Q99 wrote:
Kaiju are pretty fast, though. And even at walking speed, Trespasser should've killed tens of thousands in the first hour, walking through the center of San Fran. Evacuations take time.
Again though, you just have to get out of the way of the monster, not out of a 5km radius. That's not that much more demanding then a fire drill is except for the infirm and very young. With no civil defense measures panic will set in, but humans in real life have already been mentally prepared by decades of now propaganda movies to the threat of monster attack! We'd organize easily.
Evacuating before employing high yield nuclear weapons, sure, that would take time, but you'd just wait for it to leave and drop a 500kt bomb on it when it's at least in the suburbs. Tactical nukes could be used within 1,500m of people doing duck and cover if you wanted.
None of this would be a real concern though because a giant monster would be so stupidly blatant approaching shore. Whatever on the deep ocean, but no way can it not be blatant in shallow water while moving at high speeds. Wake is happening. I mean this should be an appeal of Kaiju, the ability to make a bow wave that crushes buildings on approach.
Not specifically, but a good part of Syndey was lost to the nuke there- that's in part on why the wall there is where it is, it also separates the intact parts from the nuked zone.
I assume they scaled up to fit, hence later ones only requiring one shot. It makes sense they started small with a tac nuke, found it insufficient, and moved up to one that was more assured to work.
Perhaps then. After a point though it would make no sense, because the monster would never do the same amount of radius assured destruction that the nuke would. Just wait for the monster to stop smashing the city and as soon as it leaves drop a 500kt bomb on it. This assuming incompetence continues to prevent the use of nukes on offshore targets.
It should be noted that there's nothing innate about nukes that makes them good against large targets except for their raw power, quite the opposite- The radiation's not so useful, it can't penetrate deep enough, and overpressure is going to do jack diddly to something with those skeletons, and even heat requires heating up a huge volume down deep enough to get to organs. A nuke is, after all, a non-focused weapon, it release spread out energy, their virtue is purely having as much as needed. Buncha small nukes is a lot worse for such a target than a single big one.
You can make a shaped charge nuke easily. It just has little real life point. But you really don't need one anyway when you get a skin-skin contact with nuclear device to target. Mere geometry at that point says an enormous amount of the effect goes into the target. This effect is far more intensive then anything generated by conventional explosives, mainly entirely unmitigated neutron hits at .03C and X-rays that generate something like 3 million psi of dynamic radiation pressure. The nuclear crater is a thing because of this! That's mostly material it physically shoves out of the way. A Kaiju exposed to any amount of nuclear fireball is getting kicked with a force that would make that kind of crater.
If they could withstand this at all without being flung through the air they ought to be totally immune to any kind of low velocity punch from a Jaeger that weighs less then at least several hundred thousand tons. The fact that a nuke is smaller doesn't make it less intensive, bigger nukes are the same spectrum of radiation and the same kinds of neutron effects, the fireball effect just gets way bigger and longer. No real point exists to using a nuke with a fireball bigger then the target, firing multiple rounds would be a far more efficient use of energy past that.
My conclusion is that the morons dumb enough to build a wall were also possibly too dumb to ever score an actual direct nuke hit.
Honestly so many 'why don't they just do X practical things?' people try and bring up on giant monsters is really just rule-of-cool, just what that person thinks is rule of cool.
I'm not sure I heard anyone think that wall thing was anything but stupid as a portion of the movie. It just made it more in your face how dumb it all was. Nuclear artillery failing would have looked way cooler for any purpose. I blame it on Hollywood being too left wing.
That's, like, billions of people. There's plenty of economic and food-related reasons people live on shores.
That sounds like DNC worthy defeatism to me citizen, you should report to the closet total war mobilization control point to be checked for possible alien mind worms. The point is not to remove all population from 20 miles of the coast, which is what billions would mean. Landmark seeking monsters are unlikely to hazard random fishing villages in Africa.
What really isn't even an option I'd say, is acting like nothing is wrong and we should let every moron continue to occupy obvious attack zones from which a mass evacuation is impossible in the face of the magic surprise monsters. That means nobody within a couple hundred meters of shoreline, nobody in the upper stories of office buildings a greater distance inland, and nobody near major chemical refineries or certain kinds of fuel storage tanks where a monster could unleash and utterly enormous toxic or FAE hazard. That's not a joke in real life as it is.
Vital industries would certainly be moved, high tension lines rerouted inland, and new port and shipyard facilities would start appearing as high up rivers as possible. War mobilization factories and industry would be focused far inland, the US already did that in a deliberate manner in WW2. Trying to rely on something as lol as a wall, I mean the monster could always just DIG UNDER IT...is just so absurdo dumb.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
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- PeZook
