrown backward as his velocity relative to the train rapidly decreased. Changing your mass while moving is a bad idea if everything else is moving too. Besides, Wax is a ranged combatant who never has to think about tapping mass to possibly increase his force, especially when there are a million downsides. All in all, an Iron Ferring is relatively useless during combat, as to see true benefits he would need to succumb to significant downsides. A Fullborn, however, could use the variety of metals he has available to punch with far, far more force than would normally be possible. At the very least it would allow him to conserve some pewter which is useful for many other tasks. Even still, a 5th ideal windrunner can out heal almost anything thrown at him. A windrunner simply has far more investiture available, and all he needs to do is defend himself as best as possible until the fullborn runs out of steel. Once the fullborn isn't moving with any real speed, a windrunner just kills him. It doesn't matter if you can see lightly into your own future if every future leads to your immediate death.

Why would he confirm you gain more force when tapping mass? That's not something anyone has asked him about. And Wax doesn't have a need to punch people 2~3x as hard, he has a gun. Why would he waste mass just to break down a door with a punch? Slamming his entire body into it is significantly more effective. And I seriously doubt the effectivity of an increased mass punch for Wax. You could maybe hit twice to three times as hard, which doesn't matter when you are fighting thugs or anyone with a goldmind. Plus it isn't something he needs to do often, so he never thinks about it. Also yeah, a tackle is a hit from the side. Of course it is the force of the whole body, who cares. Tackling is generally more effective than punching, because there's more mass behind it. The main reason you don't do it is because you end up in a more precarious situation. Tackling someone while tapping mass would also be more effective for the exact same reason that punching someone would be more effective. It's just not very useful to Wax, a primarily ranged combatant with a ton of other methods for fighting someone than using up a valuable resource that takes time to accumulate.

You are really overusing that density quote here. He figured that one out, it's manipulating the higgs field. Your density definitely does increase, you just don't have any extra electromagnetic force holding your body together(Aka, no extra stuff, that stuff just has more mass). If your fist has more mass but you can move it at the same speed, you most certainly can hit harder. But as other people have explained, increasing your mass to a point where you get a meaningful change to your punch energy, but don't fall through the floor/ground, is a very small margin. Plus, it would take a ton of stored weight for one punch. We never see anyone do it because Sazed could always tap pewter, and Wax didn't ever want to be in melee combat to begin with. The issues with Iron feruchemy come from conservation of energy, not from density. This wob is old and he has since fixed the gravity/density problem. Also I think we should be specific about retcons. He has never retconned something to say "that definitely shouldn't have been able to be possible". He has always retconned something as "that person was wrong/didn't know the full picture". So atium/nalatium simply retcons something no one was capable of actually knowing. I also think nalatium is a good retcon and he should keep that for the movies but that's just my thinking. Anyway, he doesn't ever retcon a scene to be incorrect, he very much doesn't want to do that ever. He has only retconned stuff with unreliable narrators.

Yep! Usage is a war crime because it's basically impossible to treat the wound on the field. The bullet should get stuck in the brain, which would impede all healing. I bet stormlight would keep you "alive" for a while until it just gives up and you die. Unless the healing could somehow push the shards out, but that seems unlikely. So in the future, radiants better wear helmets all the time haha

Hmm. Interesting. I was under the impression that metals could be pushed/pulled on because they are a conduit to investiture. So shouldn't something that is allomantically inert not be able to be pushed on at all?

Oh I know, that's why I said I didn't explain this well, but yeah. Basically go somewhere such that the fullborn has to use their metals to reach them, but not out of the fight. Obviously at that point the fullborn just sits and waits. But if the windrunner was like 30ft in the air, then they aren't unreachable. Even then you would probably prefer to be on the ground so that the fullborn is using steel. Stormlight leaks, but to do things on par with a radiant you have to use a hell of a lot more metals, more than you would be able to carry comfortably. Oh and on stealth killing a radiant, I think destroying the brain should work. You would have to be very careful to make sure you actually finish them off, but I imagine destroying the brain should destroy the connection to the physical realm pretty well. Perhaps they could be healed by an outside source, but so would anyone really. I'm not entirely convinced of that, but healing a completely destroyed brain feels too op imo. Oh also I came up with this a while ago but I think an aluminum alloy hollow point bullet to the brain should kill a radiant with basically no cure. Provided you can catch them off guard.

