Painfully Slow Projectile

thefinalcutter83: According to CNN.com: "An Iranian missile may be able to hit U.S. [in 10 years]."
SpaceInvader455: That's one slow fuckin missile.

— Bash.Org, circa 2005

Offensive projectiles are fast. Most bullets are too fast to be seen with the naked eye as any more than a momentary blur, at best. Missiles and rockets streak towards their targets at several times the speed of sound. Even arrows, sling stones, and thrown knives travel at considerable speeds, especially since that's how they damage the target. Conservation of momentum and conversion into kinetic energy and all that. Even if you failed physics, it's fairly easy to see the faster things travel, the harder they hit if brought to a sudden stop through contact with an intervening body, like yours.

But that's reality. This is video games. And it's awfully hard to dodge things that travel faster than you can react. So they don't. Bullets? Arrows? RPG's? Sidestep, duck, jump over 'em all!

And heck, if that's too much work, just shoot them out of the air! Knives are big and slow, aren't they? You and your awesome gun can just deflect them with bullets! Oh, heck, why not blow up those rockets and grenades with your weapon before they even reach you?

Much of this comes down to the fact that, invariably, these slow-moving projectiles also tend to be very powerful, with the iconic example being rockets and grenades in shooter games. If these projectiles traveled at "realistic" speeds, then they would be difficult or impossible to dodge safely, and the game would devolve into Rocket-Tag Gameplay. Making them slow allows the game to have a variety of attacks (some nigh-instantaneous but weak, some slow but powerful, some in the middle). This can be observed in games that do not use this trope, where any projectile to be strong and fast is likely to have other limitations (such as low ammo, a cumbersome reload, major-league splash damage, or being otherwise unwieldy in combat).

This is especially common in Light Gun Games, where all you have is a gun. Bullets will hit you, but missiles and grenades can be shot out of the air before they reach you. Knives, axes, and barrels can easily be deflected as they lazily swim through the air towards you at speeds that would make them trivially easy to dodge, and likely not all that harmful if they hit. Okay, maybe a giant crate could be easy to hit if one was sailing towards you, but you'd likely need a fairly large caliber weapon to deflect it. This is especially prevalent in Boss Fights, as they take a long time to kill, and can't be stopped with a single bullet like the average Mook.

Of course, certain Projectile Spells that travel at this speed are not without their merits; a 10-foot-wide energy sphere that travels very slowly can certainly be a nightmare to play around, as well as give its user control of the battlefield, especially if they can knock you back into it. The arena control aspect is also exploited by many zoner characters in Fighting Games: if your fireball attack takes three seconds to cross the screen, that's three seconds your opponent has spend focusing on the projectile and you, which can open them up to more attack angles. It helps if your projectiles move at different speeds so you can keep the opponent on their toes while they try to close the distance.

For certain Arcade Games, this sort of projectile also served a purpose for the business side of game management. Aside from an arcade machine being straight up broken, there was little more frustrating than waiting in line on a player who wasn't actually playing, and some games (typically platformers) would respond to this by spawning a slow, a One-Hit Kill projectile aimed at that player's character if it detected no input. This encourages the player to maintain their participation, and gives the game a means of resetting itself for the next challenger to keep the line moving and the quarters rolling in. For a few games, particularly Endless Games, dodging a homing instagib projectile as you play might even be an intended part of the challenge.

Related to Very High Velocity Rounds. Compare Projectile Spell and contrast Hitscan, which instantly determines whether the shot is a hit or miss. Commonly used in Bullet Hell games, in which the challenge is to dodge an absurd number of painfully slow projectiles. Not to be confused with Outrun the Fireball, though the explosions in that trope would have to be much slower than in real life too. Projectile Platforms usually require this trope.

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Examples:

Action-Adventure

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
  • The beams from Decayed Guardians or a Lynel's fire blasts can be avoided by just walking. Vah Medoh's turrets are pretty terrible too, as well as inaccurate. You can avoid them by just canceling your glide, and sometimes the turret misses when you're standing still.
  • The cryonis constructs fired by Vah Ruta and Waterblight Ganon are big and slow-moving. They make up for it with numbers.
  • Dark Beast Ganon has a very, very slow mouth beam that takes forever to reach you. IF it hits, it deals massive damage.
• Ōkami does this, but there's generally a reason for this — you have to deflect the projectiles with your Power Slash. That, and they aren't bullets, they're generally rocks or fruit being thrown at you. In any case, later projectiles are sped up considerably, with the idea that you need to use Mist to slow time down in order to be able to slash them — if you try to slash them without Mist, they either don't show up on the brush screen or they aren't affected by Mist.
• The slow but powerful apples in Spiritual Warfare.
• In ZZT, bullets travel at cycle one, which is a fancy way of saying "twice as fast as the player can move". They're destructible, too: when hit by another bullet, they annihilate each other. Stars are slow, but homing, indestructible, and change colors a lot.
• The NES action adventure/shoot 'em up hybrid The Guardian Legend gave one of these to the player in the form of the Fireball subweapon. Its main advantage was that it had a high shot cancellation modifier, meaning it would basically destroy any enemy projectile that it touched. Leveling it up to its maximum power would result in a fireball larger than the player, and it was pretty much required to beat some of the more aggravating bosses. Having sufficient walking speed to keep pace with it is nearly a Game-Breaker strategy.
• Mission Impossible (1990): Enemy bullets tend to be quite slow, and can be maneuvered around, or even outran by your fastest agent. The molotov cocktails thrown by some enemies travel about as fast as them. Fortunately, your bullets travel a lot faster, though still slow enough to be visible.

Action Game

• The old NES Ninja Gaiden games not only featured slow bullets but slow rockets that could be detonated with your sword before they hit you.
• The Xbox 360 game ''Earth Defense Force 2017' has a line of missile launchers called, fittingly, the Air Tortoise. Once fired, you can run ahead of the missile and soften up the target with a machine gun while you wait for it to kill the thing five or ten seconds later. The only advantage to it is that later versions are really powerful and relentless in tracking a target.
• The rockets in the NES G.I. Joe game can be punched, slashed, or shot before they hit you.
• Most projectiles in Silent Assault, even the boss's attacks.
• Twisted Metal 2 has Ricochet Bombs which are large black bombs fired from the front of your car. If you are using the turbo when you launch one, you immediately run into it and blow yourself up. The game also has machine gun bullets that take about a second to travel five car lengths.
• In Duck Game, one of the weapons is the Mooninite laser gun from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. As mentioned below under "Western Animation," it moves incredibly slowly, by far the game's slowest projectile. However, the projectiles are huge and you can fire as many of them as you want, so you can dart around shooting these things and turn the stage into a minefield.
• Rakion: Chaos Force:
  • The mage's special skill has the longest range out of all range skills, but is so slow and shows up on the radar that alert players can just sidestep once it's near to easily avoid it. They can also throw bombs mid-range but is still slow that there is enough time to dodge it.
  • The Golem's long-ranged attack shows them throwing a rock at the target at a certain distance. Fortunately, even the slowest ranged attack can be cast and have time to move out of the way before the rock hits the player's previous location.
• Bounty of One:
  • The Big Bertha item allows you to fire a giant missile projectile every 30 shots. It's huge, deals 3x the damage, and has infinite piercing, but moves slower than all your standard shots.
  • The Illithid enemies exploit this trope by firing energy balls that travel much slower than the standard mages', but at a faster rate than the mages. Individually, these are easy to avoid, but several Illithids firing at you can clog the screen with projectiles, giving the player far less room to dodge.

