I THINK YOU GUYS MIGHT BE IGNORING SOMETHING.
AS IN WHAT DO THE NON AMP AND MANIP USERS GET OUT OF THIS DEAL.
Realism! And if their SM-using teammates are duking it out with enemy SM-users using magicsense, neither side is probably paying too much attention to ordinary bullets or lasers, are they? Could even make that a drawback, magicsense reducing non-SM awareness when active.
And this comes back to the fact it would prompt far more commonplace space magic duels. I think we had one, back in the Assault on Hephaestus, and it wasn't pretty.
Basically, do we want to demote non-spacewizards to spacewizards' aides/sidekicks/bodyguards? To be fair, I don't find that sort of a game unappealing, but it is certainly a very different setup from the semi-"equal opportunities" thing we had going for Con and Exo users. If we are to accept this change we should see it for what it is: finally and inevitably changing the face of ER combat. Not a bad thing in itself, but something not to be decided lightly.
In all honesty, at this point I am actually willing to side with Devastator on noting that space magic should be ultimately offensive in nature. Defensive space-magic just runs counter to how the magic has been established so far. Having space-magic-negating automanips and other stuff is just enough.
Hmmm. Piecewise, could we go the other way here?
How much of a change would it require to say that both enemy ampers AND PC ampers have to go the "flashy" way? Because of carefully thought-out reasons, of course. (Maybe because of it being drastically more difficult for precise and finely-controlled space-magic than was initially thought; that, and making indirect, remote-camera-kills attacks far, far more difficult to pull.)
The continuity would be largely preserved ("Flashy" is the HMRC way, certainly), and for lore reasons (the AM space-magicking style, for example) the option still might be on the table for ultra-high-level space wizards (say, skill level 5+: even skill level 4 is easy enough to obtain, given genemods and appropriate starting skill distribution).