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At one point during the movie Avengers: Age Of Ultron Tony Stark exits his Iron Man armor, putting it into sentry mode, and explores the next room suitless. The thermal scan performed immediately prior suggests the suit can sense humans (or the absence of them) in the adjoining room Tony goes into. Otherwise I expect Tony would have continued to wear the suit to go into the next room if he wasn't already certain of its lack of danger.

Yet the suit doesn't warn Tony or attempt to intercept two people who approach him from behind.

Is the suit unable to detect these people? Is the sentry mode faulty, or is it not as capable of detecting people as it appeared earlier?

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    As I recall, didn't he go down some stairs, through a hall, and deep into a large storeroom? I just assumed that, in overconfident Stark fashion, his curiosity led him outside the range of his suit's protection.
    – Nerrolken
    Commented Jun 9, 2015 at 17:56
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    right, taking off your super suit to go wandering an active battle zone is always a good idea for something bad to happen to you. as seen in this scene from starship troopers, youtube.com/watch?v=yLopbgNVbAI semi-NSFW
    – Himarm
    Commented Jun 9, 2015 at 18:03
  • He did have to request an infrared scan from JARVIS so it could be that there are both passive scanners (just visual probably) as well as an active scan suite (IR, radar, sonar maybe?) Which sort of stands to reason as Tony still has to turn his head to look at things outside his cone of visibility so he probably doesn't have full 360 field of visibility (without adjusting his photo receptors or something like that)
    – Monty129
    Commented Jun 9, 2015 at 20:26
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    cos magic beats technology every time ....
    – John McNamara
    Commented Jun 9, 2015 at 20:41
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    They shouldn't have been able to but as the Scarlet Witch's power has some aspects of probability manipulation to it even the most improbable reason you could come up with might be true.
    – 22nd Century Fza
    Commented Jun 10, 2015 at 5:08

2 Answers 2

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  1. The suit is quite far from Tony. Tony went down to the "secret" lab, whilst the suit was probably about a floor above him or so. That, plus stone walls.

  2. Just a logical thought: How would the Sentry detect if Tony was in danger? It probably tracked any changes in his vital signs, or any unexpected movements of Tony's body(as in being thrown by someone or so). None of these happen.

This leads me to believe that the Sentry was looking out for any physical attacks, but failed to track a psychic one.

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  • If the sentry couldn't detect people in the room with Tony, then it wouldn't be able to save Tony from, for instance, a gunman inside the room as well. Even if Tony's body was outfitted with sensors for physical status, a clean headshot from someone guarding that room would have taken him out completely. It just doesn't make sense - Tony takes risks, sure, but they're usually calculated risks. Either the suit doesn't have visibility into that room, and Tony entered it unprotected without knowing whether it was clear or not, or the suit does have visibility into the room and simply failed.
    – Adam Davis
    Commented Jun 11, 2015 at 12:37
  • @AdamDavis - Tony was relatively careless because he had just thermal-scanned the entire premises. Yeah, that was a stupid move on Tony's part, but he did that. And I feel like the suit didn't have visibility rather than it failing.
    – Stark07
    Commented Jun 11, 2015 at 13:02
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Although we don't see the way that Wanda and Pietro enter the large room where Tony is, it is a possible, maybe even probable, that there were multiple entrances into the giant room where Tony finds Loki's sceptre. It's worth bearing in mind that Tony's path was through a secret passage - I doubt that a large storage room such as the one that Tony finds himself in would only be accessible through one small, secret passage-way, especially considering the size of some of the things in it - such as the Chitauri Leviathan.

Additionally, it is also with remembering that Wanda's powers are ambiguous to say the least in Avengers: Age of Ultron - it could be that she was capable of tricking the initial scan, or hiding from the suit when she entered later, even if there was only one passage into that room - which we have already established is unlikely.

In short, there are multiple ways in which the Iron Man suits sentry mode could have been tricked or misled, which when combined with the likliehood of additional passages into the storage room mean that it isn't unrealistic for Wanda to be able to take Tony by surprise.

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  • So you are saying that the iron man suit had no infrared or other visibility into the room Tony entered, and Tony intentionally left himself unprotected by leaving the area the sentry could cover?
    – Adam Davis
    Commented Jun 10, 2015 at 0:50
  • @AdamDavis I'm saying that Tony thought he was safe, and that their are a large amount of ways that he could have been mistaken, regardless of his suits Sentry Mode.
    – Dr R Dizzle
    Commented Jun 10, 2015 at 8:02
  • @AdamDavis Additionally, we do not know what Sentry Mode is programmed to do or how it works. As far as I can remember (and I may be wrong), his suit was left facing away from the passage, implying it would be monitoring the room Tony just left, rather than the one he was set to enter.
    – Dr R Dizzle
    Commented Jun 10, 2015 at 8:22

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