Mobile Suits

[Q99]

In terms of assaulting the breach, take a nuke and strap it to a dead kaiju. Drop it through the hole and goodbye breach. Clear a path with nuclear depth charges fired in sequence, backed up by large conventional charges so as to not destroy the kaiju trojan horse.

The breach is only open around when kaiju are coming through in multi-events, though. You can have multiple kaiju circling at a distance- or going right after your kaiju corpse- and then, even if you multi-nuke them (which itself has issues, namely the first nuke will clear a very wide area of more nukes, hits will actually be quite spread out by necessity), have to deal with another kaiju come out right after.

Also, consider the depth is in miles. Sinking depth charges down that far can take half an hour, and nukes are pretty fragile to either each other or being hit, and kaiju swim faster than our fastest torpedoes. Rushing in and taking out the nukes is a possibility, swimming away for just a few seconds gets to livable range, etc..

Now, could it work? Sure, but I wouldn't say it's an easier more reliable solution, not if you have inexplicably powerful robots who can show active initiative against obstacles that occur.

I also similarly criticize films like Iron Man for exactly the problem you mention. It worked fine in the first film, but by the time of the second Avengers it starts to seem more problematic.

Well, like I indicating, my feeling is I just accept it as genre.

[Jub]

The breach is only open around when kaiju are coming through in multi-events, though. You can have multiple kaiju circling at a distance- or going right after your kaiju corpse- and then, even if you multi-nuke them (which itself has issues, namely the first nuke will clear a very wide area of more nukes, hits will actually be quite spread out by necessity), have to deal with another kaiju come out right after.

Also, consider the depth is in miles. Sinking depth charges down that far can take half an hour, and nukes are pretty fragile to either each other or being hit, and kaiju swim faster than our fastest torpedoes. Rushing in and taking out the nukes is a possibility, swimming away for just a few seconds gets to livable range, etc..

Now, could it work? Sure, but I wouldn't say it's an easier more reliable solution, not if you have inexplicably powerful robots who can show active initiative against obstacles that occur.

None of your points stop you from lining the area around the rifts with high yield nuclear mines and replacing them between events. Nor does it stop them from covering the breech with concrete, or the magic materials they build Jaegers with, in a way that doesn't leave the Kaiju with enough leverage to break through it. If you combine these two ideas with an offshore naval task force of ships, submarines, and planes armed with very high impact kinetic weapons (Mach 10+ missiles), railguns, and nuclear weapons. The task force stops the Kaiju at the source thus preventing any need to drag a monster from a city.

[Purple]

Also, atomic warheads on torpedoes are a thing. So instead of floating a bomb down you can just dive down with a sub and fire one off.

[Q99]

Military subs can't go that deep, or torpedoes. Or anything military. We're talking miles down here, it'd take entirely brand new gear made for environments that would crunch current stuff if it thought about too hard.

None of your points stop you from lining the area around the rifts with high yield nuclear mines and replacing them between events.

I'll point out that still leave the 'one clears the rest of the mines,' so if one fails to kill you have a wounded but living kaiju with a clear path, will never close the rift, and automatically fails as soon as there's a multi-event, or just when intervals went down. I mean, it may sound more sensible at first, but it's one that with our meta knowledge we know will not work.

Plus it is building platforms at a fantastic depth, having to keep it functioning and with properly calibrated sensors for sometimes months in a place with no outside maintenance is impressive. It's not exactly a cheap alternative.

Nor does it stop them from covering the breech with concrete, or the magic materials they build Jaegers with, in a way that doesn't leave the Kaiju with enough leverage to break through it.

I don't think that's possible for a number of reasons. When the breach isn't active, there's nothing there, you're making it in open water deep in a trench. When it is active, it's visibly fairly high energy, so that could be a problem right there, and... how would one prevent Kaiju from getting leverage when they have all the space on the other side to work with? Nothing from stopping it from just ramming up- with, say, a knife head, that's a lot of piercing. And the kaiju, again, are designed, so they'll be adjusted til they're good at it.

And does run into the difficulty of building down there.

It's basically the wall plan, altered to reduce the scale, increase the sectional difficulty, but still leaves problems when it's breached. When, not if, and likely a very short when at that.

If you combine these two ideas with an offshore naval task force of ships, submarines, and planes armed with very high impact kinetic weapons (Mach 10+ missiles), railguns, and nuclear weapons. The task force stops the Kaiju at the source thus preventing any need to drag a monster from a city.

Oh, ships and subs are nigh useless. Underwater, Kaiju swim faster than super cavicating torpedoes. One kaiju could kill a carrier group without being touched. You're likely talking tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in a single kaiju vs navy engagement, with a live kaiju at the end. Even the Jaegers kinda sucked at them underwater- that's why they waited for the 'miracle mile,' the area where it was shallow enough to turn into a walking/running engagement rather than a swimming one.


Mach 10+ missiles and railguns and nukes? That works... once it surfaces and not protected by hundreds of feet of water, which it only does when it reaches shore, at which point it's at or right next to a city most of the time, since it can just barrel to the target at full speed. Which means with nukes, you're hitting your own city, which is what they did pre-jaegers. Missiles and railguns (assuming non-ship-mounted)? Those aren't getting a fast kill, meaning it'll start using your city as cover and rampaging.

You will see adaptation against missiles and railguns, it's an intelligent foe designing weapons against you, after all.



If a plot does give you magically effective mecha, it can honestly be a better option. Because, well, it's operating along mecha rules which bypass a lot of engineering limitations, and it's against an enemy literally designed to make this one option as feasible as possible.


And for all people tisk it, a lot of the 'smart alternatives' presented do have unworkable flaws, the biggest being 'never closing the breach.' Because any of these fail once thousands of kaiju start pouring out.

[Adam Reynolds]

Also, atomic warheads on torpedoes are a thing. So instead of floating a bomb down you can just dive down with a sub and fire one off.

That would actually not be all that efficient. The problem is that the rift is too deep for submarines to easily reach and so it would actually take awhile for a torpedo to make it down that far. It would be more effective to use moored mines around the rift.

On the point about the cleanup process, wasn't this because they leaked ammonia? Sorry to again burst the bubble, but ammonia is actually quite clean burning. Just use incendiary projectiles.

[Batman]

No current day technology torpedo could go that deep (the Alfa's alleged 900m diving depth was a challenge). Mines probably could be build to survive that far down, but how do you get them there and moor them?

[Jub]

Military subs can't go that deep, or torpedoes. Or anything military. We're talking miles down here, it'd take entirely brand new gear made for environments that would crunch current stuff if it thought about too hard.

You mean new stuff like the Jaegers that humanity managed to build? The materials they were made of survived at those depths even without being specifically designed to do so. How many submarines do you think one could make with the materials and man hours put into each giant mech?

I'll point out that still leave the 'one clears the rest of the mines,' so if one fails to kill you have a wounded but living kaiju with a clear path, will never close the rift, and automatically fails as soon as there's a multi-event, or just when intervals went down. I mean, it may sound more sensible at first, but it's one that with our meta knowledge we know will not work.

This ignores the fact that you'd have submarines on station that could swoop in after each event and replace the mines. It also ignores the fact that none of the options suggested would be run alone. You'd have mines, a breech plug, and a fleet on station to combat these foes.

Plus it is building platforms at a fantastic depth, having to keep it functioning and with properly calibrated sensors for sometimes months in a place with no outside maintenance is impressive. It's not exactly a cheap alternative.

So we've never poured cement at depth before to seal things like well breeches? Are you claiming that we couldn't use drones operated by the fleet over the site to maintain the equipment and mines?

You can accept that humanity can build giant robots that interface with your mind, but you refuse to see any advances in other less fantastic technologies in response to this level of need.

I don't think that's possible for a number of reasons. When the breach isn't active, there's nothing there, you're making it in open water deep in a trench. When it is active, it's visibly fairly high energy, so that could be a problem right there, and... how would one prevent Kaiju from getting leverage when they have all the space on the other side to work with? Nothing from stopping it from just ramming up- with, say, a knife head, that's a lot of piercing. And the kaiju, again, are designed, so they'll be adjusted til they're good at it.

And does run into the difficulty of building down there.

It's basically the wall plan, altered to reduce the scale, increase the sectional difficulty, but still leaves problems when it's breached. When, not if, and likely a very short when at that.

You've once again ignored that we've already built slabs at depth and used them to cap wells. For the material cost of building a small section of the wall they tried one could easily fill the entire trench with concrete, rebar, and other tough materials to whatever depth you please.

You have no proof that the rift has an effect on materials placed above it.

As for working from the other side they can only get to a small section of the overall breach, and this forces the breech to stay open longer enabling counter attack and longer warning periods. This means that you may be able to hold off on detonating your nuclear mines until you know that all threats are accounted for.

Oh, ships and subs are nigh useless. Underwater, Kaiju swim faster than super cavicating torpedoes. One kaiju could kill a carrier group without being touched. You're likely talking tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in a single kaiju vs navy engagement, with a live kaiju at the end. Even the Jaegers kinda sucked at them underwater- that's why they waited for the 'miracle mile,' the area where it was shallow enough to turn into a walking/running engagement rather than a swimming one.

Ignoring that we've never bothered trying to make torpedos designed to catch these sorts of threats before... You could sacrifice stealth, increase size, change propellants in order to match the Kaiju. If humanity can build a multistory tall mech, I think we can make our fish swim a little faster.

The same goes for ships, we could use the same power sources that can move a Jaeger to allow for faster ships and submarines.

Mach 10+ missiles and railguns and nukes? That works... once it surfaces and not protected by hundreds of feet of water, which it only does when it reaches shore, at which point it's at or right next to a city most of the time, since it can just barrel to the target at full speed. Which means with nukes, you're hitting your own city, which is what they did pre-jaegers. Missiles and railguns (assuming non-ship-mounted)? Those aren't getting a fast kill, meaning it'll start using your city as cover and rampaging.

You will see adaptation against missiles and railguns, it's an intelligent foe designing weapons against you, after all.

Assuming perfect adaptation is a no limits fallacy. In fact, we never see them face anything with this kind of energy in the movies so claiming that these methods won't be a fast kill is bullshit. We simply don't have any evidence either way.

With nukes, the blast radius needn't be that high if the missile itself is going fast enough to penetrate the Kaiju before detonation. Something like Sprint designed for maximum penetration and delayed detonation should work wonders against the types of threats we saw in the movies. And given the acceleration the Kaiju won't be able to bat them away like they manage with far slower projectiles.

The onus is on you to show that Kaiju can adapt to Mach 10+ penetrators with nuclear payloads.

If a plot does give you magically effective mecha, it can honestly be a better option. Because, well, it's operating along mecha rules which bypass a lot of engineering limitations, and it's against an enemy literally designed to make this one option as feasible as possible.

Ignoring the fact that those same advances and handwaved limitations could be applied to other technologies that are more efficient and likely more effective.

And for all people tisk it, a lot of the 'smart alternatives' presented do have unworkable flaws, the biggest being 'never closing the breach.' Because any of these fail once thousands of kaiju start pouring out.

Nobody thought that closing the breach was even possible at the start of the movie, so these plans not specifically taking that into account only serve to make them believable. Even then there's nothing stopping you from taking a crippled Kaiju and running the same plan with specialized submarines.

The close the breach plan also ignores the fact that new breaches could be opened.

