Is Lea stronger than the Winter Lady?

[groinkick]

Did a Bing search for Jim Butcher Soul, hoping to get lucky..  Dunno if this applies to the Dresdenverse but it is pretty awesome

“Every soul is special. They’re all beautiful. They’re all far more significant than anyone on this rock realizes. I think when people are at their best, they’re acting in accordance with their soul. The ones who have gone bad don’t have bad souls. They’ve just given up on keeping in touch with them.” - Jim Butcher

This felt appropriate

[vultur]

Also Lily's spell is far hotter than almost anything we've seen dresden do in the books. I think some of his Hellfire empowered stuff might come close, but it had the same instantaneous obliteration effect on Fix's sword

Larger, yes, but not hotter. Harry says his lake-freezing fire-column spell in WN is "hot enough to vaporize ten-gauge steel" (and there was no Hellfire in that spell, just energy gathered from the environment via regular wizard magic). Harry doesn't throw around fire magic on that scale very often at all, but it is within his capabilities.

I think he also describes a fire spell in Changes as being as hot as the sun or something, but there was Soulfire in that.

That spell is more powerful than anything we see Harry do before he's Winter Knight (afterwards, I think the warehouse-lifting-iceberg in CD is comparable or stronger) but it's not on a whole other level.

I was just about to say that.  Molly has her wizard power in addition to her Lady power.

I don't think her wizard power is all that meaningful on this scale in "raw power" terms.

However, Molly's core talents of illusion and subtle magic work really, really well with the way the Sidhe tend to do things. Give her enough time to really learn how to adapt her existing skills/talents to her new power, and she'll be incredibly, terrifyingly capable. But that will be because of her skill/talent rather than just raw power.

(Luccio says in SmF that even before her body swap, she had less raw power than Harry. But she was far more capable.)

Yeah, but Jim (who knows better than Uriel) has said that it's possible to lose your soul even without turning into something other than human, if you're terrible enough.  So it probably does get whittled down bit by bit.

If we're talking about the same WoJ (the one that talks about "growing mold on your conscience"), I think that means "lose your soul" in the sense of damnation/turning evil, not turning into a being with a radically different kind of spirit.

To be fair now i've napped a little it's also not clear whether or not JB ran the math on the trick he had molly pull at the start of Cold Case.

I'd think not, since Molly compares the energy required to "military grade munitions"; I don't think she means nuclear weapons from the way it's phrased.

The math for me come sup in the 400Kt+ range,

Well, it's described as ten feet deep, half a mile around (has to be more or less a half circle since the boat is only twenty yards from shore). So that's about pi * (800 meters * 800 meters) / 2 (for a half circle) = very close to 1 million square meters of area.

It's 10 feet/3 meters deep so that's about 3 million cubic meters of ice.

The density of ice is about 900 kg per cubic meter, so that's about 2.7 billion kg (2.7 million metric tons or about 3 million US tons) of water frozen.

The water in the Alaskan seas is likely fairly close to freezing already, but the absolute minimum energy removed to freeze water (if it's already at freezing point) is the heat of fusion, 333 Joules/gram. 2.7 billion kg is 2.7 trillion grams, so 899 trillion joules (899 terajoules). That's the equivalent of roughly 215 kilotons of TNT (1 ton of TNT = 4.184 gigajoules).

That's fairly close to your 400 KT given how rough this is.

On the other hand, we don't know how drawing on Winter Ice works energy-wise. If it just involves freezing stuff by dumping the heat into the Nevernever, the effect might be more like opening a bunch of micro-portals to the NN (which can't really be calculated in physics terms) rather than actually handling all that energy directly the way Harry does with regular wizard magic.

[morriswalters]

Hot as the sun is vague, which is good for the story line as it leaves room for the imagination.  But it isn't very meaningful.  Plasma cutters can be much hotter than the surface of the sun.  And ten gauge steel is thin.  When Molly freezes that ice what we can know is that she didn't dump the heat in a column of fire.  Maybe she removed the salt, which might have made the ocean a super cooled liquid.  Instant ice.  Harry is a power guy.  Maybe Molly works smarter, not harder.  And she is obviously smarter than me.

[Carl]

Larger, yes, but not hotter. Harry says his lake-freezing fire-column spell in WN is "hot enough to vaporize ten-gauge steel" (and there was no Hellfire in that spell, just energy gathered from the environment via regular wizard magic). Harry doesn't throw around fire magic on that scale very often at all, but it is within his capabilities.

I think he also describes a fire spell in Changes as being as hot as the sun or something, but there was Soulfire in that.

That spell is more powerful than anything we see Harry do before he's Winter Knight (afterwards, I think the warehouse-lifting-iceberg in CD is comparable or stronger) but it's not on a whole other level.

I don't think her wizard power is all that meaningful on this scale in "raw power" terms.

