Far as i know that's normal. Mine does the same thing

Yes..this is normal.

Based on the number of topics, Hot Shot is one of the most problematic em pins.

It's basically your standard four player Gottlieb until you start dealing with the bonus, and that is really out of the ordinary. Because it's not a usual add bonus then count down at the drain, it's different. There's no bonus ladder where it just counts down from wherever to zero. It will count bonus using one circuit then change to another circuit when it skips over balls that have not been lit, then return to the other circuit to resume scoring the bonus. I've never seen anything quite like it. It's interesting to watch and listen to in action, but troubleshooting it is not necessarily the easiest thing in the world.

If I recall correctly Hot Shot was Gottliebs first attempt at a "search" bonus and even then it wasn't used very often compared to the bonus ladder. It seems they got it right with later games like target alpha though I can't vouch for reliability.

After spending the later part of 3 weeks trying to fix the bonus on mine though, I gotta say it blows my mind how those engineers were able to do so much with such simple technology.

There was a lot of genius on how they were able to make these games with basically just switches and relays and motors and steppers. Pretty damned amazing.

I've played it but don't remember, Sure Shot was configured like this, did it use the same method of counting the bonus?

And the bonus for HS is explained fairly well by MarkG in this post:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/hot-shot-bonus-accuracy-#post-4454410

Never owned one but based on videos and pictures of the under playfield on IPDB, it uses a similar method to the one used in target alpha. As far as I've seen the method used to count the bonus on HS was only used on HS.

I think Jack in the Box/Jumping Jack would have been the first instance for them to use scanned bonus. Being based on 10 targets and only requiring 2 motor cycles, it might have been less problematic than Hot/Big Shot. But they can be a bugger too. Then, a similar system appears on High Hand. Then later on Hot/Big Shot.

Jumping Jack and JITB have their bonus collect issues just like Hot Shot. When you see the production numbers (8300/4975 & 9000/2900) you can see how outrageously popular those titles had to have been and therefore saw a whole lot of use during their early years.

Quick/Fast Draw can be a bit problematic for standard bonus ladder collect because they had to juice 6 pulses out of a motor cycle to produce the high speed count down of 3X bonus on last ball (potential 45,000 in 3 motor cycles).

Hot Shot, Jack in the Box, and High Hand are three of my favorite EMs specifically because of how uniquely sounding they are in scanning, stopping, scoring or even changing back and forth between different score values (100 vs 1000 on High Hand). Music to my ears!

One of their bigger timing nightmares is the Man on Base system used on Grand Slam.

There have been their fair share of bonus collect postings for Target Alpha and Solar City. A similar issue is Bonus Collect on High Score/300 and Soccer and Super Soccer with the physical balls being the bonus ladder. They do not always sit, roll or remain stationary which can cause problems too.

We read that explanation and followed it, along with our own knowledge and reading of the schematic. Still a PITA.

Well, it is certainly interesting to watch/listen to it function, but when it is malfunctioning, the music is pretty much a sour note...

We'd be standing there counting the bonus off as it did its thing, and it should advance once and you could hear it skipping when it shouldn't have. Those short frame Gottlieb relays are a nightmare, especially when you have a lot of switches on them, and even more so when there are m/b switches involved. The tolerances for adjustment are just so minute.

My game is scoring accurately, but sometimes is takes too long to sense the next target. I indicated this thread as fixed, but I'm going to try some of these other suggestions to see if I can get it working perfectly.

I once owned a "Hot Shot" that was a re-import, and was fitted with a 50HZ motor. While I never noticed any problems tallying the bonus, I did notice that the score reels would sometimes shortchange the 50/500 scores because of the faster pulses from the motor cam switch. It was one of my earliest pin acquisitions, and I never thought to look into it. Sold it long ago.