----------

No current day technology torpedo could go that deep (the Alfa's alleged 900m diving depth was a challenge). Mines probably could be build to survive that far down, but how do you get them there and moor them?

The Jaegers made it down that far and were able to keep up with the Kaiju so there's no reason to think that we couldn't use the same materials, and scaled down versions of the power sources in Torps and Submarines.

[Q99]

You mean new stuff like the Jaegers that humanity managed to build? The materials they were made of survived at those depths even without being specifically designed to do so. How many submarines do you think one could make with the materials and man hours put into each giant mech?

Not many, subs are huge and require major power plants too, and require much bigger crews, and the next non-super material sub in the works may reach the double-digit billion range. And it's still fighting Kaiju in their element- note how the first thing that happened to Gipsy in the fight was, wham, arm-gone. Except with a sub, that's wham, hull breach.

Striker wasn't able to avoid melee with underwater kaiju either, it just managed to get it's blades in place.

This ignores the fact that you'd have submarines on station that could swoop in after each event and replace the mines. It also ignores the fact that none of the options suggested would be run alone. You'd have mines, a breech plug, and a fleet on station to combat these foes.

'Swoop in' from outside the blast radius of a nuclear explosion is probably something on the order of 10 minutes away- kaiju can travel dozens of miles in that time. Also, 'on station' means you're having them there for weeks or months- remember that the Jaeger's supertech required nigh constant maintenance for deployments measured in hours, and only jaegertech subs could go down there.

It could all still conceivably be destroyed by a single Kaiju event too. Kaiju breaches plug, mine fails to kill, it swims around and kills your subs.

So we've never poured cement at depth before to seal things like well breeches?

Uh, this is an ocean-depths rift near but not quite at the bottom of the world's deepest ocean trenches, the breach site is floating above the bottom, you can't simply pour and seal like you would a small hole.

Are you claiming that we couldn't use drones operated by the fleet over the site to maintain the equipment and mines?

Adding a lot more cost again, those'd have to be expensive jaegertech drones. They still wouldn't be able to do the job once the gap between kaiju shrunk, too.

You can accept that humanity can build giant robots that interface with your mind, but you refuse to see any advances in other less fantastic technologies in response to this level of need.

If physics throws you a bone in one area, that doesn't necessarily mean it throws you bones in any other areas, and when one looks around, supertech in other areas wasn't seen.

In this universe, Jaeger tech was developed *right* after they got examples of superbioscience monsters made by technology advanced of ourse. So there's a very likely reason why this tech area is significantly in excess of the rest. Even then, it's got limits.

You've once again ignored that we've already built slabs at depth and used them to cap wells. For the material cost of building a small section of the wall they tried one could easily fill the entire trench with concrete, rebar, and other tough materials to whatever depth you please.

Wells are tiny, caps sometimes fail, and the entire trench is a gigantic amount of material (many supertanker worth) just to get to where the breach is. Which, I will note, is almost certainly merely an approximate location for some time, it likely took a good number of events before they pinpointed it.

You have no proof that the rift has an effect on materials placed above it.

It's a hole in space that opens and closes at varying sizes and produces lightning. There's a *lot* we don't know about it's properties!

Sure, I don't have proof, but I don't think it'd be wise to have a plan hing on the assumption that it doesn't.


But even assuming it can be done, then that still just means that you'll see a digging kaiju made, that'll get through.

It's a matter of when, not if, they get through because the other side has intelligent engineers that will adjust to challenges presented.

As for working from the other side they can only get to a small section of the overall breach,

They can only get at the kaiju-sized hole, which is enough for a kaiju to make a kaiju sized hole. What else would they need?

and this forces the breech to stay open longer enabling counter attack and longer warning periods.

The Breach opening lengths aren't controlled by them, that's a property of the physics of the hole. Also, the security measures are still in place, and these methods provide no way of getting kaiju corpses to get past it, or learning of the kaiju DNA security protocals.

The Breach staying open is bad, because that means you're dealing with multi-events and more rapid events. It's only once multi-events are happening that counterattack is possible (mentioned during the movie), and that means you're maybe weeks from "a kaiju every few minutes". Which... good luck?

This means that you may be able to hold off on detonating your nuclear mines until you know that all threats are accounted for.

Note, without data from prior events, there would not be the data to calculate that multievents would occur- you'd just have your side of a concrete plug to look at until a kaiju got through- could be one, could be three.

Then, once one comes through, it can swim miles in a handful of seconds. You detonate now, or that one gets clear or possibly destroys your mines. Do you detonate now, or wait? The lull between Raiju, Scunner, and Slattern was substantial, so you could wait 20 minutes and still now have a kaiju emerge from the now unmined area.

Ignoring that we've never bothered trying to make torpedos designed to catch these sorts of threats before...

Yes, that makes it harder to make the torpedoes go properly fast.

You could sacrifice stealth, increase size, change propellants in order to match the Kaiju. If humanity can build a multistory tall mech, I think we can make our fish swim a little faster.

Supercavicating torpedoes are already designed with no stealth in mind. They are loud and fast. And even if their speed is increased to as fast or faster than a kaiju, hitting a target with something just-a-little-faster isn't easy, if they're traveling at right angles it's very hard to hit, super maneuverability would also be needed.

And the problem isn't just torpedo speed, it's 'getting your sub pointed the right directing fast enough. Remember how the kaiju were able to circle the Jaeger underwater at high speed. Put 2 or 4 super subs in that place. No firing solution could realistically be made while they circle, then when they dive in, they have just a few moments to turn and fire before the Jaeger are at melee.

The same goes for ships, we could use the same power sources that can move a Jaeger to allow for faster ships and submarines.

Jaeger weren't super-fast underwater, nor does better power plants mean better propellant/speed, stuff like power-weight ratio and drag still determine that (the jaeger powerplants were likely quite heavy). Kaiju swim speed was one area where Jaeger were left in the dust.

Now, come to think of it, a "Super-sub vs Monsters" movie with super maneuverable super-fast submarines would be awesome and I'd love to see it, but it'd require a different, just-as-impressive set of supertech advantages as the Jaegers.

While I'd love to see your movie, it's definitely not a simple/easy smarter solution, it's reliant on replacing one supertech with another.

Assuming perfect adaptation is a no limits fallacy. In fact, we never see them face anything with this kind of energy in the movies so claiming that these methods won't be a fast kill is bullshit. We simply don't have any evidence either way.

Not perfect adaptation, but 'within the range of stuff we've seen' adaptation. Making something more missile resistant is merely making the right kind of armor, and we do that with tanks. Just, like, Onibaba's shell but super-thick, they have enough space to work with that making something we can't penetrate shouldn't be too hard. Consider Scunner's skull, even the full strength of Gipsy Danger couldn't get it's sword through that, and that's not a Kaiju design with, "Hm, the extermination-targets like HV penetrators, let's see how armored up we can make one of these babies in mind...".

Or even not-armor, they may realize that making them fat and soft with lots of vital redundancy would allow them to take plenty of hits from HV missiles, and go that approach to ensure the Kaiju can get into the cities to wreck havoc. Or slim, fast, and dodgy, to avoid them. And of course, another known defense- EMP. Knock every aircraft out of the sky.

We saw one Kaiju take a megaton level nuke to the face, so yes, we saw them face this kind of energy. The comics also reveal an early Kaiju took 3 nukes to kill (smaller ones, I believe), and Jaeger plasma guns are certainly very high energy themselves, so I'd say we see stuff in the energy range or higher than non-nuclear HV or railgun rounds.

As for nuclear....

The onus is on you to show that Kaiju can adapt to Mach 10+ penetrators with nuclear payloads.

With nuclear payloads? They probably don't.

In that case they can rely on the strategy of 'run into cities fast, so you lose most of the city in the process too.'

Plus stuff like EMP, fliers, and similar alternate means of attack.

Ignoring the fact that those same advances and handwaved limitations could be applied to other technologies that are more efficient and likely more effective.

Not ignoring that- So far, I've been noting that a solution that is more efficient and would actually accomplish the same objectives, with the same supertech rather than different supertech of the same level, has yet to be presented.

Stuff like minefields and plugs have strategic issues once multi-events happens. HV nuclear missiles is definitely workable, but also results in far more city damage. Super-subs is I think the best.

Nobody thought that closing the breach was even possible at the start of the movie, so these plans not specifically taking that into account only serve to make them believable.

Uh, that seems like a mixed bag. "More believable that people would go for it, but would ultimately lose," is something I can believe, but, well, it includes the phrase 'would ultimately lose.'

Some of these plans wouldn't have things lasting til the time of the movies.

And doing all of these plans would cost a heck of a lot more than the Jaegers.

Even then there's nothing stopping you from taking a crippled Kaiju and running the same plan with specialized submarines.

Submarines with giant arms plan! Getting pretty close to mecha there ^^

Though one thing about subs, it does mean if a Kaiju got past them and onto land, your super-stuff can't do much about it.

The close the breach plan also ignores the fact that new breaches could be opened.

I wouldn't say it does, or at the least, it's better than any not-closing-the-breach plan I know. Breaches take time to stabilize, so every time a breach is closed, it buys one years, and puts the situation into 'kaiju trickle through' again rather than 'thousands of kaiju super rush' that the Precursors can send through a stable breach.

Heck, what if the rate of new breaches is unaffected by whether or not the first is closed, and a second breach can be opened in addition to the first? Even if it's a small one, a breach putting cat 1s in the Atlantic is not that hard to deal with via Jaeger, but for static defense plans, you need to locate the new breach over the course of multiple events, deal with the cat 1s on land likely via nuke, and so on.

The Jaegers made it down that far and were able to keep up with the Kaiju so there's no reason to think that we couldn't use the same materials, and scaled down versions of the power sources in Torps and Submarines.

Jaegertech is fantastically expensive and high maintenance, and does face the Kaiju in their element rather than ours, where the Jaeger weren't able to keep up with the Kaiju.

On the point about the cleanup process, wasn't this because they leaked ammonia? Sorry to again burst the bubble, but ammonia is actually quite clean burning. Just use incendiary projectiles.

Ammonia was one of the things used to neutralize Kaiju Blue. Blue itself was notably harder to deal with, and it's makeup is unknown.

[Sea Skimmer]

No current day technology torpedo could go that deep (the Alfa's alleged 900m diving depth was a challenge). Mines probably could be build to survive that far down, but how do you get them there and moor them?

We built a man rated submarine to reach the bottom of the ocean in the 1950s, before we did minor things like land on the moon or build CERN, you think a moored mine would be a problem? How do you get them there? Gravity. How do you moor them, with a freaking ballast weight. The only thing depth changes is the pressure rating on the damn fuse which isn't a problem at all since the compressive strength of numerous alloys are far higher then the pressure of the deepest ocean. This is all the more absurd speaking in a context in which a mech can be built to operate at those depths. But seriously, Pacific Rim is BS end to end. It could not stick with its own self asserted premise for a single movie. Its utter nonsense in which we are told a toxic hazard exists, which is too minor to preclude unprotected people from physically prying apart the alien guts! heck its premise was no real endorsement of the Jagers, which clearly got torn to pieces easily, and clearly and constantly ended up using weapons which sliced apart the aliens anyway, and apparently worked so badly and cost so much that a trillion tons of concrete to build the Pacific Wall could somehow look like a better idea.