Beat Em Up

• The knives thrown at you in Kung Fu Master are slow and easy to jump or duck, especially if you are walking away from them.
• In Viewtiful Joe, using Slow-Mo against gun-toting enemies will cause their projectiles to move slow enough to be easily dodged or even redirected with a well-timed hit.

Fighting Game

• The Street Fighter series is the Trope Codifier for slow projectiles used for zoning.
  • In Street Fighter II, you could make your fireballs even slower by using lighter attack buttons, to the point that some fighters could walk faster than their Jab fireballs, allowing them to be used to pressure their opponents by physically following the attack.
  • In Street Fighter III, Sean's Hadou Burst is a Limit Break primarily because it doesn't do this.
  • Dhalsim's Yoga Catastrophe in Street Fighter IV. Along with its large size and Dhalsim's teleportation abilities, it is considered one of the best utility Ultra moves in the game.
  • Decapre's Ultra Combo I in Ultra IV, the Psycho Stream, is another such projectile (a ball of slow-moving Psycho Power that Decapre can rush in behind to keep her opponent locked down). Ed's V-Trigger in Street Fighter V, the Psycho Cannon, works similarly but with the added perk of being able to increase the projectile's speed by pressing forward when executing it. As Ed is a rushdown-focused fighter, having a tool that allows him to safely approach is of great benefit.
  • Laura in Street Fighter V has a slow projectile with about as much range as Dan's. But in this case, it's a mixup tool as Laura is a grappler.
• Dissidia Final Fantasy:
  • The Emperor's giant flare balls and bouncing mines. The slowest projectiles in the game, but if you accidentally dodge into one, then you become the fastest projectile in the game.
  • Kefka's projectiles are generally faster, but still slow enough and erratic enough that you will be using them to control the target's movement while you set up a better shot.
• Reptile's energy ball in Mortal Kombat. Its slow movement makes it easy to misjudge, and if opponents do get out the way, clever players can knock them right back into it.
• Marvel vs. Capcom:
  • The reasons why Sentinel's Sentinel Force assist is one of the best in the game is because it's slow and covers a good half of the screen at any one time.
  • Dormammu's Stalking Flare Hyper is a slow-moving fire orb that can be used to apply pressure to his opponents.
• Exploitable in Skullgirls if you're using Peacock. One of her attacks is a bomb that slowly walks around the ground, which can be quickly used to support teammates by forcing the enemy to keep track of the bomb and the enemy fighter at the same time.
• The bullets from Samurai Gunn act this way, so that with appropriate timing, they can be deflected back with a simple sword slash.
• In the Clayfighter series, Bonker the Clown can create balloon animals, which scurry along the ground and inflict damage on opponents on contact.
• A number of characters in Super Smash Bros. for the 3DS/Wii U have custom variants of their projectiles that move more slowly than their standard versions, but often pack a bigger punch. Samus in particular has both her Dense Charged Shot and Relentless Missile, which sacrifice speed for power and/or better homing capability.
• In Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Kain has a variation where his projectile moves in a sine wave trajectory, allowing it to stay in an area for much longer.
• In The King of Fighters XIII, Dark Ash's version of Thermidor stops in place after slowly moving forward.

First Person Shooter

• In the Marathon series, the only enemy weapons which fire too quickly to be dodged are the assault rifles the troopers use and the rockets that the juggernauts fire. Everything else thrown at you you can dodge, and are essentially required to in order to survive.
• Doom. The "light" weapons (on both sides) are hitscan, but rockets from the rocket launcher are fast, and bolts from the plasma gun are very fast, while imps' and cacodemons' fireballs move very slowly and the hell knight's and baron of hell's fireballs are still slower than a rocket (except on the Harder Than Hard "Nightmare!" difficulty, where all of the above enemy projectiles get a speed boost). This is compounded with the player moving very fast, allowing him to keep pace with a fired rocket and outrun nearly every other projectile in the game.
• In Heretic on the same engine, virtually everything being fired at you by any monster can be dodged. The golem's skull projectiles will home in on you, but it's easy enough to get them to impact walls or even other monsters.
• The plasma cannon overcharge shot in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is pretty slow, mostly because it kills everything within a thirty-foot radius of its point of impact.
• Halo:
  • The Needler. Its projectiles are homing... but this is of little use since they are so freaking slow you can outrun them by walking backward in the early games. From Halo 3 onward their speed was increased enough to make the Needler usable and sometimes even quite powerful, but they're still quite sluggish compared to other weapons.
  • The Fuel Rod Gun fires a large neon-green projectile that can be easily dodged at medium to long ranges.
  • Any and all plasma projectiles are pretty much this. High visibility and low velocity make them easy to dodge at any range beyond a couple of dozen meters (unless you're being pelted with enough to resemble Bullet Hell). Notably, this is canon: in-game cinematics and other media (like the live-action shorts) consistently portray them as that slow. Bungie gave official stats that indicated plasma weapons have projectile velocities in the range of 100 to 125 meters per second, about the speed of a crossbow bolt. Meanwhile, the Fuel Rod Gun has an official muzzle velocity of 70 m/s, and the Needler's is only 52 m/s, not much faster than the average professional pitcher throws a baseball.
  • The Rocket Launcher, while usually faster than the Fuel Rod Gun, is still unrealistically slow enough that you can dodge it with a jump without even looking due to the fact you can easily hear it coming about 1/2 a second before it hits.
• Guns in Borderlands have a hidden "velocity" stat, which determines how fast the projectiles move. Normally it's fast enough to not matter, but with sniper rifles and missile launchers, it becomes important.
  • In Borderlands 2, Torgue brand guns fire slow mini-rockets instead of bullets, making them poorly suited for long-range combat.
  • The "Sloth" sniper rifle, which you get in 2 by giving huge quantities of booze to Mordecai, has an extremely slow muzzle velocity (hence the name).
  • Zer0 and Maya can reduce the impact of slow bullets with their skills (Vel0city and Acceleration respectively). This, logically enough, increases damage.
• Most non-hitscan projectiles in Unreal are surprisingly slow, but the biggest offenders have to be the boulders. When a Titan throws a rock, it does not "fly" through the air as much as slowly float its way toward the player. Of course, this is a good thing, as a hit from one of those boulders is usually a one-hit kill.
  • Unreal Tournament had the alternate fire mode for the Shock Rifle fire a very slow explosive ball, which was trivial to dodge. It wasn't really intended to be used on its own, but could instead be detonated into a much larger and stronger explosion by shooting it with the hitscan-using primary fire mode.
• In Team Fortress 2, bullets travel instantaneously, even from across the map. Rockets, grenades, and arrows, however, will have a marked flight time, occasionally measurable in seconds. This is primarily a balancing issue, as the first two mentioned weapons have considerable splash damage (and the slow speed gives more fleet-footed class time to evade). Pyros have the option to play tennis with enemies and reflect the aforementioned projectiles back at the people who fired them.
• The pistol and nailgun in Quake IV. The shotgun, machinegun, and a few others are hitscan, although still dodgeable.
  • In the vehicle parts, some turrets fire homing missiles that are noticeably slower than your not-exceptionally-fast Hover Tank.
• The projectile of the H-AVR anti-tank rifle in Battlefield 2142 moves relatively slow compared to many other weapons in the game. Considering that anti-tank rifles destroy targets with a heavy flechette traveling at incredibly high velocities, it is kind of ridiculous to have to lead moving targets at less than 50 yards away. It is likely for a balancing reason, as being able to snipe tanks and aircraft would be a Game-Breaker.
• Superhot is played in Bullet Time; time only moves when you do. However, this applies to your own bullets as well as the ones being fired at you, so you need to lead your shots a fair distance or fire head-on at your opponents to land a hit.
• ULTRAKILL: The only Hitscan weapons are the pistol and the Electric and Malicious variants of the railcannon. Everything else moves much slower than you would expect for a shotgun blast or a rocket. This is actually to your advantage - if you're quick enough, you can get behind your own shot and punch it, radically increasing its speed and damage.

