PacificRim_Headscratchers

8/13/2019 PacificRim_Headscratchers

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Headscratchers: Pacific Rim open/close all folders

Threatening the whole world?So these kaiju are all coming from the Pacific ocean, and the film's tagline is"Go big or go extinct". Ahem... what about Europe? Western Asia? Africa? Eastern North and South America? The Caribbean?



They're all suffering from the economic collapse that comes from constantly being attacked by monsters. Anyway the kaiju were just the first step before the rift aliens completely exterminated the humans.They're coming from the pacific; that doesn't mean they're staying there. The plan is to eventually move out over the rest of the world; they're just focusing on the pacific rim's population centers first. According to one of the scientists, if the rate between kaiju incursions continued to increase at the rate it was, they'd eventually be looking at a kaiju coming through once ever four minutes,and those kaiju would be cat4's(easily a match for a jaeger one on one) and cat5's(who can apparently survive point blank nuclear explosions). The rest of the world would die after the Pacific, but they'd still die.Besides, the East and South East of Asia are the parts of the world with the highest population density. Coming for that region, the kaijuu are directly attacking the biggest chunk of the human species by numbers.Ahem, may I introduce you to Otachi? Now think about what her appearance indicates of the aliens plans. Energy Weapons as ArtilleryIf they are capable of creating energy weapons for the Jaegers, why don't they create artillery units with those things. At the very least, mobilizing a battalion of plasma blaster tanks along the coastline to back up the Jaegers would be smart.Energy weapons would be short ranged due to interference from the atmosphere not to mention the power requirements would need something the size of a Jaeger tocarry.

Gipsy Danger's blueprints states it fires plasma via charge ion carrier rail. This, along with the line about unloading the entire clip, suggests a physical component to the ammunition that would provide significant range. Gipsy Danger's power source is capable of self-sufficiently powering two plasma cannons and all of its components and systems without showing signs of taxing. The same power source would probably be able to power a large series of fixed canons and possiblylast longer since power would mainly only be consumed when firing. More likely,a smaller power reactor would be able to sufficiently handle all the power requirements necessary for a defense line.Which still doesn't mitigate the possible range restrictions.It changes it from short-range weapons to at least mid-range weapons. The technological limits aren't explored, so we don't know exactly what the effective range on Gipsy Danger's plasma cannon is. But even a mile range would be a better de

fense plan than the nothing that seems to be the backup defense line shown in the movie.Maximum observed range on Gipsy Danger's plasma cannon is several hundred feet,or slightly more than its own length. Given that they don't take long-range shots vs. kaiju even when presented with perfect opportunities, and that Raleigh isn't a macho idiot, it can be reasonably inferred that several hundred feet of range is all he's got. IOW, way too short to put on a wall... by the time the charging kaiju's in range its close enough that the momentum of its /corpse/ will probably do a wall breach, even assuming you could somehow one-hit-kill it anyway.Plasma weaponry wouldn't be the most effective weapon anyway. It would inflict splash and thermal damage rather than kinetic piercing and trauma like a solid round. Frankly, I think it would be far more efficient, cheaper, and safer to useeither MLRS batteries, rail guns, or even large caliber gas fired rounds, all of

which (save for the rail gun) were shown to be effective against the Kaiju. Striker's missiles worked quite well in Sydney, and your average destroyer packs alot more munitions than it does. This isn't Evangelion, conventional weapons dowork, and I would think a small fleet or a squadron of fighter pilots, who aren't total dumbasses with feet for hands, would be able to take on the baddies easily. The only reason to use a plasma round would be to cauterize the wound and prevent the acidic blood from spilling, but defeating them at long range and would mostly remove this issue anyway.The missiles only worked on categories 1-3. The Cat4s were a whole different story, and Slattern, the first of presumably MANY Cat5s took a NUKE to the FACE and



