Heir of the Void

I wouldn't really be surprised; on Earth, a bow is a useful hunting implement (on the steppe or in a forested environment), and as such you could maintain some number of archers able to dedicate the time needed to master the craft at less total cost than, say, mounted warfare because it had a productive purpose. The English Yeoman archers would probably be a good example of this. Conversely, it has been explicitly stated that the bow is a poor weapon for hunting shell-beasts (slings are better), so archery would be a full-time professional trade, and as such the opportunity cost of archers is cavalrymen or heavy infantry. If I recall, many of Sebarial's archers were low-level lighteyes, which is probably indicative of a fairly high upkeep. Yes, but arrows weren't all that effective against men in armor - neither were Renaissance firearms, for that matter - and the Parshendi in Stormform seem to have retained some of the Warform's natural defenses. A smaller, faster projectile would also be less impacted by any wind-based defensive shenanigans they might attempt. Not that we've seen, which is strange, all things considered. Although, beyond this, the lack of mass heavy cavalry is going to have a profound effect on the Rosharan battlefield. But then, consider that we're looking at problems like Thunderclasts. Is that really the point, though?

The big problem here is probably the switching. That is rather difficult with regular coilguns, and gets more difficult as the target velocity increases; Birkeland only got his 1904 model up to about 100 m/s muzzle velocity; to be effective as an infantry weapon worth using in these circumstances, you'd need something in the 1000 m/s neighborhood. Beyond that, I'm not sure we've seen any example of fabrial action-at-a-distance (discounted paired halves, which are probably Cognitively linked). The closest I can think of it the devices Navani used to dehumidify the air around the archers at the first battle with the Stormform Parshendi, and that doesn't need to have effected anything beyond it's surface. A augmenter might simply throw itself around rather than other objects. That could be useful as a sort of (expensive) mobile battlefield artillery, though. Then again, it might simply give itself kinetic energy with no particular velocity vector, and thus make itself... explode. Also possibly useful. Keep in mind that most contemporary designs are trying to achieve a velocity well beyond what you get with chemical propellants, and that kinetic energy rises with the square of velocity, so doubling velocity means you need four times as much energy. Here, I'm only trying to ape the output of a high-power rifle, which is a much less ambitious goal. For reference, I'm aiming at up to 5 kilojoules, whereas the Navy railgun projects are all looking at muzzle energy above 100 megajoules. Actually, my primary concern would be manufacturing precision due to the lack of machine tools or any kind of major industry demanding this level of precision. That said, there might be a solution involving Soulcasting. We've seen Ardents with Soulcasters transmute air directly into shaped buildings, so there might be something there. That said, starting with artillery pieces might be better. It's not like early cannon were in any way cheap, but they still used them whenever they could get them. Yeah, their James Clerk Maxwell probably died on some random, irrelevant battlefield somewhere as a random, irrelevant spearmen because of Vorin Discrimination. #Stormwarden #Heresiarch

Considering the effectiveness of the electrostatic discharge ability displayed by the Stormform Parshendi, it is clear that the humans of Roshar must develop their own electromagnetic standoff weapon as a counter if they wish to have any chance of survival. However, considering the myriad control problems with electrostatics, this method is likely futile. Fortunately, with just the Fabrial types currently known, a constructing a basic electromagnetic impeller is surprisingly straightforward*. The basic operational principal of the weapon would play on the function of Augmenter/ Diminisher Fabrials, with a number of possible improvements based on Conjoiner or Reverser types possible depending on the exact mechanics of the operation of those types; if a one-way conjoiner is possible, performance could be improved enormously. At its most basic, operation would proceed as follows. The 'Trigger' of the weapon is a pair of small Conjoiner Fabrial connected to their opposites on the inside of the weapon. This pair need not be at all powerful; the purpose of the trigger group is to allow the action to be contained in a sealed and insulated box for the saftey of the operator and device. When the weapon is to be fired, it is aimed at the xeno/heretic/traitor to be purged and the Conjoiner is activated. Inside the action box, paired conjoiners are used to trigger an electrostatic Augmenter and Reverser Fabrial. The Augmenter generates a negative charge, and the Diminisher generates a equal and opposite positive charge. The charge now flows the conductive rails to which the paired Fabrial assembly are connected. Seeking to equalize, the negative charge flows down its rail until it reaches the conductive projectile, flows through it, and down the opposite rail to cancel out with the positive charge. The movement of current generates the immense magnetic force (Laplace Force, for reference) with accelerates the projectile down the 'barrel' of the weapon and toward the target. To improve performance, the resistivity of the conducting rails would be Diminished, and their strength would be Augmented so as to avoid potential damage incurred int he course of firing. If necessary, a temperature-Diminished cooling jacked could be added to the outside of the barrel for sustained fire. While the energy demands many appear daunting, recall that a .50 caliber round used in a heavy machine gun or anti-material rifle has a muzzle energy of about 4 kilo-joules. This is enough energy to raise the temperature of 1 liter of water by 1 degree centigrade; therefore, Jasnath's bathtub, which can be assumed to contain some hundred liters of water heated by ten to twenty degrees would be far more energy intensive than firing a reasonably powerful infantry weapon. While the heated bathtub was a luxury, it did not appear to be particularly notable by Kanabrath standards. So... Thoughts? Ideas? Criticism?

