Ki is born out of the "fusion" between body and spirit. We know that much. So, if the body is hurt, Ki is affected directly. It makes perfect sense. Especially since in the Buu saga its shown that having a low amount of even one single component of Ki, like Genki, can leave people completely tired and useless, and can even kill them, even if all the other components of Ki are perfectly fine, including the body.hleV wrote: The same way being hurt shouldn't affect the ki output, but it apparently does? Weights suppress the capability to fully utilize one's ki ("surface" it), I don't think ki sensing would work differently than scouters in this particular case.
But a weighted fighter has exactly the same body and spirit with weights on and with weights off. So, why should the Ki output be different? If that was the case, then Goku with Goten on his back would suddenly have less Ki output due to the extra weight on top of him. Also, a fighter in a higher gravity will have less Ki output because he weighs more. Does that make sense? To me it doesn't. A fighter with weights or in a higher gravity simply has a harder time moving, because there's something extra making him slower, making it harder to move. That's all. His Ki is the same and his use of Ki is the same, he just has a harder time moving around.
We know that Radditz' scouter is able to deduce that Goku is a bigger threat with weights off but I don't think it makes sense that the machine reached that result by registering a higher Ki output off of Goku when he removed the weights. Therefore its probable that power levels aren't just measures of Ki output.
Its also very probable that all this is just a plothole and that Toriyama intended them to just be Ki detectors with numbers, but, from a in-universe perspective, it doesn't really make sense unless they are a little more complex than that.
Well they do both face antagonistic cat-like creatures and become gods at the end.