still had fight in him. Hell, it took six days to kill the first Cat1 with conventional airstrikes. The smallest, weakest kaiju ever, and it still wrecked half of Southern California over the course of a week before the US Air Force finally bled it to death. Conventional artillery is not your solution, and exotic artillery like the Jaeger plasma cannons is likely too damn expensive to build units for everywhere along a continent-sized wall (and that's after assuming it would do any good at artillery range to begin with, a fact still not in evidence!); you have to concentrate it on mobile platforms that can take the firepower rightto the kaiju.Trespasser was far from the "smallest, weakest kaiju ever". The categories didn't exist back then, but it is likely that he was a cat3 or cat4, on a suicide mission to test the current strength of the human military. Keep in mind, it took 3 nukes to kill him, and everyone was shocked that Slattern survived a single nuke. It's possible that Trespasser was a cat5. Then the cat1's came in after theyknew what resistances to breed into them.The scenario that Trespasser was strong and then they went back and started sending weaker Kaiju seems rather unlikely. All Kaiju are on a suicide mission, to cause as much damage as they can before they are put down. If the makers send a class 3 or 4 and found humanity had the capability of putting one down, no matter after how long it took, then they'd go make subsequent ones stronger not weaker.The Rift might have destabilized after sending Trespasser through, preventing them from just sending more Cat 5's. Also, remember, Cat 5 is not the highest endthat the Kaiju masters can throw at Earth, just the highest end of what the Rift

can send.On top of that, the Kaiju are ridiculously agile for their size. Anything firing from far enough away to not simply get wrecked in an instant by the thing it'strying to kill is going to be lucky just to end up causing less devastation than the monster itself; maybe Cat1-2 Kaiju are dumb enough to get their faces pounded in, but the higher-class Kaiju would be difficult to hit in a way that causes much damage. And that's before you get into the higher-class Kaiju.To be fair, we never got to see Striker's missiles used against the Cat. 4's because of that EMP, but the ease with with Gipsy's blade cut through Otachi wouldsuggest that they would be fairly effective, at least more effective than the plasma cannon was against Leatherback, and it took about a half dozen shots to the chest. A coordinated strike with ship mounted missiles and cannons would've done the job. And no, they wouldn't be hard to hit. Tiny planes moving at hundreds

of mph can be taken down with ground based machine guns, a powerful AI (i.e. the one they have managing the Jaegers) could kill them with targeting vectors andcoordinated fire from several miles away, or they could just, y'know, use missile tracking. Also, Physically, the battle with Slattern is an anomaly. It took a1+ Megaton nuke, point-blank, which would have been several magnitudes hotter than the sun, but couldn't handle a jet of reactor venting, which would have beentens of thousands of degrees maximum to prevent damage to the internal structure (unless it's a fusion reactor, in which case, it would also be hotter than thesun, but still not as intense as the explosive).I assumed the nuke managed to damage Slattern enough for Gypsie's reactor vent to do the trick. IIRC Slattern's skin was visibly cracked and the soft bioluminscent flesh was exposed in many points.SE is only about 2,000 tons. We're talking a two kiloton bomb.

I don't presume to have an answer as to WHY Striker's missiles worked, even though we only saw them work on the rather pathetic Metavore, but the fact is they do, when our other conventional weapons simply don't besides nuclear force. Perhaps they're simply too large, heavy and short-ranged for fighters to carry, not to mention they probably only work if they all strike a point clustered together. As for Slattern, its heat-shielding probably was shot after the nuke hit. It certainly looked worse for wear. Not to mention, swords and explosions work on vastly different principals, so comparing Otachi's resistance to one but not the other doesn't prove much. Kevlar can block a bullet but be pierced by a knife, after all.



