I was over at F and E's house discussing games. It's a good place to do that. There are tomes and magazines piled high, some with tablecloths or faded velvet pillows on top being used for tables or chairs. There are old globes, candles, architects tools, and tools that were less readily identifiable. Cabinets lined the wall where a TV and stereo would normally be. It looked like a cross between Harry Potter and Junkyard wars.

On top of one pile there were cards from some Magic the Gathering-like card game and I found myself reading through the cards till I came across one that seemed pretty powerful. I think it said it would target everything that targeted any of your creatures or artifacts. It got us talking about targeting in general. Computer game and RPG spells have to target things too, and it must be a pretty big part of the spell internals. In fact nearly everything useful has to have some targeting interface. Something that can target only things that are targeting you is actually pretty sophisticated. Almost like magic. Almost like what Arthur C. Clark almost said: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from pulling something out of your ass.

Wernher Von Braun worked on the V2 rockets and had basic computer technology available. The V2 was guided by a gyroscope, a fuel gauge, and a simple computer. It wasn't very accurate, but was still the best there was and served to terrorize the English. Changes in the gyroscope caused the steering tabs on the fins to adjust to bring the rocket back on course. The fuel gauge told the rockets computer to begin its decent when it ran out of fuel. Not a lot of technology there, but it worked nominally. It was an early targeting system.

Now we have rockets that can hit a GPS coordinate down to the meter if we feel like slumming with old technology. Better than that we can either lock on to an image and follow it as it changes aspect or environmental, appearing almost completely different than when a launch began. Or we can remotely guide the rocket from the comfort of a lazyboy somewhere nearby. Well, it could be a lazyboy if the Navy or whoever would put one in the control room like decent folks.

However, none of that really targets enemies; it just targets whatever you tell it is an enemy. The technology to target subjectively, rather than objectively is extremely difficult if not impossible. But then our current targeting technology must have seemed impossible once. Did Wernher Von Braun imagine targeting software that could generate a 3d image of something and then rotate the image to decide whether it was the designated target merely facing another direction?

Someday in the future your fingers will hover momentarily over the targeting controls and the HUD will display a description that reads like a magic card.