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Well I was watching the original trilogy the other day and I started wondering,why do the storm troopers keep missing even though they are like five feet away?I thought they were the best.Can you answer Dakka?

Laser rifle skill level -1.

Convenient plot holes?
The 'goodies' being proper Goodies and not being allowed to die?
Too small helmets?

LOL. But then why are they the "Emperor's finest"?
Aren't they supposed to have amazing training?

Stormtroopers are camera shy. This is why whenever they are off camera victory always seems to be theirs. Then as soon as the cameras are pointed their way they die/fall of ledges/miss with overwhelming firepower and so on.

The trope you are looking for is "Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy" AKA "Stormtrooper Syndrome"

Umm because it would have been rather boring for the film to end with the Heros breaking Leia out then getting mown down mecilessly in the corridor.

penut the butter wrote:Well I was watching the original trilogy the other day and I started wondering,why do the storm troopers keep missing even though they are like five feet away?I thought they were the best.Can you answer Dakka?

They are the best. Normally Imperial soldiers are slaughtered by a single Ewok armed with a puffy dandelion.

The Stormtroopers in RofJ trained for years to require logs and arrows and being pushed to take them out.

LOL.

Hmmm,I belive in episode 4 Luke comments that he "can't see a thing" when he has a stormtroopers helmet on,so maybe thats it.
However,I tend to atribute it to "plot convince syndrome"

But wasn't that a result of all the smoke from the bad shooting?

Besides the obvious plot choices, it is all about economics.

With years of production, short cuts and budget cuts they ended up with imposing looking warriors that couldn't even defeat a planet full of native teddy-bears. Leading up to EpIV, Palpatine simply didn't need to spend the money since the Empire was effectively his and the reputation of the Storm Troopers were solid, they didn't have to be nearly as efficient as the ones from before. Then came the Death Stars...

These budget cuts were made even worse with the construction of the two Death Stars! Which, of course directly affected the Storm Trooper production line in two ways.

1.) Less money means less training.
2.) When you have a planet destroyer (i.e. Death Star) you don't need Sardaukar (which the original Clone Troopers were much closer to in skill, though I wouldn't say quite equal to) to enforce the Emperor's will (i.e. even less training and inferior genetic material).

These Storm Troopers (EpIV and on) were far slower, dumber and less trained than any of their predecessors. Hell, I'd be willing to bet that The Goonies could have assaulted the Death Star successfully and rescued Princess Leia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtrooper_effect
that explains it all.

Weird.

penut the butter wrote:Well I was watching the original trilogy the other day and I started wondering,why do the storm troopers keep missing even though they are like five feet away?I thought they were the best.Can you answer Dakka?

The helmets dont have viewing lenses.

they are just painted black + gloss varnish.

Thus they are shooting blind ....

Maybe all the Stormtroopers are really farsighted hobos who are fighting for food and not the Emprah.

They keep shooting from the hip or chest.
They rarely aim.

I think people are just assuming that something is easy when they've never tried to do it. Have you ever shot at a speaking character? I can assure you that it's a very hard thing for a humble extra to do.

I always tried to imagine their guns just being ridiculously low quality. Dunno really... they miss and the movie ends. It would be cool to see the empire win though, lots of room for error there .

Anyway though... these are sweet.

Timothy Zahn had a great explanation as to the crummy quality of stormtroopers and the like, at least the ones stationed away from the Emperor.

His explanation?

The Emperor was using the Force to basically turn them all into puppets, but the further the distance between himself and the puppets--the less effective they were.

The most logical reason their terrible shots that I could realisticly understand is what happens before the boarding parties and getting whooped by hairy midgets...

The joke going around a few years ago was that essentially, the Clone troopers were good shots because they were cloned from Jango before he died (ie, head intact). The stormtroopers were cloned from the headless corpse, hence the marksmanship skill of blind freddy.

The West End Games RPG explained it as the "heroes" expending force points to make their enemies fail their tasks (something Force sensitives could do in the game).

Drinking on the job and/or getting high at work.

To be fair to them, Stormtroopers only seem to be bad shots when shooting at the main charector's. They mopped up the no-name rebel losers in the Tantive IV and Hoth preety quickly.

The Empire's only drinkable liquid is a 12-year scotch. Slightly impairing good aim. Makes for good giggles though.

Maybe all the heroes are force sensitive and harnessing the force in these situations albeit unknowingly?

To the stormtroopers' credit they did manage to hit at least one hero; except it was actually a heroine (Leia in ROTJ).

The stormtroopers predecessor from the clone wars got a lot of action loving to; they did some relatively bad ass maneuvers however it was against mindless robots.

Storm Troopers having bad aim = A movie that lasts a couple of hours and ends with the goodies winning.

Storm Troopers having decent aim = A movie where the main characters get thier heads blown off in the first five minutes.

Yes but it would be some what entertaining to see the hero get very badly damaged and makes it at the last minute.

penut the butter wrote:Yes but it would be some what entertaining to see the hero get very badly damaged and makes it at the last minute.

You mean like getting his hand chopped off and thrown down a trash chute only a couple days after getting his ass handed to him by a Wompa only to be saved by a nearby antenna?

Yeah except the storm guys shoot at concrete by their bad aim ending up breaking a guys foot.