You're completely right, it is foolish to compare those two different forces. But we can at least assume that if the plasma cannon can cut through Kaiju like alightsaber through a small child, a series of high impact missiles could probably work. Who says the weapons would have to be mounted on a conventional combat aircraft? A plane the size of a strategic airlifter could probably haul a few guided missile pods and engage targets from long range using JDAM kits. Instead ofusing 20 or so Jaegers, they could have dozens of strike craft, and a few AWA Cs patrolling the Pacfic at all times, Cold War style; and that's assuming they wouldnt use refitted versions of the hundreds of combat ships already available. Also, appreantly the missiles are some kind of specialized anti-Kaiju weapon or whatever, I guess they harden the nose cones with tungsten and unicorn horns?Distance seems an essential element in Eureka's payload. He could have fired onOtachi from well across the bay, but didn't until he was in spitting distance, as it was when up against Metavore.Distance? The writers proved that they had no concept of effective range the minute they showed jet fighters flying within slapping distance, not once, but twice. I had assumed they got up close to make sure the missiles didn't hit Typhoon.What, in San Francisco? There is no way that those fighters didn't make first contact with Trespasser way out in the bay, given how fast they fly. We see them doing what they do at the Golden Gate bridge because they're long out of missiles by then but still desperate to stop the thing, or at least distract it away from the bridge. Its the same logic as the Hansens trying to hit Leatherback with flare pistols - desperation.Jet craft never get that close to the target during a strafing run. There is no

reason a trained fighter pilot would try to fly under the beast's armpits.His suggestion is that fighter pilots were desperately trying to draw Trespasser's attention to themselves, much like the Aussie Rangers did with Leatherback.In the Case of Mako's memory of the tokyo attack it didn't look to me like the aircraft even attempted to pull up. They might have been going for a deliberate suicide run. The first example looks more oddball but could be them trying to get it's attention as mentioned. As for the whole firepower thing. Bear in mind these mechs are weighing in at thousands of tons and those punches at their size are moving immensely fast. Your talking a minimum estimate of double the momentumof inertia of the plane strikes on the world trade centre concentrated over a fraction the area through a less flexible surface.Yet despite that the Kaiju absorb them almost casually, anything that can absorb that is going to shrug off pretty much any blast overpressure, even a nuke would have trouble generating enough

pressure, (Hell tanks and ships have survived close range nukes and they're a hell of a lot less sturdy), though the rads and thermal would do a hell of a lotof harm, and doubtless are what killed 2 out of 3 at the end. The strikers missiles do work of course, but they're extremely large bore and apparently short ranged, (there's a correlation between range and warhead power for a given size). Where talking missiles far bigger and nastier than anything the navy currently uses here with dedicated super armour piercing warhead. Your probably looking at enough explosives to fill a unker buster in each missile and enough penetrating power to take out a nuclear silo with a bunch to spare, and it still took a dozen hits before it went down, and that was after it was softened up by who knows how many punches first, (hell it might have been hit by other missiles and stuff before that, we only see the kill shots). The other problem is the Kaiju have shown their water speed, a ship would be an easy kill for them, and waiting till th

eir on land results in a lot of dead civvies and other problems.You're not saying that having a giant mecha brawl it out on land would result in less civilian casualties are you? I'm sure the only reason the roads aren't crimson rivers is because of the timely evacuations.It's stated in a number of sources, (mostly supplemental though the movie displays this as SOP as well) that the aim of the Jaegers is to intercept them in shallow waters, the Kaiju even making it to land is already a partial mission failure.What I wonder is why the plasma cannon isn't the Jaegers' opening attack. We see several shots of Jaegers holding Kaiju off one-handed while the cannon charges,



and we know from the way GD checks Leatherback's pulse that the cannon is capable of rapid fire once it's warmed up. Given that, why don't they start chargingup when the Kaiju's still a mile away, so they can ventilate the thing the second it enters effective range?Charging the plasma cannon might take extra concentration, or might divert power away from running the rest of it. Think about it like holding down Mega Man's charge shot while trying to do platformingit's doable, but it's something else you have to coordinate. Now scale that up to giant robot levels. It might be a thing they only want to do when they know they have a shot.If the cannon takes extra energy and concentration, all the more reason to use it before getting into melee.Unless you miss, or holding the concentration on charging the cannon means you're not paying enough attention to your surroundings and dodging. The weapons areeffective, but the Kaiju are able to dodge unless they're pinned down or it's point-blank range.So standing there waiting for the kaiju to come to you is too much multitasking, but a freaking one-handed fistfight isn't?It's not "standing there waiting for the kaiju to come to you," it's preparing yourself for the Kaiju's opening attack, and that's if you can even see the kaiju before it attacks you in the first place. Throughout the movie, there's maybe once or twice where the Jaegers have any idea where the Kaiju is before it leapsout and attacks themand if you're holding that plasma charge, then what? You fall over and miss, most likely. And because you were concentrating on holding thatcharge, that's less you're concentrating on fighting and dodging.

