  In the abelian Higgs model, among other situations, it has recently been
realized that the head-on scattering of $n$ solitons distributed symmetrically
around the point of scattering is by an angle $\pi/n$, independant of various
details of the scattering. In this note, it is first observed that this result
is in fact not entirely surprising: the above is one of only two possible
outcomes. Then, a generalization of an argument given by Ruback for the case of
two gauge theory vortices in the Bogomol'nyi limit is used to show that in the
geodesic approximation the above result follows from purely geometric
considerations.