I'd weigh in favor of the solid-physical manifestation of a Shard being typically metallic, or prehaps 'defaulting' to that state if there is no reason for it/them to appear differently. In large part this is simply because the extreme similarity between Stormlight and Mist; both are described as white vapor with not-quite-natural behavior. The only real difference is that Stormlight glows, but that could simply be a consequence of the fact that Stormlight seems to be much more concentrated than Mist. The same behavior is observed between Devotion's Pool and the Well of Ascension, the only two liquid-physical forms of a Shard we have signfigant observational information on. Both appear as pools of clear-unnatural liquid, with the much more dramatically powerful pool glowing. Unless I am very much mistaken, we've never seen a sample of the Tears. We don't know anything about their physical properties or behavior, let alone their natural state, the method of collection, and so on. The only thing we know for sure is that they are a valuable dye and that they are somehow connected to Endowment. I don't feel like that's enough information to use in any sort of solid judgment.

I suspect that they require sacrifice to create a link to the Dor, which can then be used without human sacrifice, much like a permanent Aon. Remember, Hrathen had been out of Dakhor for decades and hand only gained the modifications as far as his arm, but they were enough to allow him to (temporarily) survive a fatal stab wound (like pewter?) and to pick Dilaf up fully off the ground and choke him while bleeding out, despite being stabbed again. They were also glowing. This is likely indicative of something magical going on. The act of Devotion of a man sacrificing himself creates the connection to the Intent of the shard needed, though the Domination necessary for an involuntary sacrifice might also have some effect. Therefore, I would think the sacrifice creates the connection to the Dor, which allows Investiture to be drawn out and infused into something, or expended for a dramatic single-use power like teleportation. Alternatively, it creates the bone symbols, which allow the Monk to draw on the Dor and get the investiture that way. I'm still not clear as to which it is.

I'm acutely surprised it took this long for someone to ask. We're not exactly just dropping a bomb on. The idea is to make the strait deeper, so as to make it more difficult for the aliens to walk across the seabed and threaten North American directly after they defeat the Soviet Union, because that would basically be game over for the entire human race.

It took me a moment to realize the accidental pun. I meant Bering Strait - with sufficient abstraction, you described it more or less adequately perfectly. It's only 'narrow' in the sense that, say, the Gulf of Mexico isn't. Fifty miles is nothing to sneeze at - hence the atomic bombs. Surprisingly few - the plan called for the use of one-megaton devices with a fusion fraction above 98%; so only 20 kilotons of yield from fission decays. There would be far more fusionspreen present. Second point sounds cool.

I'd like to throw out that everyone is seriously low-balling the Roshar troop counts. The Alethi Army has something like 150,000 men on the Shattered Plains, but that doesn't count any of the (lower-grade) armies fighting in Alethkar itself. Amaram's force was mentioned at being in the neighborhood of a few thousand and about equal to the other one it was fighting in the backstory - and both of those were relatively minor; it seems reasonable to then assume something like another hundred thousand conscripts there, given the sheer size of the country and the number of things each Highlord would need to defend. As for Jav Keved, I'm not sure they'd be equal - they could be a good deal weaker collectively, but they could certainly have beaten any one or two Highprinces, and Alethkar obviously lacked the unity to get all ten on board. That said, there's no reason they couldn't be near the same level as Alethkar, and the speed at which the civil war escalated to scale suggest a decent standing force. All told, for ease of estimation, we could say half a million troops for the two Vorin Kingdoms. But what needs to be considered is that neither nation is in a state of total war. Yes, the Alethi have been fighting for a while on the Plains for a while, and killing each other at home for a while, but they aren't really going all out in either case. While fighting for Gemhearts, there was no cause to build a force larger than twenty thousand or so, because the chasms limited speed of large forces, and armies are expensive. In Mistborn, it is mentioned that the Lord Ruler and the Steel Ministry could raise over a million troops, plus Koloss, is they needed to, but they do not maintain a standing army of that size, because armies are expensive and they have no one to use it on. No upper limit is given on size, but the Final Empire isn't that big, and its worth considering that they likely haven't actually conducted a full mobilization for centuries.

