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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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Note that the fog they hit just went numb; it's still there, and we can apparently still sense it, but we're not sensing it fully and it may be responding slowly. Additionally, the fog is about the weakest form of grief we could possibly make. I suspect that we can defend ourselves from the AM ray reasonably well, even if we're slightly weak against it.

Another thing to try: Grab a lump of metal from somewhere and forge it into a shield. We're in an industrial district, it should be pretty trivial to find some junked, rusting machinery or a bin of metal scrap to eat.
 
Vebyast said:
Note that the fog they hit just went numb; it's still there, and we can apparently still sense it, but we're not sensing it fully and it may be responding slowly. Additionally, the fog is about the weakest form of grief we could possibly make. I suspect that we can defend ourselves from the AM ray reasonably well, even if we're slightly weak against it.
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For safety's sake, for the time being, I'm assuming the AM beam can pierce through our Grief, and through non magical materials to some extent.

Another thing to try: Grab a lump of metal from somewhere and forge it into a shield. We're in an industrial district, it should be pretty trivial to find some junked, rusting machinery or a bin of metal scrap to eat.
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Mmm... I was thinking that since this industrial district is in full working order, it would be harder to find that much scrap metal, but I guess?
 
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Ok, new, completely-sane and well-considered idea:

Ballistic Chibi delivery.

Have Mami whip up a chibi. Use grief telekinesis to catapult it at Very High Velocity on an intercept course for the fleeing girl. Mami can handle terminal guidance and landing with ribbon wings/parachutes.

If she can get the chibi close to the target, she ought to be able to go for the ribbon-binding-immobilize or a gem snatch. Or, parley, if the target isn't instantly hostile. Chibis aren't likely to be up to full Mami combat proficiency, but she really just needs eyes on the target to try ribbon trickery.

If she can't land a disabling attack, she can at least try to follow the stranger and keep track of her. If it's a trap, hopefully the chibi detects or springs it before the full-size bodies are in danger. If the stranger is capable of shooting a fast moving chibi out of the air before she arrives, that's a very useful thing to know before we try to approach.
 
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[X] Notify everyone
-[X] Hostile contact in industrial district. Red-colored Anti-magic beams. Long range. If anyone knows a girl with those powers, now's a good time to speak up
-[X] We want all teams to remain in search pattern EXCEPT for Sayaka and Saki, who we request back-up from. Tell them to keep their eyes open too - this may not be the only hostile in the area.

[X] Tell Mami to build her wings and glide to ground - we need to split up
-[X] Jump out. Use the smallest amount of grief possible to keep us airborne - and non-witchy camo if we can spare the attention
-[X] Remotely operate the MOF and have the Obrez on standby nearby, in case we get hit by AM.
-[X] Wide laser beam set to "Temporarily Blind". Pulse it in the direction the shot came from, to help suppress them
-[X] Prepare more lethal lasers in case they aren't dissuaded by the stunbeams.

[X] Harass the enemy, but do not engage unless forced to
-[X] try to corral them away from the more populous areas, to reduce casualties.
-[X] Await reinforcements from Sayaka/Saki, then apprehend the threat
-[X] Attempt to get positive ID on the hostile actor and ascertain if she's alone or not.


To address the wings thing - I'm only suggesting she use them to glide. Bigass golden wings would just be a target anyway.

E: Also, decoy.
 
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We should probably just herd and/or shadow her, and not try to engage until our backup arrives. The enemy chose this fight, which means that they think they can win it. They've presumably got things set up to their advantage. We shouldn't have this fight on their terms.

Article:
"No matter what the odds look like, if the enemy has chosen the battleground, he has more resources than we're aware of. It becomes imperative to choose a new battlefield, one the enemy can't have prepared. Don't mistake that for cowardice."
Source: -Zsinj's Doctrine from "X-Wing: Solo Command"
 
Onmur said:
Mmm... I was thinking that since this industrial district is in full working order, it would be harder to find that much scrap metal, but I guess?
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Even near-future industrial-scale forming processes are entirely subtractive, leaving behind shavings and plates and other things that can't be used for further operations on-site and end up being shipped back to a forge for recycling into new stock. Look at any metalworking video on YT; every one of those chips that comes off a mill or a lathe, as well as the big plates that you're cutting things out of with lasers and waterjets, those all go in a bin before being shipped back. I'd actually expect an operational industrial district to have more available scrap than a dead one, especially if the dead one has sold off all its machines to cover debts and closing costs.

