Scriptorian

The wrecking ball potential of Allomantic pewter and Feruchemical iron is cool, but I'm more interesting in what happens when you're storing mass and burning pewter. Recall the fun ways Vin could use pewter because she was so much lighter than most pewter arms. Now picture that instead of weighing 90 lbs, she weighed 10 lbs! Pewter is a flat add to strength, so even with the weakness Wax described when storing, this could get silly. You could reach truly epic levels of parkour. I image you could nearly match coinshots in terms of mobility. Of course, the ability to weigh to two tons on command would offset any of the drawbacks. Also, in the MAG is says that, with a wing suit, skimmers can flap their arms and actually gain altitude. Throw the pewter-boost and a cowl on top and we officially have Batman. Edit: oooh. Batsignal shining through the mists.

This is a good video. The fact that I can't detect any solid political leanings speaks very highly to its quality. On the one hand I instinctively mistrust government regulations. On the other hand, corporate monopolies are just as bad. So...I'm gonna just head back to the theories thread where I can solve my problems with Hemalurgy.

Keep in mind our perception of the two healing methods is going to be a little warped since we hardly ever actually read the perspective of someone using gold. Also, I've generally seen Szeth as greatly downplaying stormlight's healing effects in our eyes (At this point he doesn't think it can heal shardblade wounds). A Radiant's healing seems to be far more efficient than Szeth's: hours to heal a jaw versus completely shattered legs healing in seconds? I'd actually put stormlight and gold about even, though I think the upper limit on how much health you can tap at once is higher than the amount of stormlight you can hold. I do think that a coin through the head will incapacitated the surgebinder for a non trivial amount of time, perhaps long enough for Vin to get close and repeatedly stab them in the face. Face stabbing > stormlight healing. Edit: second time to be ninja' d in an hour. Keep in mind that gold may seem slower because a feruchemist will be judicious with their stores, whereas stormlight is just gonna heal whether the surgebinder wants it to or not.

Zane's just crazy and imagined that part? In seriousness, that seems like a train of thought Ruin would have been able to guess with ease. It's the kind of thought he would have planted in Zane's mind multiple times himself. His messages to Vin often follow that exact same vein. After millennium of manipulating unstable people, it would not be difficult for Ruin to make it seem like he can hear their thoughts. He attempted to do so to Vin on at least one occasion that I remember.

Remember that hemalurgy can cause pretty dramatic physiological changes (koloss, inquisitors, etc.) Considering this, it's not much of a stretch to me that some spikes could be placed in such a way as to not cause continual pain. Also, a railroad spike in your face would probably tend to hurt more than a sliver in your shoulder or an earring. So I guess I agree with the opening post that spikes aren't necessarily a constant source of pain. Ruin diverting attention probably helped too. Do we have a WoB or something saying that spikes always hurt? All I remember is Marsh saying that his hurt. Edit: ah! Ninjas! Another thought I had is that maybe the pain is spiritual in nature, specifically as the hemalurgist's soul gets more and more tattered. Maybe the soul is trying to reject the foreign sDNA like a body will reject a donated organ. This would explain at least why Vin and Spook's spikes were not as painful as an inquisitor's and why the pain responds to emotion. Edit again: or maybe it's cognitive and they only hurt because they think it should. Since Vin and Spook never thought about theirs, they didn't hurt. Or something like that.

You know you're a Sanderfan when you have weirdly prophetic dreams about future books. Found this when I was looking through my old posts: (BoM spoilers)

Well, there is this epigraph: I've felt before that there was a connection between this and Szeth hearing the screams of his victims. Edit: it's from Jasnah's notes in WoK.

It's an interesting thought, though I personally suspect it wouldn't do anymore than buring a non allomantic metal normally does i.e kills you. If you've got the silver, then you're probably a lot safer using it to ward off the shade or for healing withering. On the other hand, if thredonite silver is actually invested, this might do some very interesting things. I could see it functioning like compounding, where the allomacy powers a super-charged version of the stored investiture. It really depends on how exactly silver interacts with shades in the first place.

I just replied in this thread concerning boosting the temporal metals: The short version is that if you put enough power into the future-sight metals, the system breaks down and you just see straight into the spiritual realm ala Kelsier in Secret History (when Fuzz shows home the spiritual realm). I wouldn't be surprised if this is also the case for gold/malatium. Edit: also, while I really like your idea, I can't help but think you'd get the same result easier with electrum. It's specificaly for seeing alternate versions of yourself in the future after all. The advantage of gold, I guess, is that you only have to deal with a singal shadow at a time. Also, I'm not sure just "transitioning" to the cognitive via magic has quite the same effect as actually dying.