[Sea Skimmer]

That would actually not be all that efficient. The problem is that the rift is too deep for submarines to easily reach and so it would actually take awhile for a torpedo to make it down that far. It would be more effective to use moored mines around the rift.

Probably. But then for what one of those mechs would cost it is not in question that we could build a large pile of 35,000ft depth rated nuclear torpedoes.

On the point about the cleanup process, wasn't this because they leaked ammonia? Sorry to again burst the bubble, but ammonia is actually quite clean burning. Just use incendiary projectiles.

Even if they were full of dioxin we could clean it up for far less money then that Pacific Wall would cost! But they couldn't have been anything that bad because a bunch of Chinese were tearing them apart by hand, and random Rich people were willing to get close while they did so. The aspestos-radiation hazard of the insulation and radium dials of a blown up T-72 were probably worse. Pacific Rim is predicated on stupidity at every single level. Just look at the selection process for the mech pilots, in which they fight with sticks even though they will never do such a thing in the mech, even though a stick would actually be a logical weapon if the premise of no bullets actually mattered instead of being utter nonsense. Pretty sad that this thread turned into this level of useless BS so quickly.

[Sky Captain]

Ideally, if powered armor was effective, the result would be unmanned infantry for certain high risk applications.

It would depend on how secure and jamming resistant it is possible to make com link. Against Third world insurgents it could work, however against peer opponent with advanced jamming equipment teleoperated robot soldiers may fail miserably.

Not perfect adaptation, but 'within the range of stuff we've seen' adaptation. Making something more missile resistant is merely making the right kind of armor, and we do that with tanks. Just, like, Onibaba's shell but super-thick, they have enough space to work with that making something we can't penetrate shouldn't be too hard. Consider Scunner's skull, even the full strength of Gipsy Danger couldn't get it's sword through that, and that's not a Kaiju design with, "Hm, the extermination-targets like HV penetrators, let's see how armored up we can make one of these babies in mind...".

If kaiju designers were able to make them durable enough to survive multi ton Mach 10+ penetrators then no melee weapon is going to hurt them. For the price of Jeager program (it was so expensive that wall circling whole Pacific ocean seemed good idea) it should be possible to field thousands of aircraft and helicopters armed with every weapon system known to man. Kaiju lack ranged weapons so fleet of bombers dropping nuclear torpedoes into ocean when kaiju comes through the breach could engage with impunity.

[Q99]

If kaiju designers were able to make them durable enough to survive multi ton Mach 10+ penetrators then no melee weapon is going to hurt them.

A multi-ton mach 10+ penetrator vs a melee attack with thousands of tons behind it going at hundreds of mph hitting along a thin edge... not sure how that works out force-wise. Besides, it still has to hit a vital. Poke a hole straight through a kaiju and you likely just have a bleeding hole.

They're weapons designed to rampage as long as possible, so redundancy and small-as-possible vitals would be in the design specs.

Note a lot of the melee was done just to stun the kaiju so it'd stand still for the actual finisher attacks, like the missiles.

Finally of course, it has the 'can't engage underwater / close the breach' problem, meaning eventually you're going to have to start missiling thousands of kaiju, many at the same time.

For the price of Jeager program (it was so expensive that wall circling whole Pacific ocean seemed good idea) it should be possible to field thousands of aircraft and helicopters armed with every weapon system known to man.

Circling the rim was because they thought the Jaegers would lose/require constant replacement, and wrongly assumed the kaiju were more animalistic and that the walls would be a good 'permanent' solution no matter how many came out. It was bad and dumb.

The big costs of the Jaeger are almost certainly the weapons and power plant, so sure, you can have tons of aircraft and helis armed with conventional weapons... or you can have fewer with weapons on the proper scale for kaiju.

And you are entirely hoping you can kill more than the Precursors can make, because resource attrition is the only way things'll stop there.

Kaiju lack ranged weapons so fleet of bombers dropping nuclear torpedoes into ocean when kaiju comes through the breach could engage with impunity.

Zero kill method there. Kaiju are faster than torpedoes, and miles down til they hit shallows. Drop a torpedo at the surface, and by the time it gets the right depth, the kaiju will have traveled dozens of miles in whatever direction. A torpedo can't catch up to a kaiju, and the depth means it's almost impossible to anticipate what course a Kaiju will take.

EMP is a pretty good method for handling a fleet of bombers. Plus we've got a flying Kaiju that can go above the ceiling of known bombers.

It's worth remembering how BS a foe the Kaiju are.

But seriously, Pacific Rim is BS end to end. It could not stick with its own self asserted premise for a single movie. Its utter nonsense in which we are told a toxic hazard exists, which is too minor to preclude unprotected people from physically prying apart the alien guts!

Toxic doesn't mean keels over quickly, it can mean 'Hannibal Chou is *extremely* lucky he's next to people with Blue nullification equipment and experience in treating exposure.' Everyone coming into contact on purpose either did so after it was neutralized, or in suits.

heck its premise was no real endorsement of the Jagers, which clearly got torn to pieces easily,

Not all that easily- the problem was the Kaiju were getting much tougher. Against the lower cats, Jaeger were able to kill them much more reliably. It's only once you got to category 3s that you had something resembling a fair fight, and even then the elite pilots were putting them down pretty reliably.

Gipsy's still tough enough to withstand the underwater nuke shockwave.

and clearly and constantly ended up using weapons which sliced apart the aliens anyway,

Two notes on that. One, note how they avoided using swords and blades in cities (Striker punched out the Australian kaiju, but used blades in the water). Two, this was, 'aw heck, if we don't win *right now*, that's that, game over,' so they tossed a lot of normal restrictions out the window.

Probably. But then for what one of those mechs would cost it is not in question that we could build a large pile of 35,000ft depth rated nuclear torpedoes.

Sure. That's just not a great solution to the tactical problem Kaiju represent since it's so hard to engage their speed in water and you probably won't be able to hit them with the torpedoes.


I mean, there's complaints about Jaeger being 'dumb,' but given the same technology shown in the movie, it's not like there's a simpler solution that anyone here has come up with that'd actually work with less damage or cost.

"If it's dumb, but it works, it's not dumb," and all that. And if it's smart, and it leaves you killed by thousands of giant monsters? I'm not sure if it's smart.

[Q99]

Now, Silly I'll grant, but when life gives you a highly unusual situation and some BS tech, sometimes you get silly answers.

You have a very unusual situation here where-
Due to only rare ranged weapons appearing on Kaiju, target profile is not a major concern.
Long-term endurance is also not a major concern.
90%+ of favorable engagement range is either urban or shallow water.
Underwater has the enemy have a significant speed advantage. Enough to get to survivable range of even a nuclear blast in just a handful of seconds, and faster than known torpedoes.
The only known-singular location for them to appear is super-deep water.
The enemies designs do vary and they will try and come up with designs to trump yours.
As a secondary concern, the enemy designs are made to require toxic cleanup and generally with maximizing collateral in mind. Clean kills are thus preferable, slow kills can be large cleanup events.
You need to be able to retrieve and move a dead kaiju to seal the breach, otherwise you'll eventually face nigh-endless waves, and this can only be attempted once you start getting multi-kaiju events.



Btw, Striker Eureka is the only one with a known-price tag, at 100 billion. Expensive, but not to the point that you can get arbitrary levels of stuff in it's place, and the others were cheaper.

[Jub]

Not many, subs are huge and require major power plants too, and require much bigger crews, and the next non-super material sub in the works may reach the double-digit billion range. And it's still fighting Kaiju in their element- note how the first thing that happened to Gipsy in the fight was, wham, arm-gone. Except with a sub, that's wham, hull breach.

Striker wasn't able to avoid melee with underwater kaiju either, it just managed to get it's blades in place.

Submarines are large, but unlike with Jaegers we've already built them and thus have facilities to do so with. Expanding such capacity will also still be easier due to acquired knowledge thus meaning that these subclasses will get an economy of scale that Jaegers never will. Submarines hulls designed to withstand great depths can also be made by nations lacking the ability to produced Jaegers and could be used as a front line screen with the better submarines closing gaps.

To give an idea of the number of submarines that could be spammed out if required Germany herself had over 1,000 submarines commissioned in WW2 and they were not even close to a naval power. Now picture what every nation in the pacific and their allies could do if they wanted to go this route instead of building mecha? Losing a few per battle would be far more cost effective compared to the costs of replacing a Jaeger. In the same vein, larger crews aren't an issue, in the event of anything with even near the same impact as repeated Kaiju attacks there would already be a draft in place.

'Swoop in' from outside the blast radius of a nuclear explosion is probably something on the order of 10 minutes away- kaiju can travel dozens of miles in that time. Also, 'on station' means you're having them there for weeks or months- remember that the Jaeger's supertech required nigh constant maintenance for deployments measured in hours, and only jaegertech subs could go down there.

It could all still conceivably be destroyed by a single Kaiju event too. Kaiju breaches plug, mine fails to kill, it swims around and kills your subs.

You're claiming that humanity couldn't make subs, vehicles that are designed for underwater movement, move at least as fast as Jaegers which were at least in the same league as Kaiju underwater... I'm not even sure why we're debating when you assuming that humanity can make the massive advances needed to make Jaegers and yet are restricted to using only current day tech when it comes to building submarines.

Also please show your work for the 10-minute claim and for the speed of the Kaiju.

Uh, this is an ocean-depths rift near but not quite at the bottom of the world's deepest ocean trenches, the breach site is floating above the bottom, you can't simply pour and seal like you would a small hole.

It's still a cheaper and easier option than the Jaeger + Wall plan that was used in the movie. It's

Adding a lot more cost again, those'd have to be expensive jaegertech drones. They still wouldn't be able to do the job once the gap between kaiju shrunk, too.

They could be construction drones based on current day deep sea submarines. You know, like the Trieste which dived down to the depths of the Marianas Trench in 1960. That not good enough, how about the more recent dives by ROVs such as Kaikō in 1995 and Nereus in 2009, or the manned dive in 2012 by the Deepsea Challenger?

If physics throws you a bone in one area, that doesn't necessarily mean it throws you bones in any other areas, and when one looks around, supertech in other areas wasn't seen.

We never got a look at other areas, however, we know that such advances would have been made. The computer power required for the drift would have lead to rapid advances in other fields. Not to mention that they could always use the material science and power sources from the Jaegers for other projects.

Wells are tiny, caps sometimes fail, and the entire trench is a gigantic amount of material (many supertanker worth) just to get to where the breach is. Which, I will note, is almost certainly merely an approximate location for some time, it likely took a good number of events before they pinpointed it.

How many super tankers do you think it took to build the wall? I'd be willing to bet far less than the number we'd need to make a new mountain over the site of the rift.

It's a hole in space that opens and closes at varying sizes and produces lightning. There's a *lot* we don't know about it's properties!

Sure, I don't have proof, but I don't think it'd be wise to have a plan hing on the assumption that it doesn't.

So you concede your point.

It's a matter of when, not if, they get through because the other side has intelligent engineers that will adjust to challenges presented.

Just like how they failed to adapt to the Jaegers in any meaningful way? They were larger and stronger at the end, but no more proof against Jaeger weapons than they were before.

They can only get at the kaiju-sized hole, which is enough for a kaiju to make a kaiju sized hole. What else would they need?

It means they can only have on Kaiju at a time working at it and only for a limited amount of time given that the breach doesn't stay open forever.

