[Jimmy C]

Originally Posted by arkhangelsk

Responsibility to prove the 10A comes to the person proposing it in the face of an alternative.

S+ mage, more than enough power for the task. I don't consider anything more to be necessary.

How about power efficiency. Presumably, the AMF is not free. Leaving them off where they aren't required is just good efficiency.

When your ship is nuclear-powered, would you be worried if you use 2 radars instead of 1? Likewise, with kind of powersource the Cradle has, it can afford it in the interests of making life difficult for its intruders.

Remember also that the Cradle's original purpose is not to fight off Nanoha. Originally...

But now Quattro's running the ship and the only magic-users aboard are the intruders and the Saint-King. So why not put up a shipwide AMF to suppress them no matter where they go?

The links will be over dozens or hundreds of meters (it is not even clear whether Nanoha can create that long an "extension cord", even in ideal circumstances).

You're thinking in terms of physical lines. Ah, I can join it with this part as well:

Another way of limiting the expenditure of little magical round is if it doesn't communicate until it finds a big contact. It is a reasonable strategy - they MUST know by now Quattro has substantial EW capability, and not having it constantly squawk out "radio signals" is going to keep that little round covert from Quattro longer.

I doubt the area to be searched on the ship is large enough to hinder Nanoha's use of W.A.S. If the scouts are further away, she just needs to pump more magic into the link to keep them supplied. But she can only do that if she knew where the scouts were. Therefore the scouts have to at least transmit a carrier signal to report their position at all times. Since they are balls of magic that were cast by Nanoha in the first place, their transmissions can be directional and therefore nearly impossible to detect.

I noticed that she was suffering with each hit and blow,

Just because she got knocked around doesn't mean her magic output suddenly plunged. If you got hit with a left hook, does it mean you can't punch back as hard anymore?

lost 8% of her magic,

Which was a long-term concern, but it means she still has most of her magic during the battle, correct? That's the important part at that point.

could just barely walk,

After walking unsteadily for a moment, she ran down the crater to Vivio. Then, she was floating fine until the heavy AMF came on.

and fell asleep when she hit the helo.

Mission complete, everyone safe. She had fought long and hard, so? That she let fatigue take her at this point is irrelevant to how much magic she use. It just shows it was more than "no sweat" to her, but not how much more. And it doesn't change the fact that she was able to give that much during the actual battle. That's the important thing.