Hack And Slash

• In Diablo, projectiles only really become dangerous when there are loads of them or they home. The Amazons in Diablo 2 also have a spell that slows down any missile. The partial exception to this is the red lightning Diablo itself fires, which is very difficult to avoid completely. Unfortunately, the Amazon's arrows also qualify which is why she gets fancy multi-shot and machine-gunning skills to compensate.
  • Diablo 3 gives the Wizard and several enemies a similar spell which slows missiles inside a dome centred on the character. Since the enemies who use it often don't move around much, this tends to result in them suddenly being hit by a large number of missiles when the spell ends, rendering it largely pointless.
• Some smaller Unmanned Gear in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance shoot missiles so slow that you can outrun them or cut them in half using Blade Mode.
• Path of Exile:
  • Several boss fights such as Innocence use the Bullet Hell version, as well as having a number of enemies that simply fire slow-moving projectiles that are rarely dangerous.
  • The ball lightning spell moves very slowly because it shoots lightning at any enemy near it, so the slow speed effectively increases its longevity.
  • Frostbolts are slow because they can be used as the target for a couple of spells that can normally only be cast centered on the player; if they moved too fast they might get out of range before the player can utilize them. That said there's an easy way to boost their speed once the player's cast speed is good enough to avoid this being a problem.
  • Essence drain is slow but creates a damage over time effect that when combined with the contagion spell can be transferred to all nearby enemies, meaning that landing a single essence drain can potentially wipe out several packs of enemies.

Light Gun Game

• Any non-bullet projectiles in Area 51 and Maximum Force.
• The old shooting-gallery-style games Cheyenne and Crossbow had this; you'd use your gun to defend the protagonist from bad guys, either by shooting them first or (when you fail) shooting their projectiles.
• Confidential Mission, like many Light Gun games, features thrown grenades or blades that can be seen and shot out of the air. The bosses also use rocket launchers or other thrown projectiles in some variety.
• House of the Dead zombies don't just claw at you, they throw axes, barrels, and crates as well. Sure looks weird when they travel only slightly faster than the zombies beside them running at you. Some bosses also shoot fireballs that can be dispersed by... shooting them.
  • Typing of the Dead: OVERKILL only slows this down further to allow you to cancel what you're typing to deal with the thrown object...or just finish off typing because you've got a couple of seconds until it hits you.
• Lethal Enforcers 1 has the bosses use rocket launchers, grenade launchers, or blades. The second has cannons, barrels, and arrows, being in a wild west setting.
• Knives and grenades in Operation Wolf.
• Police 911 has bullets so slow you can easily follow their trajectories. The game's premise revolves around moving your body to dodge attacks, and if bullets moved at realistic speeds the game would be even more Nintendo Hard than it already is.
• In Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles not only you can shoot zombie puke, but also some pretty slow falling rubble and rockets.
• Virtua Cop series:
  • Virtua Cop, in all its incarnations, feature grenades, rockets, and knives that can be shot out of the air. The first boss of the second game even throws a van at you, which is deflected with six bullets.
  • Virtua Cop 3 features a Bullet Time ability where your Very High Velocity Rounds can be used to shoot enemy bullets out of the air.
• Zombie Raid, aside from the usual fireballs, mixes in wooden stakes, (Which travel far too slowly to be of any real threat) mummy wrappings, and thrown beakers.

Mecha Game

• Steel Battalion: Line of Contact feels like this with pretty much every weapon, especially smoothbore cannons, due to how easily they can be dodged with the slidestep pedal. The High Velocity Missile Launcher (HVM-la) is faster than usual, but can still be dodged easily at longer ranges, and while the railgun can't be dodged after firing due to ludicrous projectile speed, the lead-up time required to fire it allows skilled pilots to slidestep just before it fires so it misses wide. Homing missiles like the AS-mis and PZ-mis can be thwarted with chaff and a slidestep as well.
• Throughout the Armored Core series, there have been a variety of weapons that fall into this category. Most of them are missiles. Often, said slow projectile is the dreaded Large Missile, which actually tracks insanely well and hits like a truck. Often, the slow characteristic and heavy punch is employed specifically as a lethal distraction while dozens of other, faster firing weapons bombard the poor opponent who's occupied with dodging the slow but maneuverable missile and not paying attention to the slew of rifle rounds coming from the other direction. If the opponent happens to ignore the missile at their own peril, well, so much the better.
  • Armored Core: For Answer has the Arms Fort Spirit of Motherwill, which has a main cannon that can level a city block and bring your NEXT down in one or two direct hits. And unlike other Arms Forts (which have trouble consistently hitting each other, let alone a one-man mecha), Motherwill can hit accurately from several miles away even as your NEXT is moving at rocket-enhanced supersonic speeds. Your only advantage is that the projectile's travel time gives you about a half-second per shot to sidestep it completely if you're fast enough.
• The MechWarrior series had this with PPCs, until they were turned into a sort of railgun-ish type of bolt from the third game onward. Before that, they fired slow-moving balls of energy that were trivially easy to dodge at anything beyond spitting distance (and if you shot at someone under that distance, the splash damage would also hurt you). The PPC is obviously meant as a Difficult, but Awesome weapon to master as it's the highest damaging gun that doesn't require ammunition, but against any target that doesn't have the decency to stay still leading the target becomes an exercise in frustration.
  • This was especially jarring because the videogame - as the tabletop one from which it derived - tried to pass PPCs as long-range, which they were only good at against buildings and shut-down Mechs. The tendency of PPC bolts to not actually fire didn't improve things any.
  • Many other guns shot bolts that were slower than logic would have dictated. Laser bolts and autocannons, in particular, were much faster than PPC bolts, but they still required considerable leading at long range, especially against fast targets.