I've been kind of busy lately. The stuff you hear about Engineering and time allocation? It's all true. I currently have a pile of jokes (most of them bad) and ideas for bizarre events, though part of the difficultly is that this is the part that connects to Words of Irradiance, and I need to make sure that make the appropriate fraction of complete sense. I've also been distracted by something else - an actual narrative, mind, though still a context where discussing plans for the thermonuclear dredging of the Bearing Strait is completely reasonable. So there's that.

Soon? I've been kind of busy, and the last section is mostly character stuff and introspection that's nothing like what I've been parodying in the past few sections.

Keep in mind, though, that while it can carry nukes, that's likely a 'just-in-case' capability. This is, in large part, because of ballistic missile subs. Thermonuclear weapons have advanced to the point that carrying a small number of medium-yield devices is easier than a large payload of conventional explosives; and the extra saftey and security isn't all that much more of a design challenge, especially considering that most of it is focused on the atomic devices themselves. The reasons for this are a bit more complicated. Basically, there are presently four broad missions for nuclear weapons: tactical bombing, strategic deterrent, first strike, and reprisal. This isn't a tactical bombing platform, so that's out, and submarines can serve as a more effective deterrent (by virtue of their constantly uncertain location and difficulty to detect) and would be more effective in a nuclear first strike (because they can crawl up to fairly close to their targets and launch missiles on high-speed low angle trajectories, and because they have a lot of missiles). They might be able to conduct a reprisal better, but bombers on the ground are fairly vulnerable to a nuclear first strike. Anyway, considering that the mission is likely to be heavy conventional bombing and considering what the targets of such are likely to be, Nightblood sounds like a fitting name. If anyone here is in the air force, they're taking suggestions from airmen.

You think any of this has been productive?

I don't know; I feel like at this point, any actual explanation would have less satisfying. The Epic powers aren't Allomancy; part of their thing is that they aren't truly rational. They make sense in the context of Calamity, but in such a way that preserves the inherent illogic that's part of the FUN! (In the Dorf Fort sense, naturally). It's like an MIRV ICBM, but each reentry vehicle is carrying barrels of monkeys as submunitions.

It's more like substituting the explosive lenses in an implosion setup for... this mess. And you would need the theory of an atomic weapon, but what it does get you around is the need for the really, really hard engineering needed to actually make an implosion device work (gun-type bombs are easy, but much less efficient and with a much lower cap on efficiency, for a number of reasons), which is the bulk of the work that went into the Manhattan Project. The biggest challenge that would be left is isotope separation, but you might be able to use Awakening for that; Plutonium is actually horribly toxic (and uranium isn't biologically inert by any stretch of the imagination), meaning it interacts with organic compounds, so a sufficient volume of livestock might be converted into an enrichment facility. I'll leave it up to you to imagine what that entails. It's... messy. That detonation setup is... brilliant, actually. I never considered the idea of a 'call' being something not immediately in contact with the awakened object, but I don't really see why it couldn't be. The Breath in the object is still 'yours', so there's probably some sort of Connection there. Come to think of it, we still don't really know what a war on Nalthis looks like. I recall mention of Awakened objects being used as siege engines and artillery, and Lifeless give you a very interesting sort of strategic mobility. (That being said, one countermeasure to mass lifeless I've come up with is... Well, consider the ichor-alcohol, and remember that high-proof liquor is rather flammable).

Remember that most of the Old-elantrians got lynched fairly quickly after the Reod. Combined with the fact that news would suddenly travel very slowly without AonDornic communications and travel, I doubt most of them ever heard about the formation of the chasm. There was also a mention of a lot of the more AonDornicly-Inclined elantrians being physically incapacitated by the power failure; 'not struggling as the mobs burned them' or something. Presently, I think the current theory is that magic is so tied to nation-states in Sel is because Dominion was half of what Odium blended into the Dor. So it isn't connected to geography, it's the countries, and the various geometrically transformed Aon Aons are not accurate connections to the nation, only the original is, so acknowledging the geographic change is all that's necessary to re-establish the connection. Maybe.

Yeah, detonation is one of those 'fiddly bits' that I hadn't quite figured out yet. The device is probably going to be a bit too large to deliver via Lifeless Bird (and I'm not sure how well the flight feathers would stay on in any case), and the telephone thing would be somewhat impeded by the lack of telephones, much like how constructing a mundane nuke would be impeded by the lack of high-velocity explosives. As for enriching the nuclear material, the usual methods of isotope separation will probably be off the table. However, there might be a fix for that, assuming infinite intestinal fortitude.