Man, reading this thread makes me go back and forth haha. At first it seems to me like it should be obvious, the compounding of a fullborn is crazy compared to a radiant. But then I think about how the Metallic arts are so lowly invested, especially when Radiants are dealing with insane amounts of investiture. So a 5th ideal Windrunner in full plate is likely immune to most allomantic arts, and has far more investiture to heal with than even a gold compounder. I think the only thing that gives the Fullborn a real advantage is the speed. Assuming they have a ton of steelminds sown into themselves and a pouch of steel flakes, they could certainly do some real damage. Holding stormlight definitely improves your mental speed and reactions, but not to the degree you would need. A steel compounder wouldn't be flash levels of fast, but even moving at 100 km/h would be crazy hard to deal with. And a steel compounder couldn't keep that up forever, but could keep it around for a while. I think the nerf here is that we haven't seen too much of compounding, and I think gold compounding is likely to be the most effective form. You really don't need that much extra health to heal with speeds comparable to a radiant, your issue just comes from running out of gold. The issue I find is that a surgebinder is much better off just waiting for the fullborn to run out of metals. A 5th ideal Windrunner could fly up to a point where they *can* be reached by the fullborn, just not easily. Then just wait around until they run out of steel. While the compounded strength would likely allow them to shatter plate pretty easily, a windrunner could regrow it relatively easily. If that's even how it works, since we aren't entirely sure how many windspren a windrunner is actually bonded to. They might be able to call several more full sets of armour without expending any stormlight to call the spren back. And once they get through the plate, touching a windrunner is dangerous. Sure, they could shrug off a lashing with A-aluminum, but then they wipe all of the metals they had in them at that moment. You could get around that, but it certainly helps drain reserves at relatively low cost to the windrunner. Once they run out of steel and aluminum the windrunner could just lash them into space. The fullborn would survive for a while, but couldn't get out of that situation and would die eventually. Now if the windrunner doesn't know the fullborn is coming? The fullborn wins. Run as fast as possible and crush the windrunners head like a watermelon.

I agree with you almost entirely. Might be a hot take, but I think Rashek is better than Taravangian. Rashek is definitely not good, but it is very clear that he cared about people. He was never a good man, and was certainty a power hungry person. But just about everything he did during the final empire was for the survival of Scadrial. It seemed ot me that he didn't even really care about power toward the end, choosing to stay in the shadows and let his society work itself. I also think that if allowed to ascend again, he would likely change a lot of stuff about how society worked. His society was the work of an uneducated man working with limited time. And in the meantime he had a pretty good plan to stop Ruin from completing his goals. Taravangian, on the other hand, is far more self centered. He suffers from intelligence without proper compassion, and not just because of his boon and curse. I think that cultivation was attempting to teach Taravangian that without compassion and empathy, your intelligence might trick you into thinking there is only one solution. What I mean by this is the ethical issue of the ends justifying the means. Taravangian is certainly a big believer in the ends justifying the means, but by believing too much in that, you can accidentally not consider ever option. If you come up with a solution that requires you to do terrible things to do something good, you might conclude that the good you will do justifies the horror you caused. You may certainly even be correct. But you might land on that solution, accept that the ends justify the means, and never look for a different solution. Perhaps there is a way to do the same good, but without all of the horror you inflict. This is Taravangian's problem. He lands on a solution where the ends justify the means, but doesn't continue looking to see if there is a better solution that requires less terrible means. We are told that the diagram is the only way to save Roshar, but we are told that by people who have already accepted that unconditionally. When Taravangian created the diagram, he was the most intelligent he had ever been. Meaning he was as unempathetic as he has ever been. I find it perfectly likely that he simply didn't think it necessary to explore other solutions because the one he came up with was just fine, and the ends ultimately justify the means. Everyone else simply has to accept that, because they couldn't predict the future like Taravangian could in that moment. Cultivation was attempting to teach that lesson to Taravangian so that he could be a better Odium, and I think her plan completely backfired. Odium already suffered from the same problem, believing that he must save the cosmere, which required doing a bunch of terrible things. Cultivation hoped that Taravangian could see past that, but I think this failed horribly. Ultimately I think Rashek was a simple man tasked with far more than he was capable of, and failing with power he should have never held. Taravangian failed to learn a lesson about compassion, and actively chose to do horrible things despite having the capacity to see that it wasn't necessary. Ultimately your first paragraph is completely correct, Sanderson's villains are well written and generally 3 dimensional. Neither Rashek nor Taravangian is a good person, yet neither are truly evil. This is just my justification as to why Rashek may deserve more respect than Taravangian.

