happyman

That's why it would be crazy.

Not to be nit-picky, but in the real world, infinite acceleration would get things to the speed of light instantly, but no faster! This is because the speed of light gives objects infinite momentum---and momentum is far more fundamental than velocity.

Let the Rithmatists focus and practice controlling chalkings while their non-Rithmatist learns how to draw a perfect nine-point circle? I just think you are underestimating how much what Joel and Melody did can be learned. Joel may have had a knack for it, but part of the reason he was as good as he was was because he spent hours and hours, for years, practicing. Not everybody could do what he did, but surely there are others who could learn? Maybe not as well as he could, but they could still complement a Rithmatist who can now focus on other things? In the real world, specialization is almost universal, and not everybody has to be a savant for it to be useful. In fact, most people aren't, and yet they are still more useful having learned one thing well than having learned many things poorly. We are more flexible creatures than you give us credit for.

I think this is the real extra power of a 10th heightening Awakener. In any fight or contest where everything else is equal, the Awakener who can drain things to white rather than gray would be able to continue awakening well after the other Awakener has run out of "fuel." They would also probably run through their "ammunition" more slowly. Put more succinctly, a 10th heightening Awakener would be able to Awaken more things with 100 colored rags than any of the lower heightenings would. It sounds like a big advantage to me.

All I can say, Shardlet, is that you are probably underestimating the benefits of training and practice, as well as the versatility they would have by having a much larger population to search from.

Shardlet, You are correct that Joel and Melody are extraordinary in their specialties. However, I suspect that other teams could be formed that work better than just an non-specialized Rithmatist alone. After all, if you are allowed to choose from a broader range of people than just Rithmatists, you may have better choices, turning a mediocre Rithmatist into a good team and good Rithmatists into more strategic teams, etc.

Funny, I just said exactly the same thing on another thread. Hum.

I actually had a theory about this a while ago. So far, all Rithmatists have been forced to be generalists. They have to be good at drawing Chalkings, and making perfect circles, and knowing what defenses to set up, and otherwise managing all the strategy in a single go. Why is this a good idea? Especially with the limited number of Rithmatists available? Especially with the social effects this has been having on the humans, Rithmatist and otherwise? I suspect that Melody and Joel will provide a basis for something new: cooperation between Rithmatists and non-Rithmatitists. They have shown the power of specialization. Not recruiting Joel may have been an incredible strategic success on the part of whatever faction bonds with humans to make Rithmatists. Or pure luck which leads to the same effect. Either way, I suspect that it will play out in interesting ways.

Kurkistan: Upvote for being sane. I really, really like the idea that Feruchemy/Allomancy mess with space and time directly, and that that is what allows FTL to happen. Why? Because it's the only Handwavium that would work in the "real" world. The only "real" theories of FTL travel involve general relativity and things not yet known to either exist or not exist. All you need is a little magic to fill the "not yet known not to exist" gap, and there you are. Much much easier than trying to work around using the basic Allomancy and Feruchemy we've already been given.

He was the "old man" leading the Terrismen back towards Luthadel when Elend ran into them, right after the Inquisitor's massacred them.

Mental commands sounds pretty cool, actually. By the way, knowing Brandon, the Tenth Heightening probably does have some abilities beyond those listed. The description in Warbreaker is "in-world," and it's not like a lot of people have had chances to experiment with it.

That's entirely up to Brandon. In the real world, both energy and momentum are unbounded, with velocity capped. Who knows, with Allomancy?

I just reread this scene yesterday. It is pretty clear that the musical note Shallan hears is part of the magic, as is Jasnah's hand sinking into the boulder. Not just a physical side-effect. I would also note, though, that after the boulder was transformed, Shallan had to yawn to clear her ears. She said it was like coming down from a high mountain. There was a purely physical pressure change associated with the transformation as well. It was also completely separate from the note.

I still have no idea where the original poster is coming from, but I wanted to address this. There is nothing wrong with having soft magic systems in your book---if all they do is make life hard for the protagonists! Magic that the main characters can't use can be abused by the author far more than magic which the main characters use and understand. This is why some books, such as Lord of the Rings, which leave their magic undefined, have resolutions which involve no magic, and have the good-oriented magic users strongly constrained, whereas Mistborn has the magic largely understood and defined by the time the plot is resolved with it. Even in soft magic systems, the magic can be central to the plot, as long as it is central to making the plot hard on the protagonists. Edit: quick spelling fix

My chemistry is rusty, but this seems right. A crystal lattice is the grid the atoms of a crystal are in. Salts (the generic term, not specifically referring to Sodium Chloride) often form a crystal in solid shape, but technically, salt is a chemical which doesn't have to be in a lattice (they can be melted or dissolved, for instance). In other words, it is logically possible to have crystals which are not salts and salts which do not form crystals.