So some funny stuff happens when you duralumin/nicrosil boost electrum or atium (and probably gold as well). https://amp.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2ytg2h/im_novelist_brandon_sanderson_ama/ctlt7q8 Note that he meant spiritual realm, not cognitive. We see this effect when Elend burns atium with duralumin in HoA. We currently don't know if savantism is enough to reach this breaking point, or if a booster-metal is required. In any case, being able to see directly into the spiritual realm almost certainly has its uses, assuming your mind doesn't melt from the information overload. Elend was using atium, so presumably his mind was enehanced to better deal with it, but someone just using gold or electrum will probably have a much harder time. I myself am very interested to learn more.

The "cleansing of unwanted investiture" bit is specifically referring to the use of aluminum in allomancy i.e. somthing an aluminum misting or Mistborn could theoretically do by burning the metal, aside from simply wiping their metal reserves. So I think it's less that aluminum interacts differently with different magic systems, and more that it has a specific allomantic effect and otherwise blocks all investiture the same. The two aren't necessarily related. The WoB about aluminum not having an atium shadow raises a few questions for me, however... For example, how/does aluminum show up in the Spiritual Realm (where future-sight powers originate)? Is a Shard's future-sight similarly hindered? Would an allomancer buring electrum be able to see a shadow of themselves being hit by an aluminum bullet? How well can atium's mental boost deal with an attack it can't directly detected like that? Maybe I need to go to the ultimate questions list thread...

Not quite. Like I said in my original post, the Cosmere would have to be sitting dead center on the black hole, within the event horizon. Again, what's important is the gravitational gradient, the difference in gravity from one point to one right next to it. A maxed out black hole has essentially a graidiant of zero at its event horizon, and thus there would be no time dialation. Same reason there would be no accretion disk, like Rob Lucci explained.

I was under the impression that creating amulets requires ettmetal and some other hocus-pocus we don't quite understand yet (i.e. more than just aluminum and nicrosil. Of course, I would be pleasantly surprised if we know more than this). That said, the ability for feruchemists to share reserves is still quite formidable. However, I also think that TLR was trying to prevent any intermingling of the two powers; specifically, he was trying to prevent the discovery of compounding. While twinborn aren't normally as dangerous as mistborn, eventually someone would figure out compounding, and then it'd only be a matter of time before the illusion of TLR's divinity begins to fall apart. However, however, Sazed gives us a motivation mostly unrelated to the Metallic Arts. From the HoA epigraphs: Taken from the Coppermind. Edit: further speculation from Sazed:

Assuming a spherical feruchemist with a radius of about 1 meter, I calculate that you'd need to tap "only" about 100 earth masses. No idea on how much metal you'd actually need to compound to get that, much less the size of the metalmind required to hold it. But, you know, cosmologically speaking, this isn't that much. Disclaimer: tapping 100 earth masses at once may result in spontaneous neutronium compression. The 17th Shard is not liable for any personal injury, planet wide devistation, or naked singularities that may result.

To address the OP, I think the difficulty is as much social as it is practical. On top of the fact that a shardbearer is at least 4th dahn, an incredibly valuable military reasource, and the rosharan equivilant of a superhero, the measures necessary to restrain them (as described above) are, to put it mildly, undignifying to such a person. It can be done, but only if you're ready to make a really big storm of it. And in that case, in the Alethi mentality, you'd be better off just executing them and freeing up the shards for someone else. So Dalinar's words were true, if an oversimplification.

This is correct. Supermassive black holes have such a gentle gravitational gradient that you can actually cross the event horizon without being spagetified. There's no going back, but you and your ship will be perfectly intact as you descend into oblivion (well, assuming the x-rays don't fry you). The problem here is that time-dialation is related to the same underlaying mechanic as the gravitational gradiant: the curvature of spacetime. Namely, the lower the gradiant, the less time dialation. This is why the black hole in this situation would have to be so universe-breakingly huge: it has to be massive enough to have an interstellar range, but as the mass increases, the gradiant smooths, and time dialation becomes less obvious. I did some more calculations, and it turns out that the schwartzchild radius (distance to the event horizon) would have to be 100,000 parsecs. That's the approximate size of the Milky Way, and dwarf star clusters like the Cosmere are only about 200 parsecs. And even then, it only works if the Cosmere is sitting right on top of the singularity. To recap, to get time-dilation on an interstellar scale, you'd have to be inside the event horizon of a galaxy-sized black hole. Have fun with that one theorycrafters.

So, disclaimer, I'm not an astrophysicist, but I did just finish a course on stellar and galactic astronomy. Based on my rough estimates, in order to produce any significant time-dilation over inter-stellar distances, a black hole would have to ludicrously massive, on the order of a billion billion solar masses (the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is "only" about 50 billion solar masses.) A black hole with the mass of an entire supercluster is simply not reasonable in this (or really any) context. Interesting idea, but, there are much simpler, and far less problematic, explanations.