I think that while Harmony is 1 thing, his investiture is still the superposition of Ruin and Preservation. So one could create Atium and Lerasium by "unsuperpositioning" the two, like what Wax does. SA Spoilers: I wouldn't be shocked if this ends up being untrue, but I think there's at least enough evidence that it's worth considering, and I think it has important implications for how the cosmere works. I also like this theory because it leads to a good ending, and I like it when good things happen. So I do partly believe it just because I want it to be true.

So I think that the problem is that he doesn't mentally hold to Harmony's intent, and that's the whole issue. Take the quote from SoS: I think that this itself is the issue, because I don't think this is the Intent of Harmony. This is what I described in my post, He believes that Harmony means that both life and death must exist in balance, which requires him to take a wholly neutral position. But I don't think that's actually Harmony, and I think it's backed up in the subtext. I believe that Harmony is about progress, destroying old, bad things and creating better, new things. You preserve that which is good, and destroy that which is bad. But if we believe Sazed's definition, then you can't really make any progress, for all life must be balanced by death. Sazed doesn't want to kill anyone or destroy anything, however, and so I think he adopts that pure neutrality stance, not doing anything at all. This is more in line with Preservation, not actually the neutrality that he thinks it is. The actions that he takes however don't align with Preservation. All of the things that he does exude that balance, hurting one man so that he can save millions. I think you call that Preservation, but I really don't think it is. Preservation truly does not want change whatsoever, as we see in SH where he loved Rashek. Harmony would believe that Rashek should die so that the world could become better. So he fights against doing anything at all, creating the actual Discord. I think the reason he gets worse over the course of Era 2 is because every time he interferes, he feels that he has gone against the shard's intent, and decides to fight harder to do nothing at all. But the actual Intent of Harmony wanted him to interfere, so he's really fighting against Harmony, not Ruin. I also don't think that the issue is an imbalance between Ruin and Preservation. Ruin and Preservation no longer exist, there is only Harmony. So they by definition cannot be unbalanced, there is nothing to balance. For instance the reason there was an imbalance between Ruin and Preservation was because there was more preservation in each person than there was ruin. But now everyone just has some harmony in them, there is no imbalance. And I subscribe to the belief that he hasn't actively made Hemalurgy weaker, Hemalurgy's strength came from Ruin struggling to break free and gain influence, overexerting himself and making everyone's spirit webs weaker. So instead I think the conflict that is driving Discord is Sazed believing that doing nothing is Harmony, while the Intent of Harmony is actually what he has actually been doing all along.

