Westworld/Headscratchers

• How did Peter hide in plain sight from the robot, when it had heat vision? Also, the robots must have very advanced cooling systems for them to be cold.
  • A case of Science Marches On - most writers of the time figured robots would be "room temperature", not realizing that a lot of transistors would give off a lot of heat (less than a similar number of vacuum tubes, but still).
  • The impression I got was that the Gunslinger had the infra-red vision as a backup and only started using it when its "real" vision was damaged by the chemicals thrown in its face (it isn't shown using it before that point, and is only shown using it afterwards). The heat vision was probably designed to detect the warmest things around (i.e. the guests) and ignore everything else, so the torches in that room were significantly warmer that Peter, allowing him to remain undetected.
• Why does the park use real guns? They could have just put squibs in the robots or something, would have been a lot safer.
  • As part of the attraction to the theme parks, the guns are real to heighten the thrill of shooting someone, even if it's an artificial someone.
  • There's also a real reason to that. The guns use thermal sensors, hence why when John asked Peter to shoot him, it didn't work (what John exactly said, I forgot, but it had something to do with body temperature). Maybe when the park's control system went out of whack, the thermal sensors started being indiscriminate towards human and robot-kind.
• What about the swords? The guns can't harm humans but what's to stop a visitor from accidentally stabbing a guest with a sword?
  • It's not much of a defence, but you can't exclude swords from Themepark Middle Ages. The vacations were 100% about the experience, and the experience in Medieval World would be inauthentic without them.
  • Considering the lack of security, the technicians probably considered the danger of one guest "accidentally" stabbing another with a sword in Medieval World to be as likely as a guest "accidentally" bludgeoning another with a liquor bottle in Western World. Any object is potentially dangerous in the hands of a human being, but the main concern of the technicians was making sure they weren't potentially dangerous in the hands of a robot.
  • The swords could potentially have been very blunt as well, similar to the swords reenactors use, you can swing them with a lot of force and do only minor damage, therefore only the robots could be set to react to them.