A "one-handed fistfight" is going to be less strenuous because that's not what it is. It's just holding the (preferably already weakened) Kaiju in place while you get ready to finish it off.Answering the initial question, say you did have a massive artillery piece capable of firing massive shells (something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav - 7 ton shells out to 29 miles ). While this is a great amount of firepower, the US alone has 12,479 miles of coast they need to defend. That's 215 pieces to completely cover the coast without overlapping ranges. Not only that, but rate of fire is a concern - the linked piece could fire 1 round every 30 to 45 minutes or typically 14 rounds a day (you are, after all, trying to load a 7 ton object into something). Not to mention that kaiji are fast moving targets - something artillery is terrible at hitting precisely because they're so far away.

So while such pieces might be useful, ultimately, they would really only be useful as support (as they're used currently) not has a main offensive. And if you need a lot of fire power in one place, it's more practical to concentrate it into a Jaeger (or whatever the case may be). As far as the Jaegars not firing the first shot, it could be a matter of safety and/or combat longevity. A powered up weapon can potentially explode or a shot accidentally fired. And a powered up weapon may cause enough wear and tear that holding the charge or keeping the weapon active for prolonged periods might ultimately limit a Jaegers endurance - machine guns for instance typically need their barrels changed every few belts because of wear/tear and heat. Is it the 'best' move? Maybe not, but wantonly using up your resources isn't either.Of course, the real reason the plasma cannon must be mounted in a Jaeger's arm is that it's a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters.

Note that all cases of the Plasma Caster being used to kill something, it took way more than one shot, had to have the target be relatively immobile, and was at what amounts to kaiju-sized point-blank range. Having anything other than a jaeger go that close to a kaiju would amount to suicide, let alone finding a way to immobilize the kaiju long enough for multiple shots at the same location. All of the Jaeger's fancy weapons are used as finishers; it appears that heavy blunttrauma are needed to weaken the kaiju first to get through their thick hide before a deathblow can be dealt. Gypsy and Striker both were punching their opponents for a hell of a long time before whipping out any real weapons.The apparent requirements for a weapon able to hurt the Kaiju would preclude its



deployment on anything smaller than a Jaeger. You're going to need a massive power supply to feed the gun, and the gun itself is about three times the size ofa full-sized fishing trawler, going by the intro to the movie. Gypsy's power plant took several seconds to fully charge the cannon, indicating an enormous power requirement which would also add to the artillery piece's mass. Anything able to mount a gun like that would be gigantic and not very mobile, and range restrictions as demonstrated in the movie would mean it would have to get within point-blank range before firing, a prospect that would be daunting in an open field, let alone an urban environment. A Jaeger is pretty much the only weapons platform able to get that kind of a gun into range of a Kaiju and kill it without getting destroyed in the process.It's also worth noting that Gipsy's plasma cannon initially can't fire rapidly - each time it has to charge up before it can fire, as shown during the fight with Knifehead. By the time it gets broken out in the fight with Leatherback, it'sbeen upgraded to be more practical to use rapidly, but initially Gipsy was in abad position to be shooting at Leatherback with plasma charges - had they missed, they would have hit Striker, and even once on land they needed both hands to knock Leatherback around a little bit before they sacrificed the use of one handto bring out the plasma cannon. Chest Missiles as ArtilleryOne of the Jaegers had missile launchers in its chest. These proved highly effective against most of the Kaiju they were fired against. So why not mount these same missiles on conventional mobile artillery platforms, and launch them from there? Surely, a battallion of these missile launchers would be cheaper (and easie