Thank you! And I actually kind of think these wobs can be explained in light of my theory. I think the language that Brandon Sanderson has used is very particular, in how person forward it is. For instance: "he finds it very difficult to act". This could clearly be explained by him finding it difficult to do things with his opposed shards, but I think the language is a bit specific. He finds it difficult to act, not it is difficult for him to act. I don't think that's very strong evidence for me, but I don't think it's completely unexplainable. And lets look at the second quote. "However, he has taken a belief that both Ruin and Preservation are important in people's lives, and doesn't feel that interfering is something he should often be doing. He sees his primary role being to encourage people to be better, to keep an eye on the other Shards, and to make sure the world keeps working as it should". "He has taken a belief.... doesn't feel that ... He sees his primary role". Every time it's talking about how he perceives Harmony, not how Harmony *is*. Again, I don't think it's very strong evidence, but I find it striking how he specifies Sazed's cognition here rather than a fact about the way the shard works.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I have an optimistic theory about Discord that I think is counter to the general community's consensus. I believe that Discord is what Sazed believes himself to be, rather than what he truly is. To explain myself further, I think it's pretty clear that Harmony/Discord is 1 shard, rather than 2 shards in one vessel. The 2 intents have combined, which is indicated by Harmony's godmetal being it's own separate thing rather than an alloy of Lerasium and Atium. I recognize that this itself is debatable, but I think I think it meshes best with the themes of Era 1, and with the idea of adonalisium itself. The shards are shards of Adonalsium, and when you put two together you now have 1, larger shard. Anyway, I propose that Sazed actually believes himself to be Discord, and that is what is causing his schism. This meshes well with his character in HOA, where he was very distraught and divided on who he was as a person. So now that he is a shard, I believe he is more unsure of himself than ever. I believe this is what translates into the properties of Harmonium, for instance. We know that Harmonium has its unstable properties because of the ruin and preservation within it fighting against each other. I don't think this is indicative of two shards in one vessel, but rather that Sazed believes in that war within himself. I think this is supported by the experiments done by the set, where they were only ever capable of annihilating the Harmonium, never separating it. Only Wax managed that, and it was only because he has the specific intent to do so (similar to ROW). My other main argument is intent of Discord itself. If Discord is the combination between to opposing shards like Ruin and Preservation, then this wouldn't be limited to just that combination. Mercy and Odium, for instance, could create Discord. We also have reason to believe that every shard comes with it's own opposing intent, so any combination of the two could create Discord. Meanwhile, Harmony could really only be created by Ruin and Preservation. Take Odium and Mercy. A supposed combination of the two could create a "harmony" between them, but I don't think you would name it Harmony. More likely it would be Restraint, to have godly anger but the mercy not to lash out. Harmony refers to the harmony of the world, to not destroy or maintain, but to have both together. To destroy the old to make way for better things. However I believe Sazed is worried that he can't actually be that harmony. I think he sees the conflict within himself, and extends that to conflict in the shard. He is worried about harmony, and tends to slip into simple preservation, not doing anything and hoping everything works out on its own, fearing anything else to be disharmonic. In effect, his definition of Harmony is wrong, that perhaps it means for any good thing to occur, some equal amount of bad must come with it. And because he doesn't want anything bad to happen, he fights against what he believes Harmony is, hoping that the intent won't push him to destroy when he doesn't want to. While in reality, he fights against Harmony itself, which creates the Discord between himself and the Intent of the Shard. Essentially I think Sazed needs therapy.

I definitely agree with StanLemon. I think it was clear in OB that Gavilar was only using Dalinar as a tool, and never really cared much about him. Then everything we learn from Navani's perspective is that he was an unloving husband and father. Navani was one of the only people not in the son's of honor that he ever revealed his true persona to. In her prologue when she talks about how he would "give her an apology gift later" that didn't come off to me like something she accepted. It seemed more like something she actively disliked, as if a gift would actually make up for everything, and his behavior is consistent. In actual relationships this isn't a thing that works, it only breeds resentment. I only ever really had an image of Gavilar as a selfish tyrant who only cared about his legacy, and I think every book dropped more and more hints that that is true. The only examples that exist of Gavilar being a good, honorable man are from unreliable narrators. Every time he is actually shown his behavior is consistent. We see a man actively manipulating everyone around him. And I don't think he was an idiot, he was clearly an excellent tactician. He was clearly very intelligent, but also egotistical. He refused to see Navani's value whatsoever, viewing her mostly as a tool for heirs and running the country in his absence.

So this actually gets me on what I think makes surgebinding different from other magic systems, because I actually don't think stormlight is used as an actual energy source. Rather, stormlight is used to manipulate spiritual and cognitive aspects, which then go on to affect the real world. So for lashings, you use stormlight to Connect something to something else (with adhesion, which I also think is actually just Connection but that's another story), or Connect to a direction. So spiritually and cognitively you are no longer influenced by the gravity of the ground. This then bleeds into the real world, where you feel gravity in a different direction. But you don't get the energy from the stormlight, the stormlight exclusively holds the connection. That's why fused don't need continuous investiture when using gravitation, that energy instead comes from your surroundings in the form of heat (this is supported in a few different places, large uses of surgebinding is usually associated with frost or dew forming). The same is likely true for all surges, with the exception being transportation. Transportation just changes your position (either in the physical realm or shadesmar). This doesn't necessarily require energy, although I'm not sure I really understand ptp teleportation in the cosmere. I do think there are exceptions, namely radiant healing. Although I think radiant healing is less of a feature of surgebinding and more of a feature of being heavily invested, similar to elantrians or returned. However for basically every surge I think it makes more sense that it is impacting the cognitive and spiritual natures of objects and people, rather than actively preforming work via investiture. Fabrials definitely consume investiture tho, in fact that's likely a method by which work is done via surgebinding. You essentially feed the "spren" of an object investiture, and in return it does what you want with the surge you used. SA5 released chapter spoilers: So yeah basically I think surgebinding has to do with altering things in the cognitive and spiritual realm, or put in other words, "rewriting reality". I think this is backed up by just about every example, but my memory has been known to be shaky so I could be missing a few examples.