Platform Game

• Contra has enemies attack with bullets and missiles that travel at a shockingly slow pace across the screen. Their deadliness usually comes in waves, from the fact you're a One-Hit-Point Wonder, and from the fact that it's 2D so you can't just casually sidestep the shots. This is particularly WTF-inducing in Contra III: The Alien Wars, where on lower difficulties, an enemy behind you fires a bullet at you traveling slightly faster than the character. Since the animation of your character makes it look like he's merely jogging, dodging the bullet would simply be a matter of him picking up the pace and literally outrunning the bullet. ^note To really drive in the WTF factor, note that this means that if your character could sprint, you could jump out of the bullet's path, let it pass under you, and then, as it lazily floats away from you, run after it and kill yourself by hitting it from behind.
• Lampshaded in Metal Slug. There's an enemy that's basically a big cannon on wheels^note officially called the Nop-03 Sarubia; it has a large barrel, and when it readies to fire it looks like it'll blast half the screen away. It then does a huge boom, and — plops down a sloooowly rolling projectile that acts as a moving landmine. Unlike the other examples on this page, its main purpose is to force the player to jump over them, making them easy pickings for other enemies.
  • Played straight for anything else with a big gun. The huge tank on rails in the second episode requires the player to maneuver their own tank around the pattern of sssllooowwly flying blue cannonballs, and the battleship in the third can't hit the player with its main gun if they keep moving right because the arcing projectiles are too slow to catch up.
• Mega Man series:
  • Mega Man's projectiles and heck, almost any projectiles in the game are usually slow.
  • In Rockman 4 Minus ∞, the Minimum curse in Pharaoh Man's stage combines this with One Bullet at a Time. Needless to say, it gets really annoying.
  • Mega Man X2 has the charged-up Magnet Mine, which fires out... a slow-moving black hole-like projectile. That does continuous damage as long as it is in contact with an enemy. In this case, being slow is a good thing, since it will be making contact with an enemy for a longer time.
  • Becomes lethal in X5/X6 when Zero uses his slow One-Hit Kill Sword Beam and dashes past it to lunge at you, and you can't jump because his beam covers nearly the entire screen (minus a gap below, which is blocked by Zero himself when he advances).
  • Mega Man X: Corrupted: This trope is invoked by Strike. He fires out very slow but somewhat large projectiles that can't be dashed under, which reduces the space for X or Zero to avoid his Weaponized Teleportation attacks since they stay on the screen for a good bit of time.
• Super Mario Bros.: Every projectile not shot by a player. Every. Single. One. This gets to a truly ridiculous extent when the projectiles are LASERS.
  • A noteworthy mention is the Bullet Bills, as well as other cannonballs. Not only can you outrun them easily (assuming you have space to run) but you can even jump on them.
  • The Hammer Bros. and their variants are notable aversions. For example, the fireballs of a Fire Bro. move at the same speed as Mario's fireballs.
• In Pickory, it is possible to shoot downwards while in mid-air and then fall onto your own bullet. Naturally, this kills you.
• In I Wanna Be the Guy, one of the boss fights involves them launching a giant Bullet Bill (as a Shout-Out to the above Super Mario Bros) which moves slowly enough for you to either destroy it by shooting it numerous times or Double Jump over it.
• During the trench battle in the first Super Star Wars game, the only way to survive is to shoot down the proton torpedos (which appear to be made of light) with your lasers (which are apparently faster light).
• The Hoverbomb Gun in Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando fires a floating bomb that can be manually steered and detonated by the player. Unfortunately, it moves slower than Ratchet does, so while it packs a huge punch, the only time it's really useful is if you're facing a tough enemy that's limited to melee attacks and is on a different platform from Ratchet so they can't run up and smack him while the bomb slowly drifts toward them.
• In 20XX, a Mega Man homage, the Quint Laser has a huge projectile (and can be charged to have an even bigger one) but moves only slightly faster than you do. In the boss fight that's built around them, Kur keeps you on your toes by firing volleys of them that take up most of the screen. Despite being less than useful against nimble enemies, the Quint Laser is pretty nasty against most bosses, which tend not to move all that quickly, and Rollster Beta has a stage where he Turns Red and bounces around the boss arena, meaning he's really likely to crash into a QL projectile on his way. Outside of combat, the Quint Laser can also be charged up to knock over vending machines and get stuff out of them for free.
• Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest: In "Web Woods", one of the Kannon enemies fires a cannonball that moves very slowly. Since you are playing as Squitter in this level, and Squitter is unable to pick up and throw barrels, Squitter needs to follow the cannonball so it can break through a wall that an arrow made of bananas points towards to unlock a bonus stage, which you'll need to complete if you're going for the 102% ending.

Racing Games

• WipEout:
  • In Wipeout 2097, the Quake Disruptor weapon creates a wave on the track that hits all opponents in front of you. At least that's what happens on slower race classes - on Phantom class, your own ship is about as fast as the wave, so instead of the expected destruction you get a large wall of tarmac in front of your nose that blocks your vision. The game mechanics were ported almost exactly to Wipeout 64; one of the very few changes was a speed buff to the Quake wave.
  • While the Quake was fixed in later games, the Plasma Bolt has remained this in all of its appearances throughout the series to balance out its absurd damage output (and to make it that much more satisfying to land a hit — you have to be very precise with it).

