On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 18:00, Aaron Nowack wrote:

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.

What? You're posting??!! Go back to writing SoD ch. 2! (j/k ;) ) 

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.

Weren't the Generals super-youma, essentially? IIRC, they bled and such.

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.

While yes, you noted that virtually all anti-youma methods are magical
and supposed that any data that were transmitted for the Powers That Be
would be thus useless, I think you forgot about this part. Rei's ofuda
have an effect on Mr. Youma, and AFAIK that's entirely based on her
religious training. 

Such an observation is unlikely to be left out of any report by Mercury,
et. al to the world militaries, and as such I would expect chaplains to
start doing fun things like blessing silver bullets :D 

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.

What about police, especially SWAT teams? 

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.

/me wonders how long until the USN starts breaking out the Trident D5s
or the USAF starts deploying B61s. 

I'm particularly worried about the ability of the PRC to deal with such
an invasion, especially with regard to the mass conscript armies they
have. As I've noted before, the Middle East (excepting Turkey, Israel
and *maybe* Iran if they get their stuff together) and most of Africa
(save South Africa) are almost certainly screwed. 

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. :)

Well, duh. I look forward to the next chapter; hopefully it'll drive as
much discussion as your first chapter did. 

-- 
Phong Nguyen <pnguyen7@mail.usf.edu>

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