I think that Tanavast's cognitive shadow doesn't include his memories, I think memories likely lie in the spiritual realm. So I do think that the stormfather will (and is) absorb(ing) more of Tanavast's persona, ideals, and opinions. So not memories, but Tanavast's Identity. I think we already have reason to believe that they speak with the same voice, I believe in WOK we see that Tanavast's voice is the same as the Stormfather's, albeit less booming. So yeah I think that the Stormfather has absorbed Tanavast's Identity along with a major portion of Honor. And we know from Mistborn for instance that Identity does not include one's memories.

I never even thought about it, but I think you are right. However, I imagine that the whole emotional allomancy part comes with a caveat, that being that someone sufficiently powerful could *probably* push through it. I think this would be a ludicrous amount of power, similar to what would be needed to push or pull on shardplate, but still, I think honor would qualify. Meaning I don't think they would stop being connected to Honor while wearing shardplate, but maybe the connection weakens? It could be painful or otherwise uncomfortable, which would certainly push them away from it. Ah actually I though about it and I think this is unlikely. If shardplate actively resists all investiture, radiants would have a hard time using it since they wouldn't be able to breath in stormlight from outside of the plate. And they wouldn't be able to lash things, or use just about any of their powers while wearing plate, since they would need to get stormlight from in them into something else. I'm not saying I'm definitely right, but I think it's worth a consideration that perhaps the wearer can control what investiture can get through and what can't. So an allomancer couldn't push on them with emotional allomancy, but honor could give investiture through plate. Or maybe not, since radiants clearly don't have active control, we know a windrunner can't lash a fellow radiant through plate. So maybe I just don't know. This is definitely a second explanation, but I don't think it explains why nale actively chooses not to wear plate. Although we don't necessarily know that that's true, I don't think we see him fighting a real battle ever. Otherwise, it may simply be that he has no real experience fighting in plate since he spent his career without it.

So the calculation I did ignoring air resistance was as a baseline to determine what velocity he would be moving at, then compared that to theoretical terminal velocity at any given mass. Terminal velocity decreases by the sqrt of mass, so it really doesn't decrease very quickly and under almost all conditions it takes a while to reach vt. When I went and actually reread the quoted chapter I saw that I am very clearly wrong. I figured it was silly to imagine an iron ferring storing 99% of their mass, but that was a bad assumption. However the chapter still describes sazed as falling relatively quickly, just slower than a normal person due to air resistance combating the lower force from gravity. I still don't think he reached terminal velocity, it's more that he had less kinetic energy upon reaching the ground, and used his pewtermind to help absorb whatever force he did feel. So I am very clearly wrong, but it's probably still not terminal velocity unless you are falling for a very long distance, more just your acceleration decreasing due to a proportional increase of the force due to air resistance. On the energy front, I hope you are correct. I've spent hours at this point thinking about it, and I can't come up with any in universe explanation for how energy is conserved. However, if investiture will factor into these equations in a way we cannot predict, it's possible. There also might be more restrictions to using iron feruchemy than we have seen, like perhaps storing mass while having a higher potential energy uses more investiture. The example of infinite energy by storing mass at ground level, going back to normal, walking up a slight distance, tapping that mass, and jumping off would be fixed this way. When it comes to changing mass with regards to momentum and kinetic energy I honestly don't know. I think there's clearly something deeper going on, seeing as we still don't have a good answer for how acceleration works while storing or tapping mass. So I guess the only satisfactory answer is "rafo" and hope that the physics does actually get figured out eventually. Oh and on thermodynamics I am completely fine with breaking thermodynamics. Magic as a method of breaking the laws of thermodynamics is normal, and I think the laws of thermodynamics are broken in almost every cosmere book. The laws of thermodynamics are more like guidelines anyway, they are backed in experimentation and probability, not facts of the universe.