Real-Time Strategy

• The Settlers: In Settlers II, a catapult may fire on an enemy building, only for that building to have been captured by the player by the time the boulder lands, resulting in loss of the building to friendly fire.
• Empire at War and its expansion. Although usually, the targets are too slow to get out of the way, the proton torpedoes are, while devastating, painfully slow, so ships such as a Corellian Corvette with Power to Engines can simply outrun them. The concussion missiles are better, but can still be outrun.
• Arrows and siege ammo in the first two Age of Empires games could be dodged by any moving unit, at almost any distance, because no unit in either game is able to lead their shots without research.
  • In the first game, one could easily see two groups of archers doing a little "dodge-dance" in-between shooting each other.
  • To make matters even worse, firing on a unit lets the target immediately see its attacker through the Fog of War - as soon as the shot is fired - so any AI-controlled unit is pretty much guaranteed to not only dodge a rock, but come and mess up the catapult behind it. You can actually achieve better results by aiming at the ground under a unit instead of targeting the unit directly, just so that they don't get the free warning.
  • The cannonballs fired by Cannon Galleons in II are a particularly notable example, which makes them Awesome, but Impractical against anything but shoreline buildings. Unless you're the Spanish, in which case they benefit from the shot leading research mentioned above.
  • Even shot-leading only makes them harder to dodge, not impossible. With carefully timed direction changes, it's possible to throw "smart" projectiles even further off the mark than dumb ones.
• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II: Retribution has the Light Of Calderis, a plasma cannon whose drawback is stated as "projectile moves slower". This turns out to be quite an understatement, but the blast is too devastating for you to care.
  • Similarly, any tier-four Global Powers. Whether it's artillery, orbital strikes, or a spell that's calling down demonic energies, the attacks come in so slowly and the units seem so aware of their approach, there's only three ways to ACTUALLY hit a target with them: cast it on a group that hasn't seen you yet, call it on a group pinned down by fire (which, given the way cover is spread around, drastically reduces the numbers you will hit), or call it down in the middle of a giant melee battle.
• In StarCraft 2, the Raven's Seeker Missile is so slow that it can be outrun by most ground units. Speaking of which, why are ground units often faster than SPACECRAFT?
• Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon has the Star Mortar and its heavier counterpart, the Nova Mortar. The Star Mortar bombs move incredibly slowly, to the point where they can take nearly a minute to land when fired at maximum range, however, they make up for this with their massive range, blast radius, and damage. The Nova Mortar fires a cluster of 5 Star Mortar bombs at once, but they move at the same incredibly slow velocity.

Role Playing Game

• Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas feature these. In FO3, every bullet is a rather slow tracer (which actually seems to function as hitscan with the bullet itself only having a graphical effect). Missiles travel much slower than they ought to as well, though usually not enough to dodge unless they're fired over a very long range, with the same applying to New Vegas. The various Plasma weapons in FO3 (and only some of them in Vegas) also suffer from very slow-moving projectiles as their primary disadvantage, as it makes them difficult to use over long ranges and against moving targets outside of VATS. The New Vegas plasma rifle even has a weapon mod that makes its projectiles go faster.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Morrowind: Projectile weapons travel slowly enough that dodging them is a real possibility. Projectile spells travel even slower, to the point where battling an enemy mage is best done by dodging his attacks until he runs out of Magicka before closing in to kill him. Smarter enemies will also dodge your projectiles in this fashion.
  • Oblivion inherits these problems. Arrows move so slowly without mods (bordering on Bullet Time) that a bowman firing from even medium distance poses no threat unless the player's engaged in combat with someone or something else.
  • Skyrim has retained the slow arrows and now they cut both ways as enemies are slightly Crosshair Aware (unless you're hidden...but sometimes even then) and will strafe to avoid your shots. Fortunately, enemies are still completely unable to adjust for movement. Slow projectile spells also remain for the most part, though "Shock" spells are now instant.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • The Devastator Heartless in Kingdom Hearts II launches a sluggish homing sphere of energy at the end of a volley of quick projectiles. Touching it will launch you a distance inversely proportional to its speed.
  • In Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], the Tatsu Steed's Bubble Mine attack is an even slower homing projectile, but causes high damage and stuns its victims to compensate. Thanks to Artificial Stupidity being in play, it becomes extremely effective when used by an ally, as your foes will readily charge into the projectiles, which you can use as a safe zone of sorts.
• Mass Effect series:
  • Although bullets in Mass Effect hit instantly, all the heavier weapons move slowly enough to easily sidestep on foot or jump over in the Mako.
  • Not so much in Mass Effect 2: heavier weapons are still slower than normal weapons, but they can now home in on you. The ones you use, however, often miss the memo on that homing thing. Of particular note is the M-920 Cain, which in theory fires a slug at 5 km/s, but actually moves quite slowly. Of course, to dodge the Cain, you reeeeeeally gotta dodge.
  • In Mass Effect 3, like Mass Effect 2, the missiles home in on you. However, you can now dodge roll right before they hit you (and so can enemies), and it's even possible to shoot rockets out of the air. This is easiest done with adrenaline rush, the time-slowing mod for the sniper rifle, or by pouring bullets in the general direction of the rocket with the mounted machine gun.
• Star Trek Online has various destructible torpedoes that move so slowly you often end up finishing the target off with your energy weapons before the torpedo gets there. Fortunately, they'll switch to another target if that happens.
  • Remarkably, a ship with good engines and/or a speed boost ability can actually outrun the very torpedoes it fired. Given that most of these slow, destructible projectiles are area effect weapons that can also damage the firer if they are too close to their target, this is somewhat annoying.
• Arrows and crossbow bolts in Dark Souls and Demon's Souls are quite slow, so one can generally dodge them in time. Not that this means they aren't a threat. It looks pretty weird since their actual flight paths are fairly accurate, but their slow speed requires them to essentially defy gravity to continue on them.
• Bullets in Bloodborne are about as fast as crossbow bolts in Souls, i.e. slower than a thrown baseball, allowing the player and enemy Hunters to side-step them pretty easily.
• Elden Ring has much faster projectiles than Souls or Bloodborne, but generally continues the trend of making them much slower than they would be in reality to allow the player and bosses to easily dodge them. The basic soldiers' crossbows for example have velocities of around 20-25 m/s, which while faster than in prior games is still only about half as fast they should be. More noticeable this time around as projectiles with transferable real-world velocities now include not only bows, crossbows, and ballistae, but also cannon balls, sound waves, lightning bolts, and meteorites impacting directly from space. Hilariously, low speed is a good thing for Homing Projectiles because the AI only dodges when they're launched, even if that's much too early to actual avoid getting hit.
• Soulbringer gets hit with this, oh so very hard. Arrows and bolts travel slow enough that, outside point-blank range, the barest lateral motion will dodge them. Add in the inability to aim manually, and ranged weapons are virtually useless unless the target is standing still or moving directly towards you. On the plus side, this all applies to the AI, as well.
• Various Mount & Blade game mods and derivatives with firearms have the bullets travel so slow that they are plainly visible (and fairly arrow-like in shape).
• In Tales of Xillia, Jude has the speedy but weak series staple projectile Demon Fist/Fang, but also has Sun Spark, an Energy Ball projectile unique to him that while powerful enough to blast its victims into the air moves so slowly that it's unlikely to connect with anything if it's not used at point-blank range or against something that's rushing towards him.