The Breach opening lengths aren't controlled by them, that's a property of the physics of the hole. Also, the security measures are still in place, and these methods provide no way of getting kaiju corpses to get past it, or learning of the kaiju DNA security protocals.

See above for why this makes the plug idea even better.

The Breach staying open is bad, because that means you're dealing with multi-events and more rapid events. It's only once multi-events are happening that counterattack is possible (mentioned during the movie), and that means you're maybe weeks from "a kaiju every few minutes". Which... good luck?

Proof that there were ever enough Kaiju to send one per minute through?

Note, without data from prior events, there would not be the data to calculate that multievents would occur- you'd just have your side of a concrete plug to look at until a kaiju got through- could be one, could be three.

Hence why you always assume that your first, second, and third options will fail. Real militaries plan for the unexpected. Just looking at the nuclear mine idea, you could easily make several rings of mines around the breach along with provisions for checking the mines and replacing them once used. Then you follow that up with the submarines. Then you fall back to the surface fleet. Then you fall back to the air force. Then you fall back to shore defense. Then you fall back to nuking the city with the bombers circling overhead.

[qupte]Then, once one comes through, it can swim miles in a handful of seconds.[/quote]

Your math for this?

Yes, that makes it harder to make the torpedoes go properly fast.

Still easier than building Jaegers.

Supercavicating torpedoes are already designed with no stealth in mind. They are loud and fast. And even if their speed is increased to as fast or faster than a kaiju, hitting a target with something just-a-little-faster isn't easy, if they're traveling at right angles it's very hard to hit, super maneuverability would also be needed.

Why are you assuming the torpedoes would only be a little faster? Again, Jaegers were at least in the same league as Kaiju or the Kaiju could have simply disengaged at will and hit targets not covered by the Jaegers.

And the problem isn't just torpedo speed, it's 'getting your sub pointed the right directing fast enough. Remember how the kaiju were able to circle the Jaeger underwater at high speed. Put 2 or 4 super subs in that place. No firing solution could realistically be made while they circle, then when they dive in, they have just a few moments to turn and fire before the Jaeger are at melee.

Why are you only sending small teams of submarines in the first place when you can have dozens of submarines per Jaeger? Hell, don't even do manned subs. Use fleets of single or double super-torpedo drones controlled via the surface fleet as your first line of defense. This lets you build smaller submarines with the same punch that can stay down there as long as needed without fatigue issues.

Jaeger weren't super-fast underwater, nor does better power plants mean better propellant/speed, stuff like power-weight ratio and drag still determine that (the jaeger powerplants were likely quite heavy). Kaiju swim speed was one area where Jaeger were left in the dust.

Yet the Jaegers were fast enough underwater that they could fight back and could move fast enough that the Kaiju didn't feel that it was worth disengaging from them to go for the now undefended cities. So either the Kaiju are too stupid to use their speed for any kind of lasting advantage, or they're not able to maintain those swim speeds long enough that the Jaegers would eventually catch them. Neither exactly make the Kaiju look great...

In that case they can rely on the strategy of 'run into cities fast, so you lose most of the city in the process too.'

Plus stuff like EMP, fliers, and similar alternate means of attack.

Hard to get far into a city when the Mach 10+ missile went into the air the moment you surfaced.

EMP has a tough time against properly hardened military hardware (the missiles), fixed installations (the command and control for the missiles), satellites (one means, of many, for tracking the Kaiju...)

Not ignoring that- So far, I've been noting that a solution that is more efficient and would actually accomplish the same objectives, with the same supertech rather than different supertech of the same level, has yet to be presented.

Stuff like minefields and plugs have strategic issues once multi-events happens. HV nuclear missiles is definitely workable, but also results in far more city damage. Super-subs is I think the best.

Your points have been argued from ignorance.

You've claimed that drones would need to be made of Jaeger tech to reach the breach, that EMP is a meaningful threat to military hardware, that building a breach plug is harder than building the wall...

And doing all of these plans would cost a heck of a lot more than the Jaegers.

Proof for this? Nukes are cheap, fleets of subs, planes, and surface ships are cheaper than Jaegers when you consider the costs of the tooling to build Jaegers, the facilities to store and repair them, and the repairs for them as well. The plug would also be far cheaper than any given section of that massive wall.

Submarines with giant arms plan! Getting pretty close to mecha there ^^

How about submarines with drag nets instead? You know, the sane plan...

Though one thing about subs, it does mean if a Kaiju got past them and onto land, your super-stuff can't do much about it.

Forgetting the missiles, the planes, the layers upon layers of nuclear mines, rods from god... Yeah, past the subs clearly the world is doomed.

I wouldn't say it does, or at the least, it's better than any not-closing-the-breach plan I know. Breaches take time to stabilize, so every time a breach is closed, it buys one years, and puts the situation into 'kaiju trickle through' again rather than 'thousands of kaiju super rush' that the Precursors can send through a stable breach.

Again proof for these Kaiju numbers.

Jaegertech is fantastically expensive and high maintenance, and does face the Kaiju in their element rather than ours, where the Jaeger weren't able to keep up with the Kaiju.

You're almost there. But you're missing the fact that if a Jaeger can fight a Kaiju in its element and win, which they did the movie, a submarine designed to kill Kaiju is going to do even better in that same style of fight. As said above, you don't even need crews if you go for a drone swarm approach.

Ammonia was one of the things used to neutralize Kaiju Blue. Blue itself was notably harder to deal with, and it's makeup is unknown.

It's still biological, so things life fire, intense UV radiation, other chemicals, etc will do the job. Plus it shouldn't be that hard to study, life can only use so many different elements to carry energy to cells. This gets even easier if you're not retarded and use the advanced computing shown in the movie for this task.

If something was that important, its makeup wouldn't stay unknown for long.

A multi-ton mach 10+ penetrator vs a melee attack with thousands of tons behind it going at hundreds of mph hitting along a thin edge... not sure how that works out force-wise. Besides, it still has to hit a vital. Poke a hole straight through a kaiju and you likely just have a bleeding hole.

What, are you too stupid to attempt the math required to work out the force of a sword swing versus a hypersonic missile? I'll even handle the missile bit for you so you only have to do the sword.

Assuming they use a completely stock Sprint Missile and it's going at top speed we're looking at a 3,500kg object moving at 3,400 m/s and thus generating 20.23 gigajoules of energy. This missile is also glowing white hot and shaped for penetration, and that's just Sprint.

If you rammed it with the HTV-2 you'd have an object traveling ~5833m/s with a conservative mass of 7,000kg striking with 119 gigjoules of energy.

Now in order to make the claim that these won't work please show your math for the sword or concede.

EMP is a pretty good method for handling a fleet of bombers.

Prove to me that a modern bomber is weak enough to EMP for that to be a viable solution for the Kaiju.

Plus we've got a flying Kaiju that can go above the ceiling of known bombers.

How is this relevant? It's only attacks are short ranged or melee. Even if we assume that it's faster than the planes attacking it, and that we don't do something crazy like make a bomber that has SR-71 levels of performance, it simply won't be able to swat planes down fast enough to keep itself alive.

Toxic doesn't mean keels over quickly, it can mean 'Hannibal Chou is *extremely* lucky he's next to people with Blue nullification equipment and experience in treating exposure.' Everyone coming into contact on purpose either did so after it was neutralized, or in suits.

Proof of this claim? We see Chou survive being swallowed by a Kaiju after walking around its corpse unprotected. If Kaiju Blue were actually toxic he'd be dead. Thus based on this we can assume that Kaiju Blue isn't actually that large an issue and the people dealing with it are idiots.

Two notes on that. One, note how they avoided using swords and blades in cities (Striker punched out the Australian kaiju, but used blades in the water). Two, this was, 'aw heck, if we don't win *right now*, that's that, game over,' so they tossed a lot of normal restrictions out the window.

Yes, but that doesn't solve the issue of the Kaiju being weak enough that blunt force punches from a slow ass fist and slashes from a sword are lethal threats to them.

Sure. That's just not a great solution to the tactical problem Kaiju represent since it's so hard to engage their speed in water and you probably won't be able to hit them with the torpedoes.

You keep trotting this out but aren't willing to entertain the idea that humanity could make very, very, fast torps if we had a reason to.

Btw, Striker Eureka is the only one with a known-price tag, at 100 billion. Expensive, but not to the point that you can get arbitrary levels of stuff in it's place, and the others were cheaper.

Please show that this price includes R&D costs, factory costs, logistics costs, etc. Also, please show the cost of other military equipment in that universe for comparison. That price is meaningless unless we know the value of the currency it's tied to, what factors are covered by the cost, and that the cost isn't just the number that some government PR team made public.

Go on, show me your work.

[Q99]

Submarines are large, but unlike with Jaegers we've already built them and thus have facilities to do so with. Expanding such capacity will also still be easier due to acquired knowledge thus meaning that these subclasses will get an economy of scale that Jaegers never will. Submarines hulls designed to withstand great depths can also be made by nations lacking the ability to produced Jaegers and could be used as a front line screen with the better submarines closing gaps.

To give an idea of the number of submarines that could be spammed out if required Germany herself had over 1,000 submarines commissioned in WW2 and they were not even close to a naval power. Now picture what every nation in the pacific and their allies could do if they wanted to go this route instead of building mecha? Losing a few per battle would be far more cost effective compared to the costs of replacing a Jaeger. In the same vein, larger crews aren't an issue, in the event of anything with even near the same impact as repeated Kaiju attacks there would already be a draft in place.

Sure, but we'd need *far* stronger subs than modern ones, so I'm not sure about cost, and you'd regularly lose plenty. Jaegers were only considered cost effective when they didn't die.

You're claiming that humanity couldn't make subs, vehicles that are designed for underwater movement, move at least as fast as Jaegers which were at least in the same league as Kaiju underwater...

Uh, no, I'm claiming that Jaegers were badly outsped by Kaiju underwater and were much more disadvantaged beneath the water than above, and could not actually intercept Kaiju at all, they had to wait for the Kaiju to attack them.

I'm not even sure why we're debating when you assuming that humanity can make the massive advances needed to make Jaegers and yet are restricted to using only current day tech when it comes to building submarines.

I'm just saying one supertech does not imply another. Which of the known-super advances implies great underwater speed?

Also please show your work for the 10-minute claim and for the speed of the Kaiju.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/YQzfYEH.png[img]

The timeframe for that distance is 8 frames, at 25 frames per second. So 0.32 seconds.

44.2 m / 0.32 s = 138.2 m/s.

We have Scunner- slower than Raiju, also swim from Gipsy, at known-survivable distance from the 1.2 megaton nuke, to Striker, ground zero of the nuke, in a single scene which I haven't timed.

The boat scene in Alaska also had the radar have Knifehead travel over a mile in the time it took to speak a line of dialog.

10-minute is just a guesstimate. How far one would want to be from a nuclear explosion isn't set, after all.

It's still a cheaper and easier option than the Jaeger + Wall plan that was used in the movie.

The 'wall' is really the pointless expense there....

'Subs + Jaeger' seems more sensible.

We never got a look at other areas, however, we know that such advances would have been made. The computer power required for the drift would have lead to rapid advances in other fields. Not to mention that they could always use the material science and power sources from the Jaegers for other projects.

We didn't see high tech proliferate though. The material science and power source, yea- but those are big and expensive.

How many super tankers do you think it took to build the wall? I'd be willing to bet far less than the number we'd need to make a new mountain over the site of the rift.

Conceded.