Sazed had less kinetic energy upon hitting the ground than he would have if he was not storing weight. That's all I meant by that.

I have considered this possibility, but I find it very difficult to believe. Using that equation I ran a couple different numbers and it doesn't add up. I need to look at the exact chapter from WoA to see how much weight Sazed was storing, but we can do some basic calculations beforehand. Ignoring air resistance, to fall from 100 meters (likely far further than Sazed actually fell) it takes 4.518 seconds to reach the ground. Upon hitting the ground, you would be moving at 44.276 m/s. An 80kg person has a terminal velocity of 101.71 m/s, so terminal velocity doesn't even come into effect here. In fact, you would need to be 15kg before your terminal velocity (44m/s) would be lower at all. This would be storing a massive portion of your mass, 81.5% of it. Okay I grabbed the book and read the chapter, it definitely states that you fall slower due to air resistance. It doesn't seem like it has anything to do with terminal velocity though, since you are unlikely to fall far enough to reach that kind of speed. I guess the main advantage would be having lower kinetic energy, therefore hitting the ground with far less energy. That's exactly how it is described in the chapter. Okay and I spent a long time looking over your energy math and I think your conclusion just doesn't work out. Your math was a little bit weird, but as soon as you begin to tap weight you should lose 317836.152 J. That energy has to go somewhere, and it can't be either KE or PE, those are both accounted for already. The reverse is true for storing weight, you should actually gain energy. If you began storing 40kg of your mass while moving you would suddenly gain a ton of kinetic energy from increasing your speed. Beyond the fact that you could create infinite energy by storing up a bunch of mass, stopping, and then just gaining height. By tapping that mass and jumping off, you will land with more kinetic energy than you expended walking to the higher point. Iron feruchemy completely breaks conservation of energy for a variety of reasons. I honestly don't see a good way to get away from that.

I have an issue with some of the fundamental physics behind F-Iron. Namely, what it actually does and how it interfaces with Conservation of Energy and Momentum. As per the Coppermind, "Iron is used to store or retrieve (gain) physical mass. This is accomplished by changing the Skimmer's mass, not by changing the effect of gravity on the Skimmer, i.e. it does not modify weight directly ... The law of conservation of momentum still exists when using iron Feruchemy, so while tapping weight doesn't significantly increase the speed of falling (not considering air resistance), decreasing one's weight to half will double one's speed ... Feruchemical iron interferes with an individual's interaction with the Higgs field". I want to break this down step by step, because I think there are pretty big fundamental problems with this explanation. So, Iron changes the user's mass, not by changing the effect of gravity, Conservation of Momentum still applies. If this were truly the case, (and it must be to see the effects we see) than F-Iron users would not fall slower when storing mass. This is evidently obvious by facts we know in real life, two objects of different mass fall at the same speed under the same gravitational conditions. F = GMm/r^2, dp/dt = F, ma = m GM/r^2. Mass cancels out of this equation, and has no effect on the acceleration felt. For a feruchemist to fall slower when storing weight, there would need to be a distinction between Inertial mass and Gravitational mass. The relativistic explanation says that these masses are the same, meaning that iron feruchemy must be changing the effect of the gravitational field on a mass (ie gravitational acceleration) otherwise the change in mass would have no effect on the force felt due to gravity. So either we go with the Newtonian explanation (mi and mg) or the Standard Theory explanation (only one m, but you feel the gravitational force differently). This causes problems with other effects. We can be very certain that F-Iron does effect mass, as we see Wax is able to push harder while tapping iron. He clearly requires more force to be accelerated when tapping iron, and less while storing. F-Iron also cannot change both mass and gravity, as that would once again cancel any effect on falling speed. There also might be an issue with conservation of energy as well, but I would have to do the math to find out. Conservation of momentum is fine under the canon explanation, but energy changes by the square of your speed, so a skimmer storing weight will require kinetic energy. This could theoretically be explained by just stealing energy from the environment like (Extremely minor SA spoilers) but that would be a bit counter to the idea of End-Neutral Feruchemy. Please let me know if there's a hole in my logic or math somewhere or if I'm missing something, this is going to bug me for a while.