Pacific Rim

[Jim]

PS... Pacific Rim 2 is "In development"

[McAvoy]

I agree. I understand that the Gypsy Danger crew may not be trusted and you want to keep the super duper nuke on the Mk.5 safe but we all saw what happened. The two Jaegers were destroyed and the Mk.5 was disabled and could have easily been destroyed if it wasn't for Gypsy Danger.

Having all four of them there may have allowed at least one to survive or maybe could have been worse.

[DarkMoineau]

at least that movie have not been written by Damon Lindeloff: could have been worst that what you describe

[Atekimogus]

What I also missed a bit was a sense of impending doom!

His "today we are cancelling the apocalypse" speech did nothing for me to be honest. I just never got the feeling that it really is over as soon as they loose the jaegers. The world is huge.....so loosing a few cities along the pacific coast......which are probably much less densly populated than today for obvous reason......big deal. Now they move pretty fast for their size but still, more than enough time to evade them almost indefinitly if need be.

Sure, it might spell doom in the long run......

Now if you watch "Der Untergang" about Hitlers last days in his bunker....now there is a sense of impending doom and inevitability, and it isn't even about the fate of humanity... . I don't know if I can bring the point across, just never felt like they really are such a threat that the world is really in such a bad state.

Maybe that's something they should have shown us, instead of just telling but just the way everyone acted I never get the feeling that the stakes are that high.


PS On a sidenote....why exactly did pentecola (or somesuch) assume he would die? As I understood it, he suffered from radiation sickness since the early MK 1 were not radiation shielded. Now I would assume they have fixed this issue in the following Marks?

[McAvoy]

We were never given a clear explanation about Pentecost. Is it the radiation that was killing him because Mk. 1 had poor shielding? Or was it the fact he piloted a Jaeger by himself? I got the general impression is was piloting a Jaeger by himself because that he could die if he did it again

He really doesn't have the look of a person with cancer.

Yeah the impending doom didn't feel like that. Big monsters that move fairly fast. Cool. Earth is pretty big. I think they could have expanded upon that.

Maybe increase the number of Kaiju. Have the double and triple events already happening. Have the beginning show that Jaegers are being destroyed through sheer weight of numbers that are coming through.

Use that super duper nuke to clear out the ones on Earth like in the movie but have instead of three. Have a shit ton of them.

Oh and background info has it that before Jaegers, the first Kaijus were brought down by nukes. Not conventional firepower. I find that bullshit.

[Tyyr]

You find it bullshit that creatures so large they find the biggest convention weapons "annoying" being brought down by nukes?

[DarkMoineau]

I think it's about fist able to fight creatures vulnerables only to nukes.

[McAvoy]

You find it bullshit that creatures so large they find the biggest convention weapons "annoying" being brought down by nukes?

No. I find that they can't be brought down by conventional weapons but only by nukes. But hey, a giant fist works well.

Now granted a plasma cannon thingie like Gypsy Danger works well. Unfortunately it looks like a close ranged weapon.

[Tyyr]

I did the math in the Godzilla thread, but the problem is that our conventional weapons simply aren't designed to engage something like that. Nothing we have is big enough. It's like trying to kill a crocodile with a BB gun. Could you do it eventually? Yeah. However if you're throwing everything you've got at a beast like Trespasser and it's just not dying, not even slowing down, and it's already destroyed three cities, left tens of thousands dead, yeah I can see luring it away from a populated area and nuking it just to try and end it.

[McAvoy]

I would have to look at all the weapons and missiles the US could possibly bear on it. But I have a hard time believing a bunker buster missile or guided bomb could penetrate the skin or at least leave pot marks or even do some damage to the more softer spots on the giant monsters.

Or hell... devote resources into building giant missiles that can penetrate skin that thick. Build a shit ton of them. Send a dozen at a time to each monster when they appear.

[DarkMoineau]

Using Tomahawks with warehead as nukes works on them. Destroy them far from the coast.

[McAvoy]

Using Tomahawks with warehead as nukes works on them. Destroy them far from the coast.