I think that Phantom is technically, grammatically correct in arguing that "which" can only be a referent to Realmantic theory. However, using my understanding of colloquial English, I consider it just as likely that the "which" is referring back to the understanding needed to understand what happens when you mix Lerasium and Atium. In other words, you need to be a shard or splinter to understand how to apply realmantics to a Lerasium/Atium alloy, at least without experimental evidence. This parallels the real world. There are plenty of phenomena in the real world where humans understand the basics, but there are emergent phenomena so complex, you would have to be a god to really understand how you from the basics to the phenomena. Biology contains a lot of examples of that. It's not the best usage, but this kind of ambiguity is common in spoken English. I tend towards this interpretation.

You aren't wrong; the Alcubierre concept does get around Special Relativity, but that's because Special Relativity is only an approximation to General Relativity. It isn't actually "true" in the absolute sense of the word. My general point is that most "reasonable" ways around light-speed involve changing the relationship between space and time. In Special Relativity, this relationship is fixed by assumption. The relationship is not fixed in the real world, though; it is modified by gravity. If time bubbles can modify this relationship directly in the Cosmere without the exotic matter or negative energy, it could plausibly create a FTL drive. I don't know how they would avoid also producing a time machine, but am willing to suspend disbelief on that. This is all hard to gauge, though. I mean, the term unrealistic is hard to measure in a fictional universe.

Oh, I dunno. They seemed to get their act together in that regard in the last three books.

I really like the electrum cheats. Depending on what you are doing, it may just be necessary for you to decide in advance whether to accept or reject somebody's choice. Spoiler if you don't want a magic trick ruined:

True, but I think the OP is saying that Hoid is trying to make a new shard by combining the appropriately potent bits of some of the old ones. That he 'currently" isn't one isn't relevant. My biggest problem with this theory is that I don't think that the things Hoid have been collecting are potent enough to come anywhere near adonalsium, or anything close, at least on their own. However, he is probably collecting parts of the magic system for something related to a combination of powers in some form.

It's a mathematical theorem that if the universe obeys special relativity exactly, then any FTL travel allows information to travel backwards through time. It may seem stifling, but the proof is quite elementary by modern standards, roughly comparable to many of the proofs of the Pythogorean theorem in classical plane geometry. In constrast, the only known proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is orders of magnitude more complicated, as is the classification of all finite simple groups. Because of this, most scientists/engineers/mathematicians prefer to approach the ways in which special relativity does not apply to the universe; it seems much more fruitful.

Two points: In the Cosmere, both 10 and 16 have inherent significance, unlike the real world, where neither appears to have inherent significance. The 16% was used on purpose by Preservation as a signal to humanity. Part of this was because Ruin couldn't mess with it---it was too fundamental. My guess was that Preservation tied two fundamental numbers together (16 and 10) in a very fundamental way to get 16%, knowing that it would be easy for people to spot. Thus it was partly world-building, partly culture.

Luckily for speculation, Special Relativity isn't the whole story. It's incompatible with gravity, among other things. That's why we have General Relativity, where space and time themselves actually bend! Special Relativity is to the universe as plane geometry is to the surface of the Earth: a good approximation for an awful lot of practical problems. But the surface of the Earth is not flat, and the universe does not globally obey special relativity. In fact, at a fundamental level, the whole thing is a bit of a mess currently. There *may* be something useful at that level which we could use to make some kind of work-a-round. Most importantly for the actual topic, though, I'd say that the only "realistic" FTL drives are the ones like the Alcubierre which affect space and time directly. If I had to guess how Brandon was going to use Allomancy to work around relativity, I would guess that the Allomancy will affect space and time directly, just like such drives. It's by far the easiest lever to pull in modern theories to make a work-a-round. I still don't know how he would get around the time-travel problems, though.

You haven't been online for long, have you? Either that or you have had a remarkably good experience online.

The first problem with this is that the interaction between "mass" and velocity is complicated in special relativity. It is also not particularly useful for solving real problems. (Among other things, particles get have two different "masses" as the same time, depending on whether the force is applied parallel or perpendicular to their motion.) So much so that most modern physicists just talk about the momentum and energy (mathematically much better behaved), with mass referring only to the "rest mass," or how massive the particle is at rest. You can find older quotes from physicists talking about mass changing with velocity, but trust me---from personal experience, it just ties the mathematics and the physics into knots, with no real gain, conceptually or practically. The other problem is that both special relativity and general relativity are, when written most simply, geometrical. The speed of light limit isn't caused by any complicated interaction between the mass, the forces driving it, light, or any other such nonsense. It's just the way space and time are shaped. There is no reason, in special relativity, why you couldn't have a particle with imaginary mass, or with changing mass. If our current theories are correct, there are particles which do that all the time! But because they exist in a spacetime which has a relativistic geometry, these effects never translate into FTL behavior once you work through the math.