With sufficient understanding of the principals, it might be able to be as simple as 'detonate on command', though a more complex Command might be necessary. As for the visualization, for the neutron transparency, something like the blood 'blowing' the (abstractly visualized) neutrons out of the container and the plutonium dust in place, given that the objective there is to use molecular-scale movement to 'cheat' the neutron interaction and buoyancy. Given that a liquid at room temperature is already moving quite a bit on that scale, the actual kinetic energy involved is fairly small; its the nature of it that's key. Hence the idea I used when picturing it was a sort of 'still wind'. For detonation, the 'wind' turns inward, blowing the neutrons and/or plutonium toward the center, sort of 'pushing' it to gain the right behavior. Obviously, both visualizations are far more abstract than normal, though that's really the only way it could work on this scale. I'm not sure how efficient the command would be, which is why I chose blood as the suspension solution. Hopefully, it's close connection to being alive will make up for some of the loss from a complex Command and being far from a living form.

So, in the interests of logical extremes, it seems reasonable to investigate the possibility of producing a useful atomic device employing BioChroma as a primary method of action. Because really, can any good come from giving skeletons the most powerful weapon in the world? The device starts with a bucket of blood (the 'suspension solution'), with a volume of around a bushel and a half. The material of the bucket is a rather important consideration, though the optimal choice will depend on the final design and certain, at present unanswered, questions of atomic-awakening interactions. However, a neutron reflector, beryllium oxide or tungsten carbide, is a likely candidate. At this point, Plutonium-239 dust is mixed into the suspension solution; this is the key step to the operation of the device. The amount of fissile material added to the solution will signfigantly exceed the critical mass of the material, but the suspension solution will be Awakened to avoid the assemble of a supercritical mass until detonation. Several approaches are possible here, though physical suspension of the plutonium is key. Note that an 11kg sphere of plutonium (four inches across) constitutes a critical mass If the awakened material can alter it's neutron interaction properties according to its Command, this is most desirable. This assumption is not without merit, as awakened materials can display highly abnormal properties in their interactions with physical objects, and neutrons are, in certain ways, small, fast-moving objects. If this is the case, then suspending the fissile material in a suspension solution capable of inhibiting neutron exchange without decaying and held in a non-reflective organic container is possible design route. The commands would be organized in such a way that, when detonation conditions are met, the container becomes a neutron reflector at the same time as the suspension solution becomes neutron transparent and an external surge of neutrons is provided. This causes the device to become an assembly considerably above critical mass and, with the neutrons introduced, results in a detonation. At this point, we have several options for increasing efficiency. At the most basic, adding additional actions to the Awakening Commands to physically concentrate the fissile material near the center of the device while moving the suspension solution away, resulting in a much higher density of the material, and thus a greater chain reaction. There are several possible limitations to this approach, not the least of which is the speed of assembly, which may be too low to be relevant. However, if a 'false shock wave' behavior can be created, mechanical compression may be extremely useful. In this configuration, Commanding the suspension solution to become a neutron reflector is likely to be beneficial, as the fissile material will be spatially separated from the inner wall of the container, limiting its ability to influence the detonation in the time span involved.

I'm having a pretty big problem with this too; I'm not really sure how a thousand breaths is a lot. Between 0 and 1000 AD, the population of Earth is, by most estimates, at around three hundred million people. Generally, the region of Nalthis we see appears to be at the very least on par with technology at this time period, speaking very broadly, so lacking any more evidence and assuming the rest of the planet is similarly Earth-like, we can assume that there are at least a quarter of a billion Breaths in circulation at any one time. This means that Nightblood contains, at most 0.0004% of Endowment's power, or four thousand nS (nanoshards), without allowing for Endowment to have retained any Investiture. As we know Endowment is not splintered (as Honor is, which would suggest more Investiture is available on Roshar), so the total proportion would be somewhat less than the four thousand figure. It could be possible that either: Spren are much more efficient at producing physical effects, and thus posses far less actual power, or Endowment's power can be converted into outside investiture more efficiently, so a much smaller piece of Endowment is needed to generate a given unit of capital. Alternatively, Nightblood might not be especially powerful, but rather serves as a conduit to rapidly consume power to generate a given effect; plutonium in a bomb rather than a reactor. However, WoB imply that this is not the case.

Eh, don't confuse importance and significance with screen time. It's entirely possible to have a very important character who doesn't get much POV, or even appear 'on screen' all that often.

The man in plaid fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

I see no way this could end poorly. And I though it would be a good idea to mount an allomantic particle beam on a Chasmfiend (totally could work), so clearly by judgement can be trusted.

To be honest, I can't see that and not think 'Eye of Terror'.

Well, you can use the orignial jokes, or your own if you have any ideas, or I could probably come up with more stupid. Basically, Kaladin and Renarin are the sane/competent ones (relatively speaking), Shallan has a very selective memory, resulting in alarmingly frequent segmentation faults, Dalinar... Has mostly stopped fighting it.

Buddy, look at me. Look at me. Yes.