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Originally Posted by Keroko
No, he still fulfilled the Front Attacker role. He engaged the enemy and kept it from firing at his allies. Just because he didn't do so in melee does not mean he did not fulfill the Front Attacker role.
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Um...maybe when he did his "I won't let you shoot!" Steel Yoke attack to blow up some of the heads, but initially he was standing in line right next to Yuuno and Arf spewing out chain-binding spells to clear the way for all the "I'm XYZ, and this is my attack! Take notes!" strikes. Which themselves further emphasize the point, since they involve three Centers, two Front Attackers, and one Guard Wing all doing exactly the same thing. The point is, that battle required completely different tactical patterns.
Similarly, if I have a four-man team (one of each position) where Yuuno is my fullback, I'm going to have completely different tactics regarding him than I am with Caro as a fullback (particularly in terms of how much indirect offense I can count on out of the position). While the two of them are similar in some of the powers that they
don't have (neither, for example, has a hand-to-hand physical attack of any substance), the powers they
do have are completely dissimilar.
Maybe what I'm best trying to say here is that, the "four position" system is a good description of a standard Bureau military tactical formation, it doesn't do a good job of describing what the people occupying it really can do. Worse yet, most of the examples we have to work with are among the best of the best, so they have really long lists of spell abilities and so can fulfill multiple roles (Nanoha, for example, has defensive, binding, and area-search abilities as good as anyone's, so she could fill the role of fullback if the squad wanted to use a "four position" deployment and didn't have anyone else for it; similarly I can't think of anyone other than Nanoha who displays better shooting-magic, i.e. Center, skills than Fate does) so calling them X, Y, or Z is more limiting than it is descriptive.
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Originally Posted by Keroko
Well, their energy was explicitly described as 'not magic' so it's definitely not a 'different kind of magic.' Magic in Nanoha seems to rely one single one form of energy, and anything that uses a different form of energy to achieve similar results is not magic.
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...or maybe, "not magic" in the sense of "not casting magic spells in the way that a magician does?" I mean, the Gadget Drones aren't "magic" either, but they use artificial Jewel Seeds as their power source? For example, while AMF prevents magicians from summoning and casting magic using their linker cores within the area of effect, it doesn't shut down technology (such as Tia's motorcycle...or heck, how about Uno's computer system? Or turning off the lights as Drones fly down the corridors of RF6)? even though we know that Mid uses "magic" as the
source of its technological power. So the cyborgs' Inherent Skills (and indeed, their basic functioning, such as their skeletal structure, muscles, etc.) would be ultimately
powered by magic (i.e. an extension of the same principles of MagiTech that the TSAB infrastructure works on), but not actually
be magic in the sense that Nanoha's spell abilities are.
Or did you mean that one of the booklets specifically said, "an ability using a different kind"--as opposed to
source--"of energy than magic"? Which of course raises the question of what source of power is that and how does it work, because my tolerance for technobabble hand-waves goes way down once it all stops being magic-based on some level or another.