[arkhangelsk]

Originally Posted by Jimmy C

An anti-teleport-in barrier appears to require a lot of power. Clinque blowing up the generator in GFHQ in ep16 only reduced the output of the defensive barrier. Yet, that was enough to allow Lutecia to teleport the army of Gadgets in.

Actually, the drones were never actually teleported through the shield, half-power or not. It seems more likely that the blow generator thing is just to weaken the shield to the point where it can actually be dissolved by the AMF.

Lesser barriers cast by mere mages in the first two season have been consistently shown to be unable to prevent hostile entry, although they're better at preventing hostile exit.

Actually, the barrier that protected the HQ building seems to be an entirely different type than the anti-discovery barriers used by the cast - for example, it definitely did not purge all the non-mages inside the building - as far as we know, it purged no one.

Strictly speaking, we are not even sure whether the thing has an anti-teleport ability at all. Our enemies didn't exactly seem awfully interested in teleporting inside the building. The shield apparently wasn't even raised at the beginning (Dieci's shot hit the building direct), yet no one tried any teleports that we can see.

This also requires a mage to be in position to cast a barrier to trap an incoming teleport in the first place. The TSAB hasn't shown the ability to remotely cast barriers tens of km away or more, ever.

Or any spell for that matter, unless you count the destination point of a teleport, or Precia's "leap attack" which seems to be basically teleporting an attack spell.

For the first two seasons, the purpose of the barriers was to keep the people of Earth from finding out about magic. That's no longer a concern when the action takes place on Mid instead. Also, I vaguely recall someone talking how casting those barriers ties down mages that could otherwise assist in stopping the threats inside the barrier.

There's also the factor that the barrier might accidentally trap someone who shouldn't have been trapped.

On the broader issue of Middie sensors, they definitely don't have a lot of variety, and their general hopelessness in detecting anything without a large energy signature is legend (the one time we saw it, detection vs two non-mage girls is 300 yards - maybe a dedicated search would squeeze out a bit more range...). On the other hand, what they have are reasonably suited to TSAB's purpose, which is mostly against large energy (mostly magical) events. When a large event happens, the sensors do seem to cue in very quickly and automatically, with apparently excellent resolution and even finds a way to present a visual a lot of the time. Also, it apparently works through walls and mud, at least for the target types of interest, which makes it more useful as a general purpose TSAB sensor than line of sight limited methods like radar, thermal and visual sighting.

The lack of long range air surveillance is curious to us, but not so much considering their dominance. They don't have conventional enemies and even air travel of all kinds seems strictly limited. Under such circumstances, they may have decided to forego the expense of dedicated active emitting radar-type surveillance.

It is probably assumed that if a really dangerous flying threat actually appears, it'll have a high energy signature, and will be detected adequately on the regular surveillance system (if it is a "pop-up" threat, probably the radar system would have trouble picking it up until it powers up as well), and a less dangerous flying threat would have a low energy signature, so it is less important if it was detected at a closer range. And of course there's the whole teleport thing too. But they won't really appear because their primary targets are criminals which probably won't be so conspicious as to fly.