Shoot Em Up

• In Tiger Heli, tanks fire slow-moving shells that resemble quarters, which you can often dodge quickly, provided nothing is in your escape path. Your bullets, however, move as quickly as you can push the button.
• As mentioned above, this is a staple for most Bullet Hell games. A metric tonne of ordinance is put into the air at low speeds, restricting your movement to create flying mazes made of bullets. And while you're carefully navigating the curtain of oncoming fire, they'll throw a handful faster and aimed at your head. Yannow, to keep you on your toes.

Simulation Game

• The shots fired by some anticapital guns in the X-Universe series are so slow they can be outrun by a scoutship.
• Some guns in Vega Strike shoot these, e.g. Crippler and Disruptors, though many others fire bolts at several km/s. Rlaan "Mini Grav Thumper" takes the prize: it's so slow that only capships can't easily dodge it, but it's also so expensive and hideously powerful that there's no point to hurl it at small craft in the first place. It's also got very high dissipation and short range, thus to kill a capship, you as likely as not had to enter the ship's explosion range — and since in VS you cannot Outrun the Fireball, it's wise to accelerate away immediately, so... it's not too bad that it's outrageously slow, after all?
• As noted on the Real Life section below, torpedoes in the Silent Hunter Series take its time to reach their targets. The shells fired by the sub's deck gun are considerably faster but need seconds to reach their target.
• In Terminal Velocity (1995), it's possible to outrun with the afterburner the projectiles fired by your basic weapon. With a cheat that increases your afterburner speed, it's even possible to outrun lasers^note The third weapon type, that is described as a laser.
• TIE Fighter has space bombs, which are the heaviest and most powerful warheads in the game, but, like all other missile weapons, they can be shot down, and they move so slowly that they are nearly useless unless dropped at point-blank range on a target.
• Many of the heavy warheads in the FreeSpace games also move very slowly, like the Harbinger and Helios torpedoes, and are not difficult to shoot down, although dealing with many of them heading for a friendly capship at once can still be very hectic.

Stealth Based Game

• Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, especially with suppressed weapons.
  • And the first game.
  • In Hitman 2, the newly-added briefcase items moved noticeably slow when thrown, and due to how the game was programmed, it wasn't uncommon to see a briefcase curve around a corner to hit the target if they move out of the way while it was moving. A later patch made them faster, but turned it into an Ascended Meme with the ICA Executive Briefcase Mk II, which is even slower than before.

Survival Horror

• In Resident Evil 5, the SMG and other guns are hitscan, while the huge Gatling gun you can unlock is not. Actually, it's the same Gatling gun the powerful vulcan ganado uses. This also makes the thing nearly useless considering the gun's horrible recoil. Most of the time your bullets fly right past the enemies. The hitscan SMG with infinite ammo makes for a much better weapon.
  • Most projectiles the Majinni throw at you are pretty slow, by virtue of being arrows and lobbed objects. Slow enough to deflect with your knife.
• The very last phase of the boss fight against George, ergo the Raincoat Killer in the present day, in Deadly Premonition requires you to not merely dodge the infinite axes he throws but to shoot it out of the air. It is almost impossible not to dodge or hit said axes given just how slow they fly through the air.

Third Person Shooter

• The shots fired by enemies in Cabal and games that are inspired by it are slow enough to dodge and can also be destroyed. The problem is that there are a lot of them, especially in later stages. You'll die many times over without utilizing the Unnecessary Combat Roll-induced invincibility frame.
• Splatoon 2 has the Salmon Run exclusive Grizzco Slosher, which hurls a single glob of ink that travels well under your walking/swimming speed. Of course, this is a Necessary Drawback, since said projectile is capable of damaging otherwise invincible enemies.

Other

• Gratuitous Space Battles has two main types of weapons. Beams that hit instantly, and everything else. This leads to missiles that are so painfully slow that several volleys of fast-firing close range beam weapons can be fired between the time the missiles are launched and they hit. Furthermore, missile velocity is a known statistic with actual effects.
• Annoth the Firebreather Dragon in I of the Dragon has access to the Hound spell which works like this... fortunately though, it does cast good damage and it is also a Homing Projectile.
• Howitzer cannons and artillery tanks in World of Tanks tend to fire projectiles with noticeable travel time, which makes them best at close range where their slow shell speed is not a detriment. This is why artillery actually has a much higher skill ceiling than most players realize—a really good artillery player often has to guess where the target will be nearly ten seconds after they pull the trigger.
• In Star Trek Online, while many torpedoes will go quite fast and strike quite easily, certain torpedoes modified with the Torpedo: High Yield skill will become this as they will grow bigger, move slowly, and become an easily-taken out target.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, the Trial boss Byakko can fire rotating waves of energy bullets from the center of the room. These bullets move slowly enough that players can easily weave between them: the tricky part comes from doing this while also dodging his other attacks. Many of the Machine Lifeforms in the YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse crossover raids employ similar tactics.
• In Mutant Football League, the Terror Bay Mutineers' home field has cannons that fire shots across the length of the field from the endzones. The cannonball is just slow enough that an attentive ballcarrier can avoid it, and it's always fired directly in front of the ballcarrier, so juking left and right is necessary to avoid taking what will usually be more than half a player's health. Less intelligent players on the roster aren't as likely to notice them coming.

Non-Video Game Examples:

Advertising

• In one commercial for the Seattle Mariners baseball team, pitcher Jamie Moyer's changeup was treated as being so slow that the catcher could take off his mask and carry on an extended conversation with the batter before it reached home plate.