r to find operators for) than a Jaeger.For that matter, why not put longer-range rocket motors on these missiles, and turn them into Cruise Missiles? Then they could be launched from anywhere.One word to address both: Mobility. It seems to be the key aspect regarding everything about Kaiju combat; Everything needed to take a Kaiju down needs to be in position to strike when the Kaijus have been beaten to a moment of weakness. The best method of applying this is to simply mount the weapons ON the Jaegers. The cruise missile could still theoretically be possible, but the size and complexity of the missiles would make such a thing difficult. And keep in mind; Just because we don't see it doesn't mean they haven't made something. Artillery and/or cruise missile variants of the anti-Kaiju missiles may very well exist in-universe.They may be used as a support salvo... but even that's contingent on being able

to spot the kaiji first. Also, missiles have a travel time - in the time it takes to get a target, aim, fire, and impact, the kaiji might already have hit land... at which point, we're already operating under a conditional mission failure since we're explicitly trying to stop them from damaging infrastructure and cities. And if the first salvo doesn't kill it or there is a need for an escalation in force, well... you're already screwed at that point because use of something like a nuke is going to do as much hard as good. By pushing initial contact out as far as possible, these options remain viable without causing damage to yourself.Also when we see the size of the missiles next to a person they look to be the length of a SAM missile and about 5 times as wide. You could fit one of those things on a truck and no more unless you started using mining equipment. And Depending on the ratio of warhead to motor its possible that their range made arming a

fleet of B-52's with them non-viable.They're even bigger than a SAM missile. These are missiles that would be comparable to medium-range missile artillery like a SCUD or MRLS battery. And these missiles appear to be short range, with less space given over to fuel and more given to payload and penetration capability. You're pretty much not going to be able to mount these on a tracked vehicle and have it remain relevant in a battle against something as mobile as a Kaiju; the only way you're going to get such a missile launcher in range to be effective would be to have it relatively close to the Kaiju. It would get a single salvo, at which point the Kaiju will either tank the hit and destroy the now-defenseless artillery, or it will go down. Too risk



hat regularly re-supply the group or the infrastructure to provide the resources for those ships to bring. Also, even for something like a battleship, typically only about 4 of any given class are ever built. 4. Now this isn't to say that they wouldn't try or want to build more (extinction and all that), but rather that demand may very well out pace supply and the ability to train/provide infrastructure. That's, after all, one of the reasons stated in the movie for the decline of the program to begin with - not that it wasn't effective, but that they simply could not keep up. You can have all the pilots you want, but no Jaeger, they're worthless. You can have both but without the support staff, that Jaeger canonly fight for so long. And perhaps more importantly, you don't build a multi-billion-dollar machine with the intent of using it as a general purpose fighting machine and not worry about attrition because you have reserves - the resource drain would be phenomenal and wasteful. There's no point in winning the fight against the kaiju if your infrastructure collapses.Another point is that Jaegars likely individually cost the resources to equal to an entire carrier battlegroup and beyond just to assemble, let alone maintain.Look at how big those things are; they can use tanker ships as hand weapons. The resources needed to even partially build a single Jaeger would likely bankruptmost modern nations' economies, even with wartime rationing and economic laws.It seems that at the height of Jaeger Combat, every Jaeger was basically it's own countries mark on the world; they probably wanted that mark to be unique for propaganda purposes and, at the time, there wasn't a need to mass produce them since the handful they had did the job well. It wasn't until Gipsy Danger's fateful battle with Knifehead that caused them to seriously reconsider the invincibili

ty of the Jaegers, at which point it became an arms race; each new jaeger had just enough new gadgets to survive until the Kaijus adapted again, at which pointthey had to overhaul the design again. There's also several hints that each Jaeger is tailor-made for it's first set of pilots; this is very obvious with the Crimson Typhoon, who can only be piloted by the Wei Triplets and no one else, which means mass production would be out of the question. Why does the rift work that way?Everything about the rift just screams at me. If you're going to make an interdimensional portal to send attacks through, why in the world would you:Put the entrance on your end right next to you, without defences? This is just a no-brainer.The portal doesn't appear to open into the heart of the aliens' territory. It opens into a factory that's assembling Kaiju. All the nuke did was take out a fact