[x] Standing vote: Keep your team and allies updated
[x] Standing vote: Keep an eye out for traps or enemy reinforcements

[x] Notify everyone
-[x] Ask for small reinforcement - Sayaka, Saki
-[x] Note possibility of decoy, trap, or enemy team
-[x] Describe assailant, ask for information

[x] Pursue and evade
-[x] Go low. MOF can navigate at street level just as well as the spheres could
-[x] Spawn decoy MOFs, obfuscate position
-[x] Lessen grief emissions - windshield is the biggest thing
-[x] Grab any metal scrap you fly over and forge a non-magical shield

[x] Follow her, herd the conflict toward a more advantageous and safer area
-[x] Track - levitated or launched mami chibis, non-hax grief sensors, ribbon sensor grid, etc
-[x] Harass - Lasers to cause temporary flash-blindness, microwave and coherent-acoustic emitters to distract, tangle bullets (chibi crew-served gun, mami+brina rifle?), etc
-[x] Try to get around in front of her and push her in another direction

[x] Hail your opponent. Identify yourself, ask her to stop, find out what she wants, etc.
 
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Hmm... Question: Is seeing that girl in our senses yesterday enough information to telepathically contact her now?
 
The Narrator said:
We should probably just herd and/or shadow her, and not try to engage until our backup arrives. The enemy chose this fight, which means that they think they can win it. They've presumably got things set up to their advantage. We shouldn't have this fight on their terms.
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That's what I'm voting for. ;)

We probably can't not engage at all; we need to stop this guca from going where she wants.

[X] Yell for the Pleiades.
-[X] Describe the attack and any further developments.
-[X] Ask reinforcements from anyone nearby. Don't call off the search; this might not be our thief. A decoy, perhaps.

[X] Dismiss everything that pings megucas' radars; reduce the Fog to be as unnoticeable as possible.
[X] Beware multiple possible enemies and traps.

[X] Corral them away from habitated areas.
-[X] Get within sensing range. Beware the Memory Device.
-[X] Let Mami do the harassment while you do the driving. Evasive measures.
-[X] Upgrade one of Mami's muskets.
-[X] Try to fashion a double layered shield of Grief and scrap metal.

[X] Once you get reinforcements, coordinate and surround.
-[X] If possible, ask for a cessation of hostilities. You're here to help.
-[X] Else, subdue them as a group. Go for a Gem Snatch.

The Narrator said:
For that matter, is what little we've been able to see of her in this firefight enough?
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We haven't seen her yet.
 
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Should we keep Oriko and Kirika in the loop or just leave them to continue searching the shopping center?

If we're worried about being tracked by witch sense, shouldn't we move the windshield to where we aren't instead of dissolving it?
 
Wait. We're actually going to use a thin metal plate to block a magic beam?

We have to make some kind of reference out of this. Get a lead plate if we can, too!
 
I was thinking more along the lines of how lead plates in D&D can block quite a lot of spells: Detect Magic, Detect Evil, Detect Good...

...and here, probably (hopefully?) Detect Witch.
 
Tangentially related:
So combat aircraft have some interesting policies when it comes to dealing with anti-air fire. The classical method from way back in WW2 was to just hope you didn't die, but that's since evolved into a variety of very sophisticated methods.

The biggest deal is the fact that relative to a gunner, a given aircraft might be flying quite quickly but they're so far away that the aren't actually traversing that quickly. It becomes quite easy for an aircraft at high altitude to have their trajectory plotted and settings to be put into your gun or missile to intercept that aircraft. The solutions to this problem are to be so high that the enemy guns/missiles just run out of energy before they can hit you OR to fly so fast that nobody can catch you. These are exemplified by the U-2 and SR-71, respectively.

Over time, as missiles got better and better, these stopped being a good options. Flights switched to low altitudes, with aircraft flying just a few feet over the tree tops. The idea here is that your gunner/missile shooting platform has to find a way to traverse and track you as you're approaching them at Mach 2, without the help of you being so far away that tracking you is easy. Now you flash past them so quickly that they don't have time to react and you can bomb at your own leisure.

Additional tangents:
So the interesting thing about dogfights is that they're very dependent on the relative speeds of the two aircraft. If your aircraft is substantially faster than the other, you can often have serious problems. What tends to happen is that as you go into a turn, the slower aircraft will be able to pull tighter while you'll slide past and in front, allowing the enemy to shoot you down. There are ways of dealing with this, of course, but that's a truly huge tangent.
 
Torgamous said:
Should we keep Oriko and Kirika in the loop or just leave them to continue searching the shopping center?

If we're worried about being tracked by witch sense, shouldn't we move the windshield to where we aren't instead of dissolving it?
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Oriko and Kirika can't fly, so they'll keep searching. I think all votes call for that right now.

I'm... not sure about using the windshield as decoy. Maybe? It is a windshield, so it won't do much more than distract for a second; enough for they to see we're not there.
 
Re: Lasers
We can also try pulse lights. Studies have shown that it makes it extremely disorientating, and confuses the target's ability to figure out which direction is coming from, or whether they're getting closer or not.

