Timewaster's Guide Archive

My report is posted:

http://peterahlstrom.blogspot.com/2008/08/rolling-up-wheel-of-time-panel.html

(I'm Peter Ahlstrom.)

Spoiler Alert
When talking about viewpoint clusters, Brandon mentioned a "Perrin Faile and Galad" cluster, so, we know where Galad is going.

Mistborn wins for me, I haven't read Alcatrez or any of the unpublished stuff though.

Warbreaker is second, kinda good, but lacks polish in places.

Elantris just didn't seem as good.

Look back to Eye of The World, in the fights at the end "I WILL TAKE NO PART, ONLY THE CHOSEN ONE CAN DO WHAT MUST BE DONE, IF HE WILL" (may have the quote slightly off, this is from memory), most people attribute this sentence to the creator, with the chosen one being the dragon.

OK, I think I understand now, but I don't think you could make a shield of coins.  First of all, doing this to one coin would take a huge amount of skill, and doing multiple coins at a time would take even more.   And even then, one little push or pull would disrupt the orbit wouldn't it?  All you need is a coinshot or lurcher to push or pull the coins away.

You're right. However, if there are enough things flying around, the enemy may not be able to focus on your shield, if not, well, it  would be useful against anyone other than a coinshot, lurcher or mistborn.

If you want the force that holds them in orbit around you to counter gravity, they'd have to go at a set speed depending on how far below the point they were being held in orbit. Because, a lurcher or mistborn can only control the magnitude of the force, not the magnitudes of it's vertical and horizontal components.

the horizontal component (Fcosø) would have to be m*v*v/r while the vertical component (Fsinø) would have to be m*g, where ø is the angle that the line of the force makes with the vertical.

This would therefore require v to be √(rg/tanø) where r is the radius of the circle and g is the local gravitational constant.

reskar, you know he's made the whole book available as a .doc: http://www.brandonsanderson.com/drafts/warbreaker/WarbreakerFull4.2.doc
or a .pdf: http://www.brandonsanderson.com/drafts/warbreaker/warbreaker4.2.pdf

I don't think washer would contemplate releasing Vahr, as Vahr's aims would conflict with Vahser's.

How was I wrong?  You stated the exact same thing I did, just in a more complicated way.  You even admitted that the Moon's momentum would need to remain equal to the force of Earth's gravity.   Subtle pulling would still not work if it was constant.  However, I just thought of something;  If you allowed the object to slingshot around you by pulling and releasing, you may be able to get an elliptical orbit for a time.  However, in the case of the Mistborn Universe, it would take so much concentration as to be counterproductive.  When Vin Pulls that gate, she stops pulling once the object passes her.  If she didn't the gate would either slow down or stop and come back at her, or if it was heavy enough, take her with it.  I see Pushing and Pulling like tying yourself to the object like on a tether.

Nope, a constant force is what is required. The only problem I can think of is that the coins might drop and hit the ground. The force on the moon does no the vary, the force on a coin would not have to vary to keep it in a circle. And no, the force on the moon is not equal to the moon's momentum, momentum is velocity multiplied by mass, the force on the moon (or anything moving in a circle at constant speed) is the object's mass multiplied by it's (speed squared) divided by the radius of the circle.

My initial post was not intended as a flame, but to be blunt,  you're still wrong.

There is no such force as inertia, inertia is a measure of a body's tendency to resist a change in it's motion, in simple cases this is just the bodies mass. Hence Newtons second law, force = mass * acceleration (simplified slightly but will do for this purpose).

The only consequential force on the moon is gravity. At any given moment, the moon is moving in a straight line tangential to the earth, if you turned off the earth's gravity it would carry on in that straight line, the earth's gravity pulls it enough to stop it from flying off, but due to it's rather large momentum, can not cause it to fall to the earth. If you;re interested, the appropriate rearrangement of Newton's second law in this case is, Force = mass * (velocity squared)/(radius of circle), velocity being it's tangential velocity and the force being the force towards the centre of the circle, if the force is too big it will move toward the centre of the circle, if it is  too small it will move away.

The case being suggested of pulling metal objects with iron pulling  to make them orbit around you would work if you made the pull force small enough, considering that you'd be using small enough objects so that pulling them wouldn't move you, the force you'd have to apply would be tiny, unless they were moving at insanely high speeds.