ory; there's no indication that it wiped out the entire alien species.Put it on your ceiling? This way it needs upwards propulsion to send things through, and anyone attacking you can let gravity do the work.Don't assume that it was on the ceiling. Note how Gipsy was slowing down as it "descended". It is entirely possible that it was simply being carried "up" into the alien facility on momentum. If anything it looks almost as though it was a zero gravity underwater environment.Make it go two ways? If they can require authentication, then why ever allow anything back through? It's not like they value the kaiju highly enough to recoverthem once the planet-wrecking is over. You can just make a new portal once it'sready to harvest.It's hard to say since we don't know the limitations of the portal or how the aliens' technology works. As for the upward propulsion, there seemed to be little

gravity in the dimension.The thing about doorways is that, well, they are two-way in general. Don't assume that the aliens can make the portal one way.In general it helps to consider that it's less a rift which is natural and unpredictable in nature, and more like a Stargate. It's deliberately built to facilitate travel between point A and point B. It also helps to consider that the aliens thought themselves more advanced and likely didn't consider that Earth would figure out how to get back through the door. Wouldn't be the first war lost to hubris. Also? The aliens were pretty much winning up until that point. Humans only thought they were, the opening narration by Raliegh points this out.



Newt mentioned that the aliens are planning on colonizing earth; they may have needed to come back and forth between the rift after the kaijus have finished their extermination to coordinate their exodus. They probably never counted on anyone but them going back through the gate.They're not planning on colonizing, but harvesting. They aren't looking to expand onto Earth, but to take all the resources and leave a lifeless rock. Hence the need for a two-way door. Kaiju codenames and categoriesWho determines a kaiju's codename and category? The nicknames seem very on-the-nose despite the apparent complete lack of pre-mission briefings, while categories seem entirely arbitrary. The 5 doesn't seem meaningfully larger than the 4s.The kaiju's category is defined by their water displacement, toxicity level, and ambient radiation when they come through the breach. The Cat 5 kaiju (Slattern, H: 596' est. W: 6,750 tons est.) was MUCH larger than any previous one. He wasmore than double the weight of the heaviest Cat 4 (Scunner at 3,230 tons) and well over 100' taller than any previous one. The naming convention seems to be pretty general and random based on the shape they see when they come out. One Kaiju came out and his head was shaped like a knife, so let's call him "Knifehead". Another comes out shaped like a giant gorilla, let's call him "Leatherback". Oneis named "Sydney" because, well it's about to attack Sydney, Australia. Don't think too much about the codenames.You should also keep in mind that the kaijus are basically depicted in the movie as natural disasters. The naming and rating systems for kaijus closely resemble the naming and rating systems for hurricanes. Like the SaffirSimpson hurricane w

ind scale was created by a civil engineer and a meterologist, the kaiju scale was probably also created by people who research the kaijus. What it comes to thenames, is there really some logic to why a hurricane gets a name like Katrina? Like in the case of hurricanes, the names are probably just tools for referencing the kaijus.For hurricanes, they're named alphabetically in order of appearance for the year.Slattern is definitely much bigger than the others. Water-displacement and tonnage aside, when other kaiju face off against Gipsy, it's roughly proportionate to a male gorilla facing off against a human, maybe a grizzly bear fighting a manfor the Cat-4s. But when Slattern stands in front of Gipsy at the Rift's edge, it's more like rhino versus human.One thing to consider is that, due to the scale what we're talking about, bigger

may not seem noticeably bigger. When you're already 500 feet, an other 100 isn't nearly as much as it may seem. And weight is deceptive due to Cube Square Law- the weight tonnage will go up really really fast at that point. Look at Slattern - that extra 100 feet in height ''doubled' it's weight from the last 500 feet of height. Sure, the movie may not be going for a lot of accuracy in that department or the scale, but the idea applies. Narrow rift?Did they really think originally that the reason they couldn't fit a bomb through the rift was that it wasn't wide enough? Despite the fact that massive kaiju were getting through?The impression I got was that, prior to the events of the film, they believed the rift to be an unstable natural phenomenon and the kaiju to be gigantic wild animals from another dimension. Ergo, the kaiju incursions would be occurring when