Perhaps you'd get a malatium-shadow explosion, cosmetically similar to when two people use atium at each other? I figure he's so old and has had so many chances to remake himself, the normal two shadows would be insufficient. Follow up question, what happens if you burn malatium at a shardvessel?

This question had bugged me for some time, but on my last read of WoR, this line caught my attention: So it doesn't even look like a fabrial is involved, but somehow they can feed the stormlight directly to the plants from gemstones. This could have huge implications if anyone else figured out how to do it. The increase in crop yield must be significant if it's feeding the entirety of the Listener population on barren plateaus. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more stormlight-efficient than soulcasting, though probably slower. Most people have little use for the stormlight in their spheres except as a light source. How much could a farming village's output be increased if they fed most of their stormlight to the crops every Highstorm? Of course, what if for some reason only Listeners can make use of this technique? Does drawing stormlight out of the gems risk shattering them like soulcasting does? Does using different colors of gem have differing effects? So many questions...

The horneater stew. Rock and I are in accord that these airsick lowlanders put too much spice in their food. (Seriously, I can't stand any level of 'spicy-ness') Would you rather be a one-armed Herdazian or a Horneater princess?

Elantrian. They can program magic with their fingers! In all seriousness, plate is dang useful, but can't be worn constantly, has to be recharged, is vulnerable to non-hemalurgic theft, etc. Also using a dead shardblade would make me feel like a jerk. AonDor takes more dedication to use, and is weaker away from Elantris, but is just so versitle. And I would look fabulous in sparkles. Would you rather be a member of the (in-universe) 17th shard, or have Lift's ability to metabolize stormlight?

I suppose the next logical question is: "Could a shardblade destroy, or even damage, the One Ring?" And to answer my own question: "Eh, no." I'd say the Ring is at least as invested as Nightblood, and probably more. It contains the larger share of a demigod's power, and specifically made to be indestructible. None of the rather powerful people in Middle Earth could even dent it. Nightblood would have a better chance, but the Ring's primary mode of defense is to just corrupt everyone nearby into not wanting to destroy it. I don't think Nightblood is quite strong-willed enough to resist that. Of course, is the opposite true? Would the Ring be able to resist Nightblood's "precious effect?" Well, almost certainly, but it was amusing to think about. But then, what would happen (or could it even happen?) if Nightblood were to take up the One Ring and make himself a new Dark Lord? Since the Ring acts as an amplifier for someone's native power (read: investiture) and given how powerful Nightblood is...the possibilities are indeed troubling. Since Sauron primarily used the Ring to enhance his mind-control powers, to the point where he could affect entire nations, my guess is that Nighblood's nausea/pick-me-up-and-kill-everyone aura would extend to the point of causing continent-wide chaos. This is, of course, assuming he wouldn't just consume all of the Ring's power and vaporize the planet. That would certainly be one way to destroy all of the evil. For the sake of all worlds, we can be glad that this unholy matrimony of Artifacts of Doom can never happen. Well, that post meandered a bit.

This basically fits with how steel and iron work. The more skilled you are, the more you can regulate the strength of the push/pull in either direction. One of the reasons Vin was so awed by Zane's skill was that he was able to levitate just a few feet above his coins. This turned out to be due to his hemalurgy, but I imagine savantism could have a similar effect. Theoretically, duralumin is a Push in the same way as steel is, so theoretically, the more skiiled/savantish you get, the more you can regulate the amount of power you get from it. This could be very useful. Good question!

Well, I just went through my copies of the Mistborn RPG (including Alloy of Law era) and the only people it has as savants are Spook and Breeze. It does only have Marsh post-spikes, so that could be messing things up. He does has a bronze rating of 11. Wow. For reference, the normal maximum without Hemalurgy is 10, and Vin's highest rating is 8. Miles does have 10's in both Allomantic gold and Feruchemical gold, just no savantism. Zane also has a 10 in steel, but again, Hemalurgy, and he wasn't really a candidate anyway. There's no stats for the Lord Ruler, you could probably just put "players lose" and move on. Wax is also not a savant, but the stuff in here is a couple books out of date anyway. Spook and Breeze, the two savants, both have ratings of 8. Just thought I'd put this up for reference. Interesting thought about Physical versus Mental. I don't know if it entirely explains the discrepancies, but it is notable.

I kind of agree with Calderis. Consider that Spook was a savant for only about a year, but we already saw some pretty life-altering side-effects. I'm pretty sure the RPG has Marsh and Breeze as savants, but well, that's the RPG. If they had been savants for their "adult lives" you'd think there would be something much more noticeable. I mean, compare them to Spook and the soulcasters and you can see the discrepancy. That said, I think you might be onto something with Vasher...It's brought up rather often in Warbreaker just how much better he is than everyone else. And it's not just his knowledge, it's how much he can do with a simple Command and few breaths. The fact that he can visualize his Commands so well sounds savantish to me.