You could. But the problem is fallout. Which is why nuke mines near the entrance could work. Though that area would be super duper radioactive for a long time if it works every time one comes through.

[Tyyr]

Here's the problem. Godzilla is about 300 feet tall, just scaling him up from a more conventional lizard he probably weighs in at 40,000 tons (200 blue whales). That's a lot of meat. Assuming no monster mojo a bunker buster is going to do a good job burrowing into his body. The problem is that bunker busters don't have big explosive charges. Really they're supposed to kill people and break things inside a bunker, a few PSI of overpressure is all it's going to take, plus they'll have the cavity to help reflect the blastwave around and wreck things even more. You can actually see this in some of the footage of testing penetrators against hardened aircraft shelters. You can see the shock front bouncing around inside the shelter.

Here's the problem, in Godzilla there isn't going to be a cavity, he's going to be solid meat, so the shock front won't be doing much reflecting. Second, he's 40,000 tons. A BLU-109 has an explosive charge of about 500 lbs. To put that in a human perspective it would be like detonating 0.00125 lbs (1/50th of an ounce, half a gram) of explosive about an inch under your skin. It's going to hurt, but cause massive damage? And the BLU-109 has a comparatively large explosive capacity for a bunker buster. A couple of bunker busters would annoy a creature Godzilla's size even if he was just a regular animal.

The sizes put forth here are about right for a Pac Rim Kaiju. Simply put, the biggest bunker buster we have in the inventory isn't going to do much more than annoy Trespasser. A large bomb? Much the same. Sting, scuff him a bit, and then he'll go and knock a skyscraper over.

Here's the other issue. Trespasser was totally unexpected. Until he showed up and tore the Golden Gate bridge in two (and fucking seriously, if you cut the main tensioning cable the towers will be ripped back towards shore damn it.) Believe it or not it's not exactly easy to get a division or two of ground troops somewhere in a hurry. Even aircraft in meaningful numbers will take time to rustle up. Put it this way. To transport a single armored regiment from their base to the training range at... shit, forget the name, anyways, transporting that regiment represents months worth of work by the whole staff to get it moving. Even then loading it on the train, deploying once you get there, stocking weapons, you're a week's worth of work. There's no way you could have gotten significant ground forces moving to deal with Trespasser. The only people on the ground would be national guard who would have nothing much more significant than Hummers and .50cals aside from maybe some old 105mm artillery. The only thing you could quickly get moving to attack him would be aircraft and Trespasser would likely get to buttfuck San Francisco and move on before you could marshal much to attack him beyond the few fighters on alert covering the entire Pacific coast.

Oddly enough a nuke is about the only weapon you could reliably get on target quickly to deal with a Kaiju.

Using Tomahawks with warehead as nukes works on them. Destroy them far from the coast.

Except that they are underwater until they get near the coast.

[McAvoy]

Interesting.

Though the human comparison with the bombs may not work. Testing bombs and shells on reduced scale models don't translate well on full size targets. But I get the point.

I just have a hard time believing a metal fist the size of let's say a tank going maybe 25 MPH will have any impact.

The technological solution of a Jaeger makes no sense. You want to build something big and powerful? Build a giant gun like that plasma weapon. Have it towed by helicopters like they do for the Jaegers and since Kaijus move slow, you may be able to target them and do damage.

[Tyyr]

Well a very basic bit of math will reveal that a Jaeger's fist weighs in at about 1.5 million pounds. When it rocket punched Leatherback it was not unlike slamming a 747 into the Kaiju's face.

Let's be real here. Giant mecha make no sense. Giant monsters make no sense. However in this genre of film you have to accept two main premises:

1) Giant monsters are actually physically possible and won't collapse to jelly under their own weight.
2) Giant robots who fight these monsters by punching them in the face ARE the best solution to dealing with them.

If you refuse to accept those premises then there's no point watching the movie because in no reality do either of those ideas work. You have to acknowledge that there is a great deal of Rule of Cool at the heart of these movies and go with it.