|
Good point, Skane. Not so much about over-the-horizon (it looked like she did have LOS, even if it was a pretty long-range sniping job), but about the verification of sensory feedback from the device to the user. Also A's 5, where Nanoha nails the four incoming Flying Swallow balls with her Accel Shooter - another example of eyes-closed shooting.
Given that, maybe the user is actually aiming, but with feedback from the device? "Up a little... to the left... back to the right a bit... 'kay, that's dead on"? I don't know if I buy that, though, because that still leaves a lot up to the actual user's muscle control. But it's obvious that there's no need for "iron sights" - the device is actually looking for the target with its own sensory capabilities, and can pass those on to the user, so you don't have to be able to bring anything in line with your eyeball in order to see the sight picture. Nor is an actual display required, because we know that the devices can kick targeting information back to the user even with the user's eyes closed.
Barrier jackets... interesting thought. Obviously they act in cloth-like fashion, they get scuffed up and dirty, they tear like cloth and not like, say, plate armor. But at the same time, Nanoha's barrier jacket deconstructs interestingly when she gets walloped by Vita. Perhaps this points to some kind of emergency-reactive mode, something akin to what Fate triggers manually with her Purge? But we don't ever see that kind of reaction again, and we've seen the jackets take several different varieties of damage where they react like real cloth. (Fate's, especially, tends to fray under large beamspam stress! Or, er, her mom.) So it's too much to say "oh, they're an energy matrix that just happens to resemble clothing", I think, but there's obviously more going on than just a spiffy costume backed by a force field.
I'm not comfortable with saying "mass converted to energy" because a very small amount of mass equates to a ginormous amount of energy, as others in the thread have helpfully pointed out. If RH could form a staff from a little ball, it's got enough energy to crack the planet open like a nut. It's much easier to envision the matter to be summoned (either from an unspecified location, from a pocket dimension, from some sort of elemental plane of whatever, or who knows) and then assembled on the spot by the devices.
Interestingly, the devices have "parts" that are "changed out" on more than one occasion. Even though RH and Bardiche are just little crystal thingies at the time... and some of the parts clearly refer to things which exist outside of the core when manifested, like the cartridge system. So maybe the devices are merely assembling themselves from parts that already exist? But then this runs into the "you can restore Bardiche by pouring some magic into it" problem. Could be a little of both, or that the devices actually have really freakin' good auto-repair systems and access to spare mass (or that Bardiche "picked up" the broken portion of its staff when it restored itself - we didn't see where it went.) Of course this could also be crap, and the parts refer to things inside the core of the device which actually generate the functional bits on manifestation. We don't ever see anyone with the "hood" up, working on a device, so to speak. We do see plenty of Shari peck-pecking away at keyboards while ostensibly "working" on a device, so probably there's a lot of programming involved...
|