So you concede your point.

On not knowing? Sure, but if your plan is highly reliant on the portal working a certain way, that just means you're maybe talking a coin flip.

Just like how they failed to adapt to the Jaegers in any meaningful way? They were larger and stronger at the end, but no more proof against Jaeger weapons than they were before.

They went from 'beaten down by a prototype,' to 'acid-shooting to counteract a foe's heavy armor, having extra limbs to counter a foe's extra limbs, and taking multiple plasma caster shots to take down instead of one.' Knifehead, they were honestly surprised it took more than one hit. Leatherback, they fired a bunch, then did more just to be on the safe side. Otachi seemed fairly obviously designed to take down Crimson and Cherno specifically.

Also, EMP. That's a very meaningful adaptation.

Finally, Mutavore looked like a battering ram. Possible anti-wall design?

It means they can only have on Kaiju at a time working at it and only for a limited amount of time given that the breach doesn't stay open forever.

Sure, until it gets to the point where it does. That's the big worry, eventually it stabilizes and does stay open either permamently or extended periods.

And then when they get through, you don't know when and you won't have much experience with Kaiju or warning just how many are coming out.

Proof that there were ever enough Kaiju to send one per minute through?

Looks like they could keep it up for some time to me

Newt also talked about the extermination wave, and how everything so far was just scounts.

Hence why you always assume that your first, second, and third options will fail. Real militaries plan for the unexpected. Just looking at the nuclear mine idea, you could easily make several rings of mines around the breach along with provisions for checking the mines and replacing them once used. Then you follow that up with the submarines. Then you fall back to the surface fleet. Then you fall back to the air force. Then you fall back to shore defense. Then you fall back to nuking the city with the bombers circling overhead.

'Rings'. Nah, you need domes, water's three dimensional. Hundreds to thousands of mines to do something like that. Every time one detonates, you have to replace most of them, and there is a hole until you do, they do not work on multi-events. Nukes are individually cheap, but how long can you replace them at that rate?

Surface fleet is likely gonna costs more than Jaegers if they take high casualties. Considering how ill-suited they are to defend against attacks from below, I'd cut that step out entirely and put more budget elsewhere.


[qupte]
Your math for this?[/quote]

2:18

Also I think Scunner swimming to Striker was probably over a mile, but that's just guesstimate.

Still easier than building Jaegers.

Even if you can match speed, hitting something with something only-around-as-fast isn't exactly easy, and if you lose your super expensive subs and don't get kills, you'll be at worse economics than a more expensive thing that works.

Super-cavicating torpedoes, while obviously makeable, also come with a certain range limits as well, so long range chase is difficult.

Plus, active design factor. If they're facing subs, then the Precursors will make more "Knifeheads" and "Raijus"- sleak, fast swimmers- and fewer "Leatherbacks" and "Scunners" - brute tough ones.

Why are you assuming the torpedoes would only be a little faster? Again, Jaegers were at least in the same league as Kaiju or the Kaiju could have simply disengaged at will and hit targets not covered by the Jaegers.

Jaeger were in the same league on land. In the water, less so, definitely not in speed. Jaeger walked, Kaiju swam.

The Kaiju *could* disengage by going back into the water, but the Jaeger had enough number for coverage for awhile (background material says that while Gipsy was at Anchorage, Romeo Blue was at Seattle in case it turned south), and can re-deploy at air-lift.

The Kaiju were, after all, scouts meant to test and destroy our defenses (according to Newt), with wrecking havoc on our industry only half their mission.

Why are you only sending small teams of submarines in the first place when you can have dozens of submarines per Jaeger?

State-of-the-art non-jaegertech sub can be up to 8 billion. Most expensive Jaeger is 100 billion.

One dozen for *modern* state of the art sub vs the cost of Striker.

To get them ready for Kaiju fighting, you're going to have to upgrade the cost significantly. Better armor, I assume, because you don't want them imploding if a Kaiju just taps it and you need better to go deeper. Better power, better propulsion.

I don't know how many submarines you'll be able to get per Jaeger, but definitely not dozens. You've got most of the major components of a Jaeger right there.

Hell, don't even do manned subs. Use fleets of single or double super-torpedo drones controlled via the surface fleet as your first line of defense. This lets you build smaller submarines with the same punch that can stay down there as long as needed without fatigue issues.

The main fatigue issue is gonna be maintenance more than people's need to eat or rest, I'd think. Plus you don't want something that can be taken out by signal loss, that's a potentially exploitable vulnerability, or even just bad luck, since that'd require wires.

Hard to get far into a city when the Mach 10+ missile went into the air the moment you surfaced.

Not that hard- duck behind the nearest building after leaping onto the shore, and let it take the hit.

EMP has a tough time against properly hardened military hardware (the missiles), fixed installations (the command and control for the missiles), satellites (one means, of many, for tracking the Kaiju...)

It at least temporarily shut down the Jaegers and Jaeger HQ, in a bunker.

You've claimed that drones would need to be made of Jaeger tech to reach the breach, that EMP is a meaningful threat to military hardware, that building a breach plug is harder than building the wall...

That building a breach plug is more technically challenging, and still suffers the same problem.

Leatherback's EMP's effectiveness is demonstrated.

And, conceded you can get stuff that just sinks down there with modern tech, but things that can swim around and do stuff? That needs better than we've got.

Proof for this? Nukes are cheap, fleets of subs, planes, and surface ships are cheaper than Jaegers when you consider the costs of the tooling to build Jaegers, the facilities to store and repair them, and the repairs for them as well. The plug would also be far cheaper than any given section of that massive wall.

Fleets of subs, planes, and surface ships have maintenance, storage and repair costs as well, and *replacements* from higher casualties will drive costs up.

Plug, sure, but I think any plug/wall plan is bad anyway. Not really contesting that point too hard.

How about submarines with drag nets instead? You know, the sane plan...

How are you gonna get dead kaiju into the net in deep water?

Forgetting the missiles, the planes, the layers upon layers of nuclear mines, rods from god... Yeah, past the subs clearly the world is doomed.

Not 'doomed,' but, y'know, a lot more city destruction, and if you're trading cities for kaiju, that's not exactly great if your selling point is 'cheaper than Jaegers'. Repair cost is part of a cost-analysis benefit too.

I do note that between *all* of those, you're probably talking a heck of a lot of more expense than the Jaeger program....

Rods from God is another good weapon that's not too anti-Kaiju- it takes time for something to go from orbit to ground, obviously, and they can't significantly adjust course on the way down. Indirect hits won't kill. Saturation is probably needed. Also not so good against flying Kaiju.

You're almost there. But you're missing the fact that if a Jaeger can fight a Kaiju in its element and win, which they did the movie, a submarine designed to kill Kaiju is going to do even better in that same style of fight. As said above, you don't even need crews if you go for a drone swarm approach.

The lone kaiju kill underwater were done by letting a Kaiju run into a sword.

It's still biological, so things life fire, intense UV radiation, other chemicals, etc will do the job. Plus it shouldn't be that hard to study, life can only use so many different elements to carry energy to cells.

Sure, but, set a mass fire in a city? The cost of however many tons of chemicals? More expenses on the cost-effectiveness chart.

Which is, I gather, the whole point. Just another thing to add to the defender's cost. Of course doable, but expensive and annoying.

What, are you too stupid to attempt the math required to work out the force of a sword swing versus a hypersonic missile? I'll even handle the missile bit for you so you only have to do the sword.

Come now, that's a bit childish, just because I didn't already do the math you turn to insults? I'm not always good at eyeballing numbers, but you can still respond civilly when someone just *doesn't know something*.

And there is the rather significant factor that I don't know the cross-section of the blade of the sword, or even the mass (there's some official numbers, but they are rather bunk on the light side considering the things don't float like corks, and Jaegers flat-out sink). The total energy can be estimated and I'll do that, but how much is hitting X amount of space, I don't know.

Assuming they use a completely stock Sprint Missile and it's going at top speed we're looking at a 3,500kg object moving at 3,400 m/s and thus generating 20.23 gigajoules of energy. This missile is also glowing white hot and shaped for penetration, and that's just Sprint.

If you rammed it with the HTV-2 you'd have an object traveling ~5833m/s with a conservative mass of 7,000kg striking with 119 gigjoules of energy.

Now in order to make the claim that these won't work please show your math for the sword or concede.

Again it does depend on what you mean by 'work'. Do damage, certainly, but one-hit kill? A lot dependent on where it hits.

Lesse, going off of Raiju's charge speed, and.... ok, Raiju's neutrally buoyant or close to it, right? Raiju's 104 meters long... I'll just call Raiju a 40-meter sphere as dense as water if tucked into a ball because I'm lazy and bad at calculations.... 273,974 tons.

I get... 2608 gigajoules. Which, of course, was enough to cut it in half. So yea, that much obviously works with energy to spare.

Now, assuming Gipsy slashes with the mass of a 20-meter sphere of water behind it (so this would not be putting it's whole weight behind an attack. Though unlike Raiju, Gipsy sinks, so maybe this is conservative? Whatever), at 60 m/s (number complete guesstimate), that gets me... 60 gigajoules. Which could represent the stab to Scunner's head which failed to penetrate through. Having to rely on some guessing here.

Note that Slattern took a 1.2 megaton nuke- or 5,020,800 gigajoules- and survived. Or however much of the blast it absorbed, which is a sizeable fraction of that.

The screenwriter and writer of the prequel comic says it took 3 nukes to kill one of the early Kaiju, Trespasser, but those would certainly be no more than KT nukes. KT starts at thousands of gigajoules and goes up.

How is this relevant? It's only attacks are short ranged or melee. Even if we assume that it's faster than the planes attacking it, and that we don't do something crazy like make a bomber that has SR-71 levels of performance, it simply won't be able to swat planes down fast enough to keep itself alive.

It flies to another city and causes thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions in damages before the anti-kaiju attack squad refuels and catches up again.

And will these heavy ordinance be able to hit it while flying at all? They aren't designed to hit mobile targets that can rapidly change elevation, after all. Well... if designed for anti-kaiju use they'll have to be more precise than modern super-heavy missiles if they want to hit even a running target.... hm.... gonna think about that one.

Proof of this claim? We see Chou survive being swallowed by a Kaiju after walking around its corpse unprotected. If Kaiju Blue were actually toxic he'd be dead. Thus based on this we can assume that Kaiju Blue isn't actually that large an issue and the people dealing with it are idiots.

Um, are you asking for proof that toxic stuff can be slow-acting....? Really? I think burden of proof is on you on the excluded middle there.

Tendo's grandfather (Tendo being the coordinator on the radio with the pilots) died a few hours after exposure in the prequel comic.

Yes, but that doesn't solve the issue of the Kaiju being weak enough that blunt force punches from a slow ass fist and slashes from a sword are lethal threats to them.

The punches never actually kill them from what we see, it's always just to stun them while they set up the finisher, which are volleys of oversized missiles or slow-charging plasma cannons hooked up to oversized nuclear reactors.

How energy is delivered matters a lot- a famous fencing instructor notes it takes less force to kill someone with a blade than it does to open a stuck door, and yet people can survive multi-floor falls.

Swords, well, see above calcs.

You keep trotting this out but aren't willing to entertain the idea that humanity could make very, very, fast torps if we had a reason to.

Burden of proof. We have come up with some ways to make things go fast over short distances in water- super cavication- but here you're asking for an assumed supertech different than the ones we've seen.