Anime and Manga

• Bleach: Don Kanonji has a spirit attack that launches a small and sluggish ball of light. Woe betide those that judge it by appearance, though; if it does hit, it packs quite a punch.
• A Certain Scientific Railgun had a minor, unnamed villain with an ability he called "Equal Speed". This causes anything he throws to never lose momentum until he stops concentrating on it, making it an Unblockable Attack. He demonstrates by throwing a marble at a steel door. The marble flies through the air very slowly, then plows through the door.
• In The Demon Girl Next Door, Yuko practices shooting things with Momo's Magic Wand, but can only manage to create a marble-sized ball of light that travels very slowly and turns around to attack her.
• Dragon Ball has the ki attacks move quite slowly, especially over long distances. Fanon claims that the viewer is actually watching the action through the incredibly heightened reflexes of the main characters. There is evidence for and against this theory.
  • Played for Laughs in one episode of Dragon Ball Super, where during a baseball match between Universes 6 and 7, Goku is told to hold back on his pitches after his first destroyed a good track of land and vaporized the ball. Goku takes this very literally as he tosses the ball with enough force to make it slowly move towards the current batter Champa, slow enough that a fly is comfortable enough to land on it. While Champa is able to hit it, his impatience causes him to make it a foul ball
  • In the Red Ribbon Army arc, there's a scene where Roshi is confronted by a mook with a Sten submachine gun, only to block all the bullets with his bare hands and drop them on the floor, freaking the mook out. The bullets are visibly very slow. Even assuming this scene is meant to be seen from Roshi's perspective (and ignoring how the mook is still moving at normal speed...), it still doesn't work because in both the manga and anime the mook has managed to fire over half a dozen shots from his gun specifically before the first bullet has made it to Roshi, who's standing quite close to him. With the gun having a 500-600 RPM rate of fire, that would indicate it took the first bullet more than a full second to cross about 5 meters. The manga makes it even more blatant as Roshi seems to be alerted to the fact that bullets are coming at him by the sound of the gun firing, even though the real-world equivalents of those bullets are faster than sound.
• Gundam's beam weapons are surprisingly easy to dodge for accelerated particle weapons in frictionless space—even the various Mecha-Mooks of the disparate series seem to have few problems in avoiding them, and the combination of High-Speed Missile Dodge and Ace Custom mobile suits means that named characters have an even easier time not getting shot down by beam weapons.
  • This is actually reversed in the Mobile Suit Gundam novel trilogy, where Char Aznable says that the only way to avoid getting struck with beam weaponry is to not be in its line of sight.
• One Piece: In the Ice Hunter Filler Arc, the Big Bad had the power to heat himself up and create balls of "heat", however, they were extremely slow, even when the villain tried to mimic Luffy's Gatling attack; the balls were as slow but they were many of them.
• Slayers: Sylphiel's version of Flare Arrow comes out like this due to her inexperience with attack spells. It's also pathetically weak and shaped like a carrot.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie contains a Lampshade Hanging: during the climactic battle, Eggman fires such a rocket, and it's shaped like a tortoise to boot. The other much faster rocket is shaped like a hare, and Eggman writes off the tortoise as a design failure. After the battle is over, Eggman gloats that he could make a better Metal Sonic, only for the tortoise, slow as ever, to come and steal the data disc necessary to remake Metal Sonic and explode.
• Zatch Bell! features Zoboron, an iguana-like demon whose two known spells conjure massive and extremely powerful spheres of energy, the second of which is a homing attack, which sloooowly inch their way towards their target. But the real threat he presented is that when he appeared, he was teamed up with another demon, Purio, who had spells designed to immobilize the opponent.

Films — Animation

• Downplayed in Turning Red. Mei throws a dodgeball fast enough to apparently break the sound barrier but it is still portrayed as taking a couple seconds to cross the length of a basketball court.

Films — Live-Action

• The first Iron Man movie has the titular character (who doesn't have superhuman reflexes) dodging a tank shell after it left the barrel, a feat duplicated by no one else in the setting, even ones who explicitly have super speed. Luckily for him, the round moves considerably slower than a thrown baseball, instead of borderline-to-outright hypersonic like a real one.
• The Last Airbender: The infamous "Pebble Dance", which involves seven Earthbenders going through a long and elaborate series of moves to levitate a rock roughly the size of a human head, which floats past the screen at two miles per hour.
• Runaway: The villain Gene Simmons has a pistol that shoots homing bullets. From the bullets point of view they travel only slightly faster than their running targets.

Literature

• Harry Potter: Avada Kedavra, the "Unstoppable Death Curse" is described as a projectile that can be stopped by solid objects; gravestones and statues, for example. Granted, one probably couldn't do Bullet Time or something if out in the open, but this is less than the inevitable doom it was cracked out to be.
• Septimus Heap: Despite Etheldredda being very close to Jenna, Alice Nettles manages to jump into the way of the bullet shoot by Etheldredda just in time.
• Angels and demons in Wars of the Realm have impossibly fast reaction times, so, to them, bullets (all projectiles, really) are slow and easy to dodge or parry. Drew Carter's Super-Reflexes and Super-Senses let him see and dodge bullets as well.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5: PPGs are "phased plasma guns" that shoot relatively slow-moving blobs. This was done for dramatic reasons (so characters can dodge blasts of hot plasma) and also for in-universe reasons: PPGs are implied to be used mainly aboard spacecraft and space stations, due to concerns about regular kinetic weapons ripping a hole in the outer hull and killing everyone, including the shooter, by too-long exposure to vacuum (not to mention the paperwork ). Supplementary material states that ground forces typically use projectile weapons because exposure to the vacuum of space is not a concern in an Earth-like planetary environment (though one could reasonably imagine that plasma weapons would be more useful to oxygen-breathers on a planet with an atmosphere they couldn't breathe, for similar reasons as why they are used in space).
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: The Terry Gilliam animation "Opera Singer being shot by a very slow cannon," which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. An opera singer sings while a cannon stationed a few feet away is shot at him. The cannonball takes about a minute to get to him.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: The Romulan plasma torpedo is an absolute beast of a weapon, but it can be outrun by a suitably nimble ship until it dissipates.
• The Flash (2014) is often guilty of making bullets extremely slow in the Bullet Time scenes to give the illusion of the protagonist running faster than he actually is. In this scene for example, the first shot fired still hasn't reached the target less than twenty feet away by the time Flash arrives, even though there's a more than two second gap between those events (in fact it's only covered about half the distance by then, putting the bullet's velocity at about a fit man's sprinting speed). Not only that but when the Flash's Bullet Time vision begins, the shooter visibly reacts with a head movement to him running by while the bullets appear frozen.

Tabletop Games

• The Fireball spell in the German tabletop RPG Midgard is this — a fiery sphere manifests next to the caster and requires concentration to both maintain and move, the latter at the rather sedate pace of one foot per second. Once it finally does go off it is one of the most damaging area effect spells available to adventurers in a game that generally likes to emphasize how its spellcasters aren't simply D&D-style "magic artillery", but it's essentially only good against already-cornered enemies in tight quarters and outright stationary targets.

Theatre

• The Complete History of America (abridged) makes use of the Rule of Funny by having an enormous prop bullet carried on a stick.

