First, my apologies to everyone who's commented for my tardiness in
replying. For various reasons, my computer time has been somewhat
limited of late, and the volume of responses was a bit too much to reply
in the time I had.
Second, as always, my thanks to those same people for taking the time to
comment on my story.
Now, as before, discussions of the effectiveness of specific types of
military equipment on the youma are over my head, so don't expect much
in the way of intelligent commentary on that front.
It seems as though the critical factor in how effective a modern
military would be on the battlefield against youma is the question of
what, exactly, a youma is. The wonderful thing about that is that,
since youma don't actually exist and the show didn't concern itself
which such matters, I can essentially make the answer to that question
up to suit my purposes. :)
So, a brief treatise on the youma of Shades of Darkness:
At the core, a youma is essentially an elemental spirit of evil. The
physical form is essentially no more than a shell for that spirit,
though the youma don't tend to think of it that way. Because of this,
it is very hard to slay a youma through purely physical means, as the
physical form can and will regenerate from most damage. Obviously, the
more powerful the youma, the more physical damage it would take to put
it down - the most powerful might even be able to recover from being
completely vaporized.
The Senshi/Champions attacks, of course, have a spiritual as well as
physical component, allowing them to defeat the youma much more easily
than a purely physical attack.
Another thing to note is that the youma have a supernatural, paralyzing
"fear aura" of sorts. Though it wouldn't have much effect on trained
soldiers, it would make mass arming of the populace less effective than
has been suggested.
One thing that I think is clear, is that, given enough time to throw at
the problem, First World countries could and would mass-produce the most
effective anti-youma weaponry, whatever it might be.
A lot of how a war of the sort that's being discussed here would turn
out would be how much damage the youma were able to do before the human
forces were able to adapt to them and develop effective tactics.
To close things off, I seem to recall one respondent saying something
along the lines of "now that we've spent all this time discussing this,
th author will certainly throw something entirely different at us". I
have to say that that's pretty much correct. :)
Once again, my thanks to everyone who commented.