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Hero-Tracking Failure: Difference between revisions
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The hero is running from the baddies. He is unarmed. The baddies are not. They proceed to shoot everything they have at him, but for some mysterious reason they can't manage to track his position fast enough, with the result that bullets (and rockets, and laser beams, and...) hit juuuust where he was a moment ago without so much as scratching his clothes. Completely ridiculous, of course, since simple geometry dictates that swinging a gun a mere inch will result in the bullets hitting several metres ahead depending on distance, so the baddies must be moving their focus ''agonizingly'' slowly. You could argue that the baddies are bad at estimating the time the bullets take to travel, but even then, how long can this last before they decide they just have to [[Lead the Target|swing the gun a slight bit further]]?
This sometimes happens with armored vehicles as well, in which case it might be slightly more justified in that the turret might lack the capacity for fast tracking. That is, if the same turret wasn't shown rapidly swinging itself into position in a second just moments ago... then it's just dumb.
This sometimes happens to bad guys too, but it's generally more often seen with heroes, seen as they can't possibly be hit and shredded to bloody pulp in a shower of lead. When it does happen to baddies, the shooters usually manage to get their act together in the end.
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== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* ''[[Appleseed]]'' has large tanks with [[Gatling Good|enormous rotary cannons]] as their main gun, and automatic sensors to pick up the target. A tank picks up the main character as she starts running, the turret quickly swings into position and the big gun opens up, spewing thousands of empty shell casings out the side and laying waste to half a city block. You'd think that with all that firepower and modern systems the tanks would be able to correct their aim to track a running human. You'd think...
** It's heavily implied that the tanks were deliberately missing, leading Deunan to be surrounded from all sides, in order to take her alive. Note that at the end of the chase both tanks are aiming right at her and she has no place to flee, yet they don't open fire. This is especially likely, considering who hired them for the job.
** Subverted later on in the movie by the gigantic spiderlike weapons platforms, which seem more than capable enough to track the flying armored suits and swat them out of the sky with more [[More Dakka|automatic gun fire]].
* Taken to ridiculous extremes in the anime trilogy ''Memories'', or, more accurately, in its 2nd part entitled ''Stink Bomb'', where half the Japanese army (tanks, aircraft and all) is unable to kill a guy going over a highway overpass on a ''bicycle'' (even though everything immediately behind the target gets blown to smithereens).
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*** This doesn't quite explain why they didn't just try [[Lead the Target|shooting ahead of him]], blowing up the road and preventing him from advancing, but, [[Rule of Cool|whatever]].
* Justified in ''[[Trigun]]'': Vash isn't human, and has the reflexes to deflect bullets by throwing rocks at them in flight.
* In [[Code Geass]]: Suzaku outruns an automatic machinegun guarding a narrow hallway. They try to justify it by saying the camera has a slight delay, but there's no reason it couldn't have been programmed to lead the target.
== [[Literature]] ==
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* The ''[[Alien vs. Predator]]'' PC-games averted this in the case of the Marine and the Predator characters, but played it straight for the Alien when controlled by the players. Justified in that since it is fast and harder to see in Infrared the Alien is harder for auto-turrets to track, but it's mainly for gameplay as otherwise the Alien would be defenseless against such obstacles.
** Most of the time there was an alternate route around the auto-turret, allowing the Alien player to sneak up to it from behind.
* ''[[
* One of the cut-scenes in ''[[Resident Evil]]: Code Veronica'' has this with one of the characters outrunning the strafing minigun fire from a helicopter. Naturally it was knocked off for ''[[Resident Evil]] The Movie 2''.
** What made the least sense in this one is that the helicopter pilot decided to strafe rather than turn.
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* Averted by the better bots in programming game [[Robo Code]]---a lot of effort is put into analysing the movement patterns of targets and trying to guess where they're going to dodge to.
** Nearly omnipresent in [[Robo War]], due to the limitations of integer arithmetic. There's a reason why most of the top robots [[No Range Like Point-Blank Range|get up-close and personal with their targets]].
* Downright weird example in the first ''[[Mercenaries]]'' game. Hard to tell if the game has tracking AI, but the bullets move so slowly that you can dodge them pretty easily. Seriously, you can see the bullets coming for you, and a simple sidestep is all it takes.
* A [[Real Life]] example in games: You. You're probably gonna be doing this a lot when it comes to trueshot attacks in most games. Particularly RTS games.
** This tends to especially happen with analog stick aiming, where it feels like you ''should'' be able to move the sights faster than the target, but in the heat of the moment fail to realize that you're capped out by the control interface and start firing too soon.
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