Web Original

• Dorkly Originals: Spoofed in ''Bowser Wants a Gun, where Bowser chews out and kneecaps one of his henchmen for making such shoddily designed guns, pointing out how Mario was able to do get past all of them due to this.
• The Frollo Show: Spoofed where Jafar fires one that is excessively slow even by regular Painfully Slow Projectile standards, but it doesn't even seem to cross Frollo's mind to avoid it.
• Red vs. Blue: Revelation: Done with a fist. The Meta is slowed down by his malfunctioning temporal distortion unit but keeps charging at Doc, who jokes about the Meta's attempt to very slowly kick his ass. Simmons notes that while the Meta is appearing to move slowly relative to them, he's still technically moving as fast as he was before, therefore his punch would have the same amount of force. Doc laughs... right up until the point the Meta taps him, which sends Doc flying into a wall.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: Spoofed (what else?) in one episode. The opponents, based on the Mooninites below, have to actually tell Yugi and Kaiba "Just give it a minute". Kaiba is so bored by this that he screws the rules and tells Obelisk (the attack's target) to attack them both to win.

Western Animation

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
  • Played for Laughs with the Mooninites' laser cannons, whose pixelated bullets move sluggishly, especially in the case of the bigger Quad Laser, but packed enough punch to vaporize Carl (it didn't kill him; it just teleported him to the Moon).
  • In a later episode, they use a variant called the Quad Glacier, which moves four times the speed of a glacier.
  • This and their "Jumping is useless" line actually made a bit more sense for the Mooninites' original origin, which was cut for time, of them being the spirit of hundreds of old video games buried underground - most of those games were entirely 2D, so a projectile too big to jump over would inevitably kill you no matter how slow it traveled.
• Bugs Bunny's "perplexing" slowball in "Baseball Bugs", which manages to singlehandedly strike out the side because no one can freaking hit it.
  "One, two, threestrikesyou'reout! One, two, threestrikesyou'reout! One, two, threestrikesyou'reout!"
• The Cleveland Show: When Raymond the Bear is made the baseball team's pitcher.
  "It's as if the ball itself is stoned."
• In the Droopy cartoon "Sheep Wrecked", one gag involves a very slow seeker missile.
• Invader Zim has "Walk for Your Lives" which is not technically a projectile; it's an explosion. It's caused when a time stasis prison malfunctions and explodes so that the explosion is under the time stasis and slowly expands. Resulting eventually in everyone panicking to escape but quickly realizing that they can leisurely walk away from it. Zim's plan to stop it was to undo the temporal flux, returning it to its normal speed, and thus the explosion would be over and done with instead of slowly threatening everyone. Of all people, it was GIR who pointed out the flawed logic.
  GIR: But if the big 'splodey goes fast, won't it be baaaad?
  • Similarly, several aliens are shown firing energy-based projectiles, none of which are the virtually-instant-hit devices you would expect from short-range laser and plasma blasts.
• Sonic Boom: In the episode "New Year's Retribution", Eggman fires a laser that, due to him slowing time for everyone and everything around him (including Sonic, whose "slow motion" is everyone else's normal speed), travels slowly enough for Sonic to casually sidestep it.
• Woody Woodpecker:
  • In "Misguided Missile", a villain is chased by a guide missile originally meant for Woody but is now, thanks to Woody's tampering, aimed at him. Said missile crawls through the air at a snail's pace, alerting its victim with its Terrible Ticking.
  • In "The Screwball", Woody throws an incredibly slow baseball that none of the players can hit.

Real Life

• To a degree: Certain Roman-era barbarian tribes worked up a technique where their soldiers, armed with a javelin, a side-weapon such as a sword, and practically no armor, would throw the javelin and run forward while it was in flight so that both of them would reach the enemy at close to the same time. Not so much "painfully slow projectile" as "painfully fast soldier", though.
• Until the advent of gunpowder, a man on foot had a decent chance of dodging artillery projectiles by the virtue of the fact that the projectiles were not particularly fast and rather large. As long as he wasn't hindered by a tight-packed formation.
  • Which is why archers would train to synchronize their shots, the strategy being to cover an area with arrows at the same time rather than trying to pick off individual targets.
• Paintball. For safety reasons, markers are capped at a muzzle velocity of three hundred feet per second. Slow enough that it's possible (albeit difficult and does require good reflexes or long distance) to hear someone firing at you, see the paintball coming, and dive for cover.
• Nerf darts are fairly speedy at first, but not a patch on paintballs, and being foam they slow down a lot at range, making it not that difficult to dodge them. Discs and larger missiles tend to glide at even slower speeds, and can therefore be avoided very easily.
• Battleship shells are only painfully slow with respect to their range, which leads to an interesting scenario: a battleship firing at extreme range cannot hit a destroyer except through pure luck, as the destroyer moves several times its own length in the time it takes the shells to arrive, giving it plenty of options for dodging. ^note However, if the destroyer were to move close enough to engage the battleship with its main guns, this problem would no longer apply.
• Early guided missiles, particularly of the anti-armor type, flew relatively slowly so that they could be seen and controlled manually and could take upwards of 15-20 seconds to reach a target. These could easily be countered by the enemy looking for dust and/or smoke kicked up by a missile and shooting at the launch position to break the operator's concentration. In fact, this was the standard response for Americans in Vietnam (and Israelis in the Yom Kippur war) to being fired at by an AT3 Sagger (9K11 Malyutka for Russians). In its earlier version it took a lot of skill and concentration to get a hit, which is very hard when you have tank shells exploding near you- even 1 second of distraction can mean a miss. However, since then, new aiming systems have been created (look up SACLOS: Semi-Automatic-Command-to-Line-Of-Sight) in which the launcher does the hard work and the operator can get a hit just by keeping the crosshairs on the target (not needing to actively control the missile).
• Naval torpedoes are quite slow and a shallow-running torpedo can easily be seen. Rocket-powered supercavitating torpedoes create a drag-reducing air bubble and can travel 2-4 times faster than traditional units... at the cost of being short-ranged, not very maneuverable and extremely noisy. Only the Russians have ever managed to field a working example so far.
  • Early models were so slow that the torpedo boats had to be careful not to overtake their torpedoes after launching them.
• In live-action roleplaying games, boffer arrows (i.e., "safe" arrows) are slow enough to be dodged or knocked out of the air by someone with quick reflexes.
  • Of course, many systems (such as Belegarth) have explicit rules against hitting arrows in mid-air, as high-velocity splinters of fiberglass can cause quite serious damage.
  • In the Russian live-action roleplaying system (where the arrows are the only heavily bofferized weapons) there are people who train themselves to catch those arrows in mid-flight.
• Firing rounds from a gun with a very short barrel, such as the ever-popular .38 snub nose, can result in the bullet moving slowly enough to be easily visible in flight to the naked eye (this is very slow by ballistic standards). This doesn't make trying to dodge them a good idea, of course.
• Anyone who's fired an M79 grenade launcher will witness the same effect. Trying to dodge these is an even worse idea.
• Similarly with paintballs, airsoft pellets rarely go above around 300 ft (91 m)/sec. However, due to the projectile being really light, they lose velocity quickly to the point where the pellets are easily seen and can be dodged at not that far of a range.

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