However, Molly's core talents of illusion and subtle magic work really, really well with the way the Sidhe tend to do things. Give her enough time to really learn how to adapt her existing skills/talents to her new power, and she'll be incredibly, terrifyingly capable. But that will be because of her skill/talent rather than just raw power.

(Luccio says in SmF that even before her body swap, she had less raw power than Harry. But she was far more capable.)

If we're talking about the same WoJ (the one that talks about "growing mold on your conscience"), I think that means "lose your soul" in the sense of damnation/turning evil, not turning into a being with a radically different kind of spirit.

I'd think not, since Molly compares the energy required to "military grade munitions"; I don't think she means nuclear weapons from the way it's phrased.

Well, it's described as ten feet deep, half a mile around (has to be more or less a half circle since the boat is only twenty yards from shore). So that's about pi * (800 meters * 800 meters) / 2 (for a half circle) = very close to 1 million square meters of area.

It's 10 feet/3 meters deep so that's about 3 million cubic meters of ice.

The density of ice is about 900 kg per cubic meter, so that's about 2.7 billion kg (2.7 million metric tons or about 3 million US tons) of water frozen.

The water in the Alaskan seas is likely fairly close to freezing already, but the absolute minimum energy removed to freeze water (if it's already at freezing point) is the heat of fusion, 333 Joules/gram. 2.7 billion kg is 2.7 trillion grams, so 899 trillion joules (899 terajoules). That's the equivalent of roughly 215 kilotons of TNT (1 ton of TNT = 4.184 gigajoules).

That's fairly close to your 400 KT given how rough this is.

On the other hand, we don't know how drawing on Winter Ice works energy-wise. If it just involves freezing stuff by dumping the heat into the Nevernever, the effect might be more like opening a bunch of micro-portals to the NN (which can't really be calculated in physics terms) rather than actually handling all that energy directly the way Harry does with regular wizard magic.

It's not clear from where the shore is when Molly walks ashore though how contiguous the shoreline was. From the fact that Molly specifies in every direction i;d assume she was stepping onto a headland of some kind, (this also makes sense in that she clearly didn't freeze the towns harbour so she must have been at least half a mile from there). So i treated it as a full 360 degree. I also assumed Moly was specifying the volume of water frozen with ice expansion pushing somewhat past that and i dug up a value of 80 calories per gram for seawater which equates to 334.8MJ per cubic meter. 10ft is 3m so that means roughly 1GJ per square meter of surface ocean area which is about .225 tons of TNT equivalent.

I'm not convinced JB wasn't thinking in very low end nuke terms, he's shown a bit too much knowledge of the sciences involved for that. My bet from re-reading the WN scene is he was thinking purely heat capacity, which is around 2 orders of magnitude lower energy totals. Thats down around a tactical nuke rather than a full blown trident warhead. Which comes in close to what i remember calculating Lily's Cold Days fire wall at.

As far as Harry's fire goes. I wasn't saying he couldn't dump the necessary energy out. He clearly can but his focusing ability is poor, he's not normally capable of putting enough energy out inside the volume of one of his practical evocations to vaporise the end of Fix's sword, (without knowing exactly how much Fix's sword piece weighed it's hard to give an exact value, but probably a couple of MJ total energy required). The minimum energy density of the flame wave was roughly 67kj per cubic centimeter, but thats assuming it took a full second to pass over and Fix's sword absorbed 100% of the energy. The latter is probably a safe assumption what with magic being involved but without re-reading Cold Days in don't recall the wave being that slow moving. So i suspect the value is up somwhere in the few hundred KJ per CC range.

Now you'll note i used the term normally when talking about Harry's magic. I did that for a reason. i'd basically forgotten about this. But that had to do with the fact that when i said Harry's magic i was specifically referring to what he can do with his own direct personal power. The WN trick was a case of drawing on an external energy source. It still took a lot out of him but most of the energy came from the water not his magic which is a very different proposition to his day to day fire spells where he's throwing out fire purely from his personal will.

Also as the next person to post mentioned, (this kinda got held up for a few days half complete), 10 gauge steel isn't very thick, just 3.2mm and temperature isn't the same as energy.

Molly's little trick however, like Harry's warehouse refloating from Cold Days however was very clearly reaching down into the power of the mantle. And whilst the text with Molly didn't specify i'd expect it to work the same way as Harry where he was just outright projecting cold.

As an aside a quick bit of math says Harry's WN trick probably involved moving a bit over 5GJ of energy or about 1200kg's for TNT. Given the size he specifies that works out at an energy density of around 3kj per CC. Thats over 2 orders of magnitude below the minimum for Lily's and over a fraction of the area. Which is still nothing to sneeze at mind.

The idea of what Sarrissa or Molly could do, (even if we assume JB was thinking a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than the math says), if they focused the energy up tight is frankly freaking terrifying. The only thing man built thats ever come close to that kind of energy density is a Casaba Howitzer. Which is a shaped charge nuke, and i don't think one was ever built and tested on a large enough scale to actually match. Think about that for a moment.