ever the rift burped and got big enough to send one through. It spent most of its time being too small to send anything through.Yep. When Newton suggested they were essentially biological weapons, it completely changed the game. Before that, his theories were laughed at.They didn't think it was narrow, they thought it opened and closed. In fact, it's possible that that was correct, and that the DNA lock was there as extra insurance on top of that. Why build a wall?Why would you ever think that a wall of all things was a better method of dealing with kaiju than something that actually kills them right away? Your absolute b



est-case scenario is it can't get through, but it keeps battering away at the wall(thereby weakening it for the next attack) until it's dealt with, or worse, just goes over it. There is no reason to think that they'd just give up and go away - as far as anyone knows at that time, they're mindless. They also know the kaiju are changing to better deal with the defenses - it's much easier to overcome a (relatively small, judging by the height of the kaiju that broke through Sydney's) barrier than something that actively fights against the monsters and is capable of planning and doing new things.They were working under the assumption that the Kaiju were just wild animals. If that were true, the walls should have been perfectly adequate for deterring them.The breach in Sydney is the first ever recorded in at least half a decade sincethe walls first went up. It was incredibly fortunate that Striker Eureka was still there to fend Bladehead off, but up until very recently, the walls worked. And the alternative was pouring untold billions, if not trillions, into constantly constructing new Jaegers and finding warm bodies skilled enough to become pilots when the Kaiju keep on killing them.I'm decently sure the wall had mounted defensive turrets on it. I *could* be wrong and those might have been cranes for the construction, but one would think they weren't going to assume the kaiju were just going to run into a wall and go away, they were going to run into a wall and get shot at either until they died or went away. Still, the wall wasn't the best idea given that it was, essentially, surrendering the Pacific, which would cut out vast amounts of trade, transit,and fishing profits.

My personal guess was cultists sabotaging the defense efforts. We know kaiju-revering religions exist in this universe; we saw some in Japan. Whether they callthe thing they worship Dagon, Cthulhu, or something from Japanese culture, there were some people who were resigned to or even welcomed destruction. If any of them had infiltrated governments, they could have turned public policy and/or opinion against the Jaegers because they were effective. I realize there's little evidence of this in the movie, but it's not a terrible explanation for all the Idiot Balls being juggled.It's possible that the "suits" had been assuming the kaiju, like their skin parasites, wouldn't actually be able to survive in Earth's environment for long dueto incompatibility between their physiology and Earth's biosphere/atmosphere/hydrosphere. If they'd been told there isn't enough ammonia or digestible food available in the Pacific for an animal of their massive size and biochemistry, and t

hat the attacking kaiju were like dying animals lashing out in their slow, but inevitable death throes, then walling them off until they croak of natural causes might genuinely have sounded like a better plan than continually sacrificing billions of dollars on Jaegers. This reasoning falls apart if you know the kaiju are biological war machines, hence don't need to live long to fulfill their function, but nobody told the "suits" about that until too late.The idea that they were dying animals is somewhat disproven by the first Kaiju surviving six days of airstrikes before dying. When something that big is attacking, six days is a long time to hold a wall.The wall is quite possibly a simple vanity project to maintain some illusion ofprotection while the government works to protect what and whom it can. A bit cold, but had the last-ditch effort to close the rift not worked a fully-funded Jaeger program wouldn't have fared any better in the long-run. Riots were already b

reaking out worldwide over the those rich and fortunate enough to settle inland. Constructing defensive structures on an epic scale was intended to give the billions of coastal poor, whod otherwise overrun inland refuge settlements, a falsesense of protection and purpose. Also, it's likely the governments knew that the kaiju were attracted to population centers, so maintaining mass metropolitan populations on the coastline was likely very, very intentional.If the Kaiju are mindless, as initially believed, then they don't have any goals. They just head of in a random direction, and stuff gets crushed just because it's there. So logically, if a Kaiju encounterd a big wall, it would probably just bump into it once, and then turn in another random direction. Nobody expected