I'm willing to entertain the idea, but which of the known techs discovered in that time frame would solve the underwater speed problem? The walking/movement stuff wouldn't, superheated sword wouldn't, plasma *probably* wouldn't, and the super tough materials wouldn't.

If you can come up with a solution using something at least close to implied by the movie, that's ok. But if you argument is, 'one supertech, therefore another,' that doesn't follow.

Please show that this price includes R&D costs, factory costs, logistics costs, etc. Also, please show the cost of other military equipment in that universe for comparison. That price is meaningless unless we know the value of the currency it's tied to, what factors are covered by the cost, and that the cost isn't just the number that some government PR team made public.

Go on, show me your work.

I think this is a deflection into details.

We're told this is the unit cost of that individual unit- and US dollars makes the most sense, though I guess it could be Australian, and this comes from one of the "PRDC documents" put out as part of promo stuff, so that'd be via a governmental procurement system (the novelization also has someone comment on them costing 'billions of dollars,' which is even more vague). I did mention the unit cost of modern high-end submarines- wich also does not cover R&D, factory, logistic, crew cost and training (a cost Jaegers don't really have, what with their crew of 2), etc.. If you want to assume a 20% jaeger surcharge or some other number along those lines, fine, that's reasonably reasonable. If you wanna toss out a known datapoint because it doesn't contain all other information and assume very significantly higher... I don't think that's a very reasonable stance to take, as *most* fiction doesn't touch on that kind of thing and you're arguing not that we don't know the cost, but that the cost is significantly higher than stated- especially when compared to the even-lower-data "hypothetical super subs made with similar materials and power systems and unknown propulsion".


Oh yes, and the total cost of the jaeger program is in 'trillions,' though that's not any more helpful, considering that's for over 20 Jaegers and all bases, maintenance, repair, etc. for over a decade, and such a wide range of numbers. Though considering it comes from jaeger program opponents, I'd expect 'tens' to be included if it got that high, so probably single digit.

[Adam Reynolds]

Q99, face the fact that Pacific Rim cannot be rationalized and just enjoy for its own sake. Do we sit around and criticize Star Wars or Star Trek for having FTL? The fact that a premise of a movie cannot be rationalized with what is known about reality doesn't make it bad or mean that you can't enjoy it.

[Q99]

Q99, face the fact that Pacific Rim cannot be rationalized and just enjoy for its own sake. Do we sit around and criticize Star Wars or Star Trek for having FTL? The fact that a premise of a movie cannot be rationalized with what is known about reality doesn't make it bad or mean that you can't enjoy it.

Well, yea, of course! It has *mysteriously effective giant robots*. That don't collapse under their own weight, can be thrown across a town and be fine, and so on.

I'm just pointing out that once you have mysteriously effective giant robots, it's pretty silly to call it 'dumb' for using 'em- it's kinda like complaining that starship ship designs are too inefficient. It's internally consistent, it's just got fictional magic-tech.

I'm entirely on your side here. You can't rationalize the existence of mysteriously effective giant robots, you can just rationalize their use once you have 'em.

[Batman]

If you have mysteriously effective giant robots, you have the technology to make mysteriously effective giant robots, and that technology could be much more efficiently used otherwise.

[Q99]

Looking over my calc numbers for Raiju's mass, I realized they're way high- radius vs diameter mixup. Like I said, I'm not good at this ^^; For a 40-meter across sphere of raiju (rather than a 40 meter radius sphere, which is what I actually had), it'd be 34,246 tons. Which at Raiju's speed, results in a more sensible- but still significant- 573 gigajoules to slice it in half.

If you have mysteriously effective giant robots, you have the technology to make mysteriously effective giant robots, and that technology could be much more efficiently used otherwise.

If you have ships that can go percentages of C, or FTL, you have the technology to do so, and could go into all kinds of hijinks that most spaceship SF doesn't. And also consider stuff like the transporter- everyone knows you could abuse that in sooo many ways. Is Trek a dumb story for not doing so? I don't think so. We accept that soft SF often uses not-fully-exploited technology in many cases.


Also, the *specific* technologies of a mysteriously effective giant robot don't necessarily help everything else, they aren't exactly the most widely applicable. It means good power (+ energy weapon tech that relies on it), good armor, and good joint/muscle-esque stuff. The third technology doesn't help with much in the military that's not a giant robot. The first is applicable to only really big stuff, since the power plants are frik huge, as we've seen. The second is the only widely applicable one, and it doesn't solve all the problems out there.

Plus there's the drift tech, but really, that doesn't help out much militarily at all, I can't think of a single combat unit that that'd benefit.

While other approaches have been suggested in this thread, and you can make an argument for using them as an alternate, I don't think you can point to any being *much* more efficient, not by the huge margins implied by the word 'much' (super subs: similar size- though more hollow- probably the exact same power plant and armor, only real saving is in the muscle material, and in return you have to fight Kaiju where they're faster and harder to deal with)... save maybe the ones that we also know are pretty much a sure long-term loss to rely on like the minefield method, so meta knowledge tells us that's a no-no.

[Adam Reynolds]

The point that you are not understanding is the complexity engineering that goes into making something that moves in a way that mimics humans. From a physical standpoint, it is inherently inefficient. There are too many moving parts under a dynamic load, with a center of mass that is far too high.

Consider what the act of walking takes in comparison to a more conventional vehicle(either a naval vessel or ground vehicle). Each time you lift the leg, you are wasting energy to fight gravity in order to physically lift that leg off the ground. You then have the issue of ground pressure when you put that foot down and shift weight on top of it. Especially considering that these things are supposed to weigh nearly 2000 tons.

Put it this way, would you be willing to race a person on foot while they have a bike? Because that is what you are talking about when using mecha. They are inherently physically inefficient. Technology won't change this. Whatever technology that makes them possible would also make conventional ground and naval vehicles more effective. Just like the fact that even an extremely fast runner would be even faster on a bike.

The only context where it would ever make sense would a suit to supplement infantry, as had been mentioned in this thread. Or outright robotic infantry. And even in those applications it would be heavily supplemented by traditional vehicles or smaller, often tracked units like what is already in service.

[Sky Captain]

I don't think submarines would be that necessary. Kaiju are not stealthy and are easily detectable. Bombers or helicopters with nuclear torpedoes would work just fine and operate in environment where kaiju can't attack easily. EMP is not a problem. If you expect nuclear explosions nearby then your assets will be hardened against EMP as well as possible. Range issue of supercavitating torpedoes also is not a major problem since bombers could drop them just in front of swimming kaiju. Or have a cruise missiles that drops torpedoes just on top of Kaiju so you don't loose aircraft due to nuclear blast.

Note that Slattern took a 1.2 megaton nuke- or 5,020,800 gigajoules- and survived. Or however much of the blast it absorbed, which is a sizeable fraction of that.

That scene just don't make sense. If Kaiju were that durable then Jeagers would have absolutely no chance against them. Only workable solution would be bigger nuke or drop an asteroid on it.

Not that hard- duck behind the nearest building after leaping onto the shore, and let it take the hit.

Reaction time against such missile would be much less than against any other weapon shown in the movie. Mach 10 is about 3x the speed of rifle bullet. If one could dodge that then dodging Jeager attacks would be trivial. And there wouldn't be one missile but many coming from different angles. Movies generally do poor job at showing how fast real missiles actually are.

[Adam Reynolds]

Reaction time against such missile would be much less than against any other weapon shown in the movie. Mach 10 is about 3x the speed of rifle bullet. If one could dodge that then dodging Jeager attacks would be trivial. And there wouldn't be one missile but many coming from different angles. Movies generally do poor job at showing how fast real missiles actually are.

Not to mention that they also fail to show just how powerful explosives are. A consequence of the fact that explosions in movies are actually more likely to be gasoline fireballs rather concussion or shrapnel based explosions that actually kill people(because film studios don't like killing stuntmen or actors). One would think CGI would have helped with this, but it hasn't changed much.

[Jub]

Sure, but we'd need *far* stronger subs than modern ones, so I'm not sure about cost, and you'd regularly lose plenty. Jaegers were only considered cost effective when they didn't die.

You mean like the multiple submarines that have already been as deep as the rift or deeper? Yes, they aren't military submarines designed to fight at that depth, but it isn't as if we don't know how to make things survive at those depths. If you throw the need for running quietly out of the window you can also do away with a lot of the design constraints modern submarines deal with.

Uh, no, I'm claiming that Jaegers were badly outsped by Kaiju underwater and were much more disadvantaged beneath the water than above, and could not actually intercept Kaiju at all, they had to wait for the Kaiju to attack them.

If the Kaiju were so fast, why were the Jaegers always able to intercept them? The Kaiju should have been able to disengage at will and strike a target on the other side of the Pacific while the Jaegers would be caught entirely out of position. So either the Kaiju can sprint for short distance at high speeds, but have a far slower sustained speed, or the Kaiju and their masters are some of the worst military minds anybody can conceive of.

Which is it?

I'm just saying one supertech does not imply another. Which of the known-super advances implies great underwater speed?

The power plant able to move a multistory tall walking robot, the incredible increases in computing power needed to link pilots within the drift, the materials science that could, depending on the exact properties of the materials discovered, allow for lighter but string skins on planes, tanks, and submarines. Perhaps some combination of the above.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/YQzfYEH.png[img]

The timeframe for that distance is 8 frames, at 25 frames per second. So 0.32 seconds.

44.2 m / 0.32 s = 138.2 m/s.

Would you mind showing your work on the scaling done in that scene? Could you also show the scene in question, I'm not taking your frame counts at face value.

Also, please show that Kaiju are able to sustain that speed for any length of time.

We have Scunner- slower than Raiju, also swim from Gipsy, at known-survivable distance from the 1.2 megaton nuke, to Striker, ground zero of the nuke, in a single scene which I haven't timed.

Show your work on scaling, time, and distance covered.

The boat scene in Alaska also had the radar have Knifehead travel over a mile in the time it took to speak a line of dialog.

Prove it.

10-minute is just a guesstimate. How far one would want to be from a nuclear explosion isn't set, after all.

You don't get to be this wishy-washy on your numbers. Prove that a submarine would have to be stationed as far out as you claim.

The 'wall' is really the pointless expense there....

'Subs + Jaeger' seems more sensible.

So you concede that the funds for a proper combined arms approach do exist.

We didn't see high tech proliferate though. The material science and power source, yea- but those are big and expensive.

That doesn't matter. DARPA would have access to this technology as would other top military and civilian research facilities. So the people that need the tech to design things other than Jaegers already have it. If they didn't the Jaegers never would have been created.

On not knowing? Sure, but if your plan is highly reliant on the portal working a certain way, that just means you're maybe talking a coin flip.

We actually do know that it doesn't interact with matter in any violently destructive way. We don't see it flash boiling water or causing any effects that would cause concerns for concrete, steel, etc surrounding the rift.

Try actually looking at the fucking movie next time you scrub.

They went from 'beaten down by a prototype,' to 'acid-shooting to counteract a foe's heavy armor, having extra limbs to counter a foe's extra limbs, and taking multiple plasma caster shots to take down instead of one.' Knifehead, they were honestly surprised it took more than one hit. Leatherback, they fired a bunch, then did more just to be on the safe side. Otachi seemed fairly obviously designed to take down Crimson and Cherno specifically.