Downsides include making you a big target for anyone not in the beam, so, probably only use for final approach flashbang uses, but without deafing your own people.
 
Grief light would probably be pretty good if we can time it so the meguca is aiming at us just as we try to blind her. Don't think it'd work more than once, so probably something to pull once reinforcements are here.
 
[X] Yell for the Pleiades.
-[X] Describe the attack and any further developments.
-[X] Ask reinforcements from nearby. Keep the search going; this might a decoy.
-[X] Warn everyone they might get attacked right now.

[X] Dismiss witchy windshield. Diminish Fog so it won't be sensed.
[X] Beware multiple possible enemies and traps.

[X] Corral them away from habitated areas. Fly low.
-[X] Get within sensing range. Beware the Memory Device.
-[X] Let Mami do the harassment while you do the driving. Evasive measures.
-[X] Upgrade one of Mami's muskets.
-[X] Try to fashion a double layered shield of Grief and scrap metal.

[X] Once you get reinforcements, coordinate and surround.
-[X] If possible, ask for a cessation of hostilities. You're here to help.
-[X] Else, subdue them as a group. Use Grief light to confuse your opponent and go for a Gem Snatch.
 
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Just lase the ground or wall in front of her and the reflected light will be bright enough to cause flash-blindness. This is actually the major difficulty using laser weapons for real combat. To quote myself from an old thread on SB, from a fic where Taylor gained access to some high-end biological manipulation:

Vebyast said:
The major problem with lasers is that they almost invariably blind everybody nearby. Maximum permissible exposure for lasers in the visible light spectrum is on the order of 1e-4 joules per square centimeter over the course of a tenth of a second. If you shoot an average metal surface, up to 80% of the incident energy is dispersed by reflection instead of being absorbed by the target. If you do the math, a 5 GJ, 100 ms pulse hitting a metal surface can cause unsafe visible light radiation almost 500m away. Go up two orders of magnitude, to upgrade from unsafe exposure to actual damage, and the danger zone is still over 50 m in radius. And that's not even taking into account things like particulates in the air; if the battlefield is smoky enough for visibility to be 10 km, Skitter's death laser will be scattering thousands of watts per meter of travel, compared to a household fluorescent tube radiating 10 W per meter.

High-power energy weapons don't look like nice simple beams. Like Faraway-R said, the closest thing you can probably think of is a very big, very scary lightning bolt, hitting close enough to you to leave you with big purple flashy things in your vision that take a couple days to go away.
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Vebyast said:
Isn't that energy level for lasers at the point where things don't melt, they just explode (and can create weird matter?)
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Yes. Very much so. Attenuation length for visible light in most materials is on the order of micrometers. A 5 GW beam (and Skitter's is probably way higher-power thanks to a shorter pulse) with a spot size of 5 cm will heat that depth to vaporization in literal nanoseconds. The resulting plasma will continue to heat up as it spends a couple milliseconds expanding; there will be so much energy in this initial phase that the resulting explosion will simultaneously blowtorch and shatter everything nearby. The target itself will disintegrate as a metal-liquifying shockwave smashes it and disperses the fragments at several kilometers per second. The cloud of plasma and particulates blasting out from the impact point will continue to absorb energy from the beam for the duration of the lasing event, probably causing a longitudinal shockwave that will put significant damage on everything else nearby. Everybody within 50 meters of the event will be permanently blind; everybody within a kilometer will be blinking away a giant green spot in their vision for days.
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Which is why we should use a blinding pulse. That way she can't actually aim at us without looking into the pulse with her eyes open and blinding herself.

Most heroes ride out of the sun, but we have the unique opportunity to become the sun.
 
The Narrator said:
Using blinding-intensity lasers instead of burning-intensity also avoids property damage and collateral damage.
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I hope we're talking short-ish range. Don't want to blind anyone we don't intend to.

I feel 'light attacks' will be useful once we're engaging, but not much good before then, since the meguca will probably be able to heal her eyes pretty fast?

We need the surprise factor, and a follow up for the Grief light to work.
 
Onmur said:
I feel 'light attacks' will be useful once we're engaging, but not much good before then, since the meguca will probably be able to heal her eyes pretty fast?
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High-speed chase, remember - blinding her for even a second or two is a major win. She has to slow down to heal, she could crash into something even in the second or two it takes her to restore her sight, she can't aim while she's blind and we'll have brief moment in which we can move safely. Even the simple distraction of bringing up healing magic means she's not doing something else with her attention, like paying attention to how she's being herded or returning fire.
Godwinson said:
Hey, you know, if we really need to distract someone(s) in a fight without injuring people, we can use a bit of grief to produce something akin to a microwave area denial weapon's effect.
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Already in my vote, along with LRAD. :D Totally on board with the various crazy IRL less-lethal weaponry.
 
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