that a Kaiju would single-mindedly keep smashing that one wall until it broke.If nothing else, because walls worked in the past, in so far as popular perception goes. Castles, the Great Wall, the Dragon's Teeth, so on and so forth - walls have worked. The hitch - and this is something that may very well have occuredin-universe - is that while walls are impressive, as this headscratcher notes, walls are defensive. Sieges worked not because they were able to destroy the castle, but because the defenders more often ran out of supplies before re-inforcements came. Up until they learned that the kaiji had an actual purpose (war), a wall could very well have been seen as a good idea by both the majority of governments and civilians alike with only the PPDC and others realizing otherwise. Why not use the sword earlier?Why did Gipsy Danger rely so much on punches, improvised weapons, and seeminglyineffectual point-blank cannon shots in the Hong Kong fight? It had two swords built into its arms.Kaiju blood and guts is toxic. Since the sword didn't seem to be thermal based,it wouldn't have cauterized any wounds. Slicing either of those Kaiju to piecesin the middle of the city would have created a major biohazard.The above argument is confirmed by the co-author to be true: http://travisbeacham.tumblr.com/post/61739018157/so-one-thing-that-bothers-me-is-how-so-many-peopleWhy would they even mention that the blood is toxic if they had no intention ofmaking it a plot point? There were dozens of Hannibal's people fully exposed tothe blood and nobody bats an eye.Hannibal's people were in masks and hazmat suits.It has been stated officially that the people working for Hannibal are people th

at have already been infected with kaiju blood and were going to die anyway. Pretty tragic, actually.And, given China's often callous attitude toward worker safety, he might've simply not cared.For the most part, they never really needed anything more than that until now. Also, Raleigh didn't know about the blades since they were an upgrade to Gipsy Danger; he still should have known from drifting with Mori. It could also be because the pilots may not have been proficient in that kind of armed combat during the early days, and it would have resulted in problems with the drift for the pilots until they mastered a style.Drifting doesn't give you everything, I think is the implication.It still doesn't make sense that they didn't use the sword till later in the film. Don't want to spill toxic blood? Then why not stab it when they were still fi

ghting in the ocean? Besides blood spills anyway when they "check it's pulse" with the plasma weapon. Raleigh didn't know about the sword or couldn't learn about it from drifting? Then why didn't the people in charge tell him about this important addition that could save his life? (Especially since I think they listedsome other improvements that had been made.) Raleigh hadn't mastered it? He waspretty good when training with staffs, and didn't seem to have any problems when they fought with swords on the ocean floor. Forget fancy sword training, if they had just stabbed the kaiju in the face during the Rocket Punch scene the fight would have been over quickly.They don't want to spill the blood on land if they can avoid it. Raleigh is still unfamiliar with using the sword, though he does adjust very quickly. There would still be the concern of breaking the drift because he might have to start thinking about his movements. There is a big difference in fighting with a sword (w

e know he has training in) and a wrist-blade (which we don't have any referencefor). It is mentioned several times throughout the movie that instinct is better than analyzing. Next time you're walking down the street, focus on every aspect of your gait from the rotation of your hips to the way your foot rolls and seeif you can keep going without looking like a bow-legged duck.Supplementary material states that they worried about the toxic affects at first but as things escalated they stopped caring, the main reason they focus on punches and the like is that this is what the Jaegers are designed for and what thefirst generations of pilots where trained in. The whole idea was to replicate the impact pressures of a nuclear bomb without the collateral. A few thousand tons



of machine moving at however many 10's or 100's of metre's per second and concentrating that impact over a fist sized area is perfect for that, and got the job done quite well at first. It's only as the Cat3's and especially Cat4's show up that punches stop being enough on their own. But even then the Jaeger's appearto use them to soften the target up so they can use the long charge up time plasma casters and missiles we see.The swords appears to be a new addition to granteven greater concentration of force for taking on the new bigger Kaiju's. Everybody got complacentThe entire world is facing gigantic monsters. Completely new creatures with unheard of capabilities and