Yet in the end they all still failed. They lost to the very things they were designed to counter. They were still vulnerable to the exact same weapons they were at the start.

This doesn't exactly bode well for them adapting to high velocity impactors.

Also, EMP. That's a very meaningful adaptation.

It would also be a worthless adaptation against a non-movie military.

Finally, Mutavore looked like a battering ram. Possible anti-wall design?

Proof? You can't just keep begging the question, doing half the work needed to prove a point, and expecting me to let it slide. Put up or fuck off.

Sure, until it gets to the point where it does. That's the big worry, eventually it stabilizes and does stay open either permamently or extended periods.

It's not as if the plug wouldn't be watched, and damned closely. We'd have a good idea of when it's going to fail. Also, depending on the energy patterns given off by the breach it's entirely possible that we could monitor it regardless of the plug being in the way. After all, we could figure out pretty damned accurately what it was doing through miles of water.

And then when they get through, you don't know when and you won't have much experience with Kaiju or warning just how many are coming out.

The Kaiju also won't have much experience with us. Given how slowly the adapted to Jaegers, and how poorly they did so, that's more of an issue for them than it is for us.

Looks like they could keep it up for some time to me

That doesn't look like a movie still to me. I'd like you to show a count from the movie.

Newt also talked about the extermination wave, and how everything so far was just scounts.

Any proof that he was correct in his assumption?

'Rings'. Nah, you need domes, water's three dimensional. Hundreds to thousands of mines to do something like that. Every time one detonates, you have to replace most of them, and there is a hole until you do, they do not work on multi-events. Nukes are individually cheap, but how long can you replace them at that rate?

Rings, domes, it doesn't much matter. The idea would be to place mines in the best pattern to kill Kaiju without losing your investment when you have to use them. Only you would place your mines in such a way that they would blow themselves up uselessly in common useage.

Surface fleet is likely gonna costs more than Jaegers if they take high casualties. Considering how ill-suited they are to defend against attacks from below, I'd cut that step out entirely and put more budget elsewhere.

You have subs covering the surface fleet. The surface fleet is needed as a missile launch and spotter plane platform. The fleet can also act as bait. If a Kaiju wants to come up from the depths to slag a ship, that opens it up to your hypersonic missiles, which means a dead Kaiju. If the Kaiju learn to ignore the surface fleet it gives humanity an easy place to strike from.

2:18

Also I think Scunner swimming to Striker was probably over a mile, but that's just guesstimate.

Please do the actual math. I'm not taking you word on this.

Even if you can match speed, hitting something with something only-around-as-fast isn't exactly easy, and if you lose your super expensive subs and don't get kills, you'll be at worse economics than a more expensive thing that works.

Super-cavicating torpedoes, while obviously makeable, also come with a certain range limits as well, so long range chase is difficult.

Has humanity ever seriously tried to make longer range versions of these weapons? Right now they're a luxury, a nice thing for your fleet to have, but aren't exactly a war winner.

Plus, active design factor. If they're facing subs, then the Precursors will make more "Knifeheads" and "Raijus"- sleak, fast swimmers- and fewer "Leatherbacks" and "Scunners" - brute tough ones.

That's a win for humanity. It means they're weaker to the shore defense and interceptors.

Jaeger were in the same league on land. In the water, less so, definitely not in speed. Jaeger walked, Kaiju swam.

Yet the Jaegers still won against the best Kaiju to date, at the bottom of the ocean. Why are you claiming that dedicated underwater craft are a poor idea again?

The Kaiju *could* disengage by going back into the water, but the Jaeger had enough number for coverage for awhile (background material says that while Gipsy was at Anchorage, Romeo Blue was at Seattle in case it turned south), and can re-deploy at air-lift.

The Kaiju were, after all, scouts meant to test and destroy our defenses (according to Newt), with wrecking havoc on our industry only half their mission.

So the guys controlling the Kaiju were stupid?

They could have used hit and fade tactics, wasted resources, and massed Kaiju on the ocean floor giving them unexpected two or three on one odds to kill the Jaegers with. They could have faked out humanity by not sending a Kaiju through the breach each time it opened and thus hiding their strength, drawing humanity in with this scientific curriousity and then sending a wave of Cat 5's through to start the war .

But they didn't, because they're straight up too stupid to fight a war.

State-of-the-art non-jaegertech sub can be up to 8 billion. Most expensive Jaeger is 100 billion.

Once again please show your work for what exactly went into the 100 billion dollar price tag.

Consider that the F-22 program ran up a 66.7 million dollar budget when designing a thing we've already designed plenty of. Also consider the current cost of the F-35 program which was 1.3 trillion dollars as of the 25 May 2015 in this report. Now please go ahead and tell me that you buy a Jaeger costing 100 billion dollars with development factored in.

One dozen for *modern* state of the art sub vs the cost of Striker.

Your numbers are wrong.

To get them ready for Kaiju fighting, you're going to have to upgrade the cost significantly. Better armor, I assume, because you don't want them imploding if a Kaiju just taps it and you need better to go deeper. Better power, better propulsion.

I don't know how many submarines you'll be able to get per Jaeger, but definitely not dozens. You've got most of the major components of a Jaeger right there.

So you're conceding this point right? You haven't shown a baseline for the cost of a Jaeger, you refuse to give an estimate of how many subs you think could be built per Jaeger, and throughout this thread you've failed to show you numbers for basically anything.

The main fatigue issue is gonna be maintenance more than people's need to eat or rest, I'd think. Plus you don't want something that can be taken out by signal loss, that's a potentially exploitable vulnerability, or even just bad luck, since that'd require wires.

Hence why you have multiple tenders, some sort of default attack patterns programmed into your drones, and manned subs as a secondary line of defense.

Not that hard- duck behind the nearest building after leaping onto the shore, and let it take the hit.

*laughs* You're pretty dense aren't you?

Even assuming a baseline Sprint missile dodging isn't going to happen. Here's a quote about the Sprint missile, "The Sprint accelerated at 100 g, reaching a speed of Mach 10 in 5 seconds." Using a the simple formular of distance = 1/2 * at^2 this means that the missile can travel 24 kilometers in 5 seconds.

Are you seriously claiming that this isn't fast enough to catch a Kaiju? Especially when they fail to react to simple punches and sword strikes.

It at least temporarily shut down the Jaegers and Jaeger HQ, in a bunker.

I don't actually think you know shit about EMP or EMP hardening. You might want to look at real life plans for dealing with EMP from nuclear weapons...

That building a breach plug is more technically challenging, and still suffers the same problem.

Do you even understand the technical issues with building a multi hundred meter wall around the entire pacific?

Leatherback's EMP's effectiveness is demonstrated.

Against the tech shown in the movie. Tech which no real life military would have let get past the drawing board. Just because stupid monsters can beat equal stupid tech doesn't mean that EMP magically works against competantly designed military hardware.

Jesus fucking christ you're the posted child for the Dunning Kruger effect.

And, conceded you can get stuff that just sinks down there with modern tech, but things that can swim around and do stuff? That needs better than we've got.

So none of the expeditions sent to the bottom of the trench have moved around or has "done stuff"?

Admittedly most of the vessels puttered about at a top speed of 3 knots, but they did move around and collect samples. That means that we could use current technolgy for mundane tasks like maintenance of mines, placement of sensors, and such.

Fleets of subs, planes, and surface ships have maintenance, storage and repair costs as well, and *replacements* from higher casualties will drive costs up.

Please, go ahead and show your work. First for the costs of the Jaeger program, with a price comparision so we can peg the value of the currency used, and then show how my plan would cost more. You're making the assertion, now show your fucking math.

How are you gonna get dead kaiju into the net in deep water?

You drag the net along the bottom. I'd figure that the term 'drag net' might have tipped you off to that idea.

Not 'doomed,' but, y'know, a lot more city destruction, and if you're trading cities for kaiju, that's not exactly great if your selling point is 'cheaper than Jaegers'. Repair cost is part of a cost-analysis benefit too.

You only assume city destruction because you've failed to account for just how mind numbingly fast mach 10+ actually is.

Rods from God is another good weapon that's not too anti-Kaiju- it takes time for something to go from orbit to ground, obviously, and they can't significantly adjust course on the way down. Indirect hits won't kill. Saturation is probably needed. Also not so good against flying Kaiju.

They work just fine when you know when and where the Kaiju are coming from. You just point your rods at the breach, let your scientists tell you when it's going to open and fire your volleys at that time with some adjustment for margine of error. You can also fire them along the Kaiju's route because these giant ass monsters aren't exactly hard to track and have been shown to bee-line for targets even when changing routes would be advisable.

The lone kaiju kill underwater were done by letting a Kaiju run into a sword.

Your point being? Even in their element the Kaiju failed to stop the mission.

Sure, but, set a mass fire in a city? The cost of however many tons of chemicals? More expenses on the cost-effectiveness chart.

You're again making a bad assumption that the Kaiju even reach the city... but in the worst case it's probably easier just to napalm the area and quarantine it than to send in clean up crews as they did in the movie.

Come now, that's a bit childish, just because I didn't already do the math you turn to insults? I'm not always good at eyeballing numbers, but you can still respond civilly when someone just *doesn't know something*.

*looks to the banner at the top of the page* "Get your fill of sci-fi, science, and mockery of stupid people."

Please shut the fuck up about my being polite and produce actual math.

And there is the rather significant factor that I don't know the cross-section of the blade of the sword, or even the mass (there's some official numbers, but they are rather bunk on the light side considering the things don't float like corks, and Jaegers flat-out sink). The total energy can be estimated and I'll do that, but how much is hitting X amount of space, I don't know.

So you don't actually know and your best math is going to be a total asspull... This ought to be interesting.

Again it does depend on what you mean by 'work'. Do damage, certainly, but one-hit kill? A lot dependent on where it hits.

Please show your work on this point. Prove that these missiles can't get a kill based on what we see in the movie.

Lesse, going off of Raiju's charge speed, and.... ok, Raiju's neutrally buoyant or close to it, right? Raiju's 104 meters long... I'll just call Raiju a 40-meter sphere as dense as water if tucked into a ball because I'm lazy and bad at calculations.... 273,974 tons.

I get... 2608 gigajoules. Which, of course, was enough to cut it in half. So yea, that much obviously works with energy to spare.

Yeah, I know you admitted your mistake below, but you fucked up your math here by an order of magnitude.

Now, assuming Gipsy slashes with the mass of a 20-meter sphere of water behind it (so this would not be putting it's whole weight behind an attack. Though unlike Raiju, Gipsy sinks, so maybe this is conservative? Whatever), at 60 m/s (number complete guesstimate), that gets me... 60 gigajoules. Which could represent the stab to Scunner's head which failed to penetrate through. Having to rely on some guessing here.

Please prove your math for the claimed speeds involved as well as show your work for energy imparted by the sword.

It's also worth noting that you've failed to account for give in the arm holding the sword which lessens your energy transfer by a large degree.

Note that Slattern took a 1.2 megaton nuke- or 5,020,800 gigajoules- and survived. Or however much of the blast it absorbed, which is a sizeable fraction of that.

Please show that the effects from the movie match the real life calculations as to the effects such a nuclear device would actually have at such depths. I'm extremely skeptical that the effect we see looks anything like 1.2 megaton nuclear warhead going off.

The screenwriter and writer of the prequel comic says it took 3 nukes to kill one of the early Kaiju, Trespasser, but those would certainly be no more than KT nukes. KT starts at thousands of gigajoules and goes up.

Are any of those things canon? Nope, so they don't count.

It flies to another city and causes thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions in damages before the anti-kaiju attack squad refuels and catches up again.

Please show that the Kaiju have ever done this.

And will these heavy ordinance be able to hit it while flying at all? They aren't designed to hit mobile targets that can rapidly change elevation, after all. Well... if designed for anti-kaiju use they'll have to be more precise than modern super-heavy missiles if they want to hit even a running target.... hm.... gonna think about that one.

A sprint missile is only 3,500 kg, so going purely by weight, a B-2 could carry 15 of them, 9 in the bay and 6 on external hardpoints. Good luck dodging the dreaded mach 10 missile Mr. Kaiju.

Um, are you asking for proof that toxic stuff can be slow-acting....? Really? I think burden of proof is on you on the excluded middle there.

If it's slow acting that makes clean up nice and easy. However based on what we see in the movie it either isn't that toxic, or the effects are easily mitgated, otherwise you simply wouldn't have people next to a corpse in anything less than full hazmat gear.

Tendo's grandfather (Tendo being the coordinator on the radio with the pilots) died a few hours after exposure in the prequel comic.

The comics don't seem to agree with the movie in this case. Thus we throw them out.

The punches never actually kill them from what we see, it's always just to stun them while they set up the finisher, which are volleys of oversized missiles

The punches clearly do enough damage to warrent the Kaiju blocking them. Ergo, these punches can harm Kaiju that are adapted to fight Jaegers.

Missiles that don't carry the energy of the Sprint missile which you're claiming won't work against them. Which is it, can Kaiju dodge a mach 10 missile or are missile effective against them?

or slow-charging plasma cannons hooked up to oversized nuclear reactors.

Slow charging and slow moving, yet oddly enough the Kaiju still don't dodge it.

How energy is delivered matters a lot- a famous fencing instructor notes it takes less force to kill someone with a blade than it does to open a stuck door, and yet people can survive multi-floor falls.

No shit sherlock. I'm well aware of overpentration, hit placement, and force concentration. That tends to not matter so much when you attach to warhead to the end of your pointy bit.

Swords, well, see above calcs.

Your calcs are shit. See above.

Burden of proof. We have come up with some ways to make things go fast over short distances in water- super cavication- but here you're asking for an assumed supertech different than the ones we've seen.

I'm willing to entertain the idea, but which of the known techs discovered in that time frame would solve the underwater speed problem? The walking/movement stuff wouldn't, superheated sword wouldn't, plasma *probably* wouldn't, and the super tough materials wouldn't.

If you can come up with a solution using something at least close to implied by the movie, that's ok. But if you argument is, 'one supertech, therefore another,' that doesn't follow.

You always seem to ignore the advance computing that they have making accomplishing all other tasks easier.

Still just from the movie techs super materials would likely reduce weight, advances in chemical technology should enable denser energy storage to power a propulsion system even if the power sources used in the movie can't scale downsmall enough to fit in a fesible torpedo casing, advances in computing allow for more accurate and faster modeling or torpedo performance thus saving money and time on testing. Those are just the obvious ones.

I think this is a deflection into details.

It really isn't. As shown above the F-35 program cost an inflation adjusted 1.3 trillion dollars in May of this year. I simply don't buy your assertation that the Jaeger program cost as little as you claim it does in 2013 USD. Hence my demanding proof for these claims as well as a baseline purchasing power of the movie's dollars.

<snip>

Without knowing the value of these dollars and what costs are included in the reports (versus the costs burried in other programs or written off as general military spending) I'm not buying your numbers.

Looking over my calc numbers for Raiju's mass, I realized they're way high- radius vs diameter mixup. Like I said, I'm not good at this ^^; For a 40-meter across sphere of raiju (rather than a 40 meter radius sphere, which is what I actually had), it'd be 34,246 tons. Which at Raiju's speed, results in a more sensible- but still significant- 573 gigajoules to slice it in half.

You still haven't actually shown your work on this. We need numbers for the Kaiju's mass and velocity at impact, the weight behind the sword and it's speed, how much energy is lost due to the flexing of the arm during the sword's impact, and some estimate for the edge thickness of the sword and the sword's stiffness. Even as a ballpark figure you haven't proven the velocity of the sword, nor the mass behind it.

[Jub]

[double post]

[Q99]

If the Kaiju were so fast, why were the Jaegers always able to intercept them? The Kaiju should have been able to disengage at will and strike a target on the other side of the Pacific while the Jaegers would be caught entirely out of position. So either the Kaiju can sprint for short distance at high speeds, but have a far slower sustained speed, or the Kaiju and their masters are some of the worst military minds anybody can conceive of.

Because the Jaegers always waited til they hit land/shallows where Kaiju couldn't swim properly (the 'miracle mile'), where they no longer had a mobility edge and where the targets are. And the Jaegers were air-lifted into location, they can be relocated that way city to city.

Also, the purpose of the Kaiju according to the person who mind-linked with the makers was to test their defenses. Not just cause max havoc, but to handle the defenses. In order to do that, it needs to meet the defenses, and not just avoid them completely.

Would you mind showing your work on the scaling done in that scene?

Scaling is official heights and the labeled-in-the-picture pixels.

So you concede that the funds for a proper combined arms approach do exist.

Sure, but that's hardly the point if the bulk of the budget comes from getting rid of the wall and you're trying to argue Jaeger aren't cost effective, is it?

If the wall was swapped for combined arms, *and* you had Jaeger, then you'd have the means to close the breach and all that other stuff.

You don't get to be this wishy-washy on your numbers. Prove that a submarine would have to be stationed as far out as you claim.

You're speculating the possible existence of super-subs in the first place.

You're literally asking me to provide proof on the limits of capabilities of something you made up with no concrete capabilities.

"You don't get to be this wishy-washy with your numbers. Prove that a submarine would be able to be made with the capabilities you claim in the first place."

We never got a look at other areas, however, we know that such advances would have been made. The computer power required for the drift would have lead to rapid advances in other fields. Not to mention that they could always use the material science and power sources from the Jaegers for other projects.

Now that's just assumption. While it's somewhat reasonable in some areas, it's still clearly into the realm of speculation. Considering how staunchly you seem to be arguing against *any* assumption, I do have to point that out.

I'm ok with some speculation, but only as long as we are playing on even ground and allow reasonable speculation on both sides, which you are clearly not.

Still just from the movie techs super materials would likely reduce weight, advances in chemical technology should enable denser energy storage to power a propulsion system even if the power sources used in the movie can't scale downsmall enough to fit in a fesible torpedo casing, advances in computing allow for more accurate and faster modeling or torpedo performance thus saving money and time on testing. Those are just the obvious ones.

I don't know about reducing weight, Jaegers sunk pretty hard, and developing a super-durable material doesn't mean you have knowledge on a super-light one. Energy density, sure, indeed that'd make sense if they could figure out what Kaiju use for chemical, but that's not the big obstacle to speed. Better modeling and such helps... but you've gotta have a really big improvement in speed, and it needs to be sustained speed, not just burst speed (which is what supercavication, the only method I know to get that fast, can give), to intercept. And your designs are *entirely* reliant on this speculative advance existing.

So you concede your point.

Do you concede mine, that you're relying on an unknown on the properties of the breach?

I don't see how you get, 'if we don't know something, it must be my way and the breach must be assumed to provide no problem for making a plug,' as a reasonable conclusion.

Especially not when the thing is clearly high energy enough to make lightning.

You're, once again, relying on generous speculation on your side.

Just like how they failed to adapt to the Jaegers in any meaningful way? They were larger and stronger at the end, but no more proof against Jaeger weapons than they were before.

They took significantly more Jaeger weapon fire to take down even when not all *that* different in size (Knifehead was the largest Cat 3, Leatherback was short for a Cat 4), from one plasma blast to a half-dozen or more, and they had better weapons against Jaegers, and EMP, and better mobility (flying). You have an odd definition of 'meaningful'.

Adaptation doesn't mean borg-style immunity, it means altering designs to be better suited for the challenges it faces. Just like fighters and tanks go through different iterations.

Slow charging and slow moving, yet oddly enough the Kaiju still don't dodge it.

Because they always make sure the Kaiju is stunned first. When they don't do that, the kaiju attacks and tries to rip them them up while they're charging, as happened with both Knifehead and Leatherback. Also Striker's missiles were disabled when it was hit there without stunning the kaiju first.

They never tried to rely on hitting a fully mobile kaiju, they reduced it's ability to evade and attack first.

Proof? You can't just keep begging the question, doing half the work needed to prove a point, and expecting me to let it slide. Put up or fuck off.

So a battering-ram looking design that batters through a wall isn't enough to even warrant a speculative possibility mention to you.

Also...

The comics don't seem to agree with the movie in this case. Thus we throw them out.

False. The movie never shown the time-scale in which the blood was shown to be toxic. We do not see Hannibal Chou hours after exposure. There is no contradiction when we do not see what happens.

You can't re-write stuff just because you don't like it. Stop jumping down my throat for mentioning things-that-make-sense-with-what's-seen, then assuming completely unseen stuff in the next sentence.

Your math for this?

It's called 'counting the time in which during which a character counts off it's distance in miles.'

You know, for someone so short about not being already provided calcs, you really aren't trying hard.

It really isn't. As shown above the F-35 program cost an inflation adjusted 1.3 trillion dollars in May of this year. I simply don't buy your assertation that the Jaeger program cost as little as you claim it does in 2013 USD. Hence my demanding proof for these claims as well as a baseline purchasing power of the movie's dollars.

Appeal to incredulousness.

You not liking the numbers is not evidence against them.

You still haven't actually shown your work on this. We need numbers for the Kaiju's mass and velocity at impact, the weight behind the sword and it's speed, how much energy is lost due to the flexing of the arm during the sword's impact, and some estimate for the edge thickness of the sword and the sword's stiffness. Even as a ballpark figure you haven't proven the velocity of the sword, nor the mass behind it.

The sword is stationary, that was a Kaiju swimming in to it. The Jaeger, roughly similar weight ballpark as the Kaiju.

And the rest? Unknown, stuff like the sword flex and thickness we cannot know.

This is arguing by 'insisting on more details until one finds enough details that aren't known to call things wrong.' We are dealing with fictional material where most of the numbers are inaccessable, but we do know the big numbers and those have been presented.

I don't believe you're debating in good faith here, argument for 'we don't know some information means we must toss out the rest' is simply another way of saying 'we can't use numbers in fictional debate'.

-----

Anyway, I've made my points. Whatever the specifics of which method would technically be best, I think I've provided enough to indicate that given the specific known supertechs, a Jaeger is not a horribly dumb call (but the wall kinda is). It's like, say, the ship in Galaxy Quest, or the time travel in Star Trek IV, is it a bit silly that they have it? Yes, but once having it, it's not dumb to use it given known non-made-up alternatives. A dumb movie is a movie that has characters act dumb, like, say, Prometheus or Interstellar, where the characters' actions make little sense with what they have and know, not just one that throws in soft-science technology that is used consistently.

That's my original and main point, and I don't feel the need to get bogged down in bad-faith nitpicks and reliance on your several major completely speculative points while being insulted even when I provide evidence and calculation of mine. I've provided calculations, math, quotes, and scenes, you have not, and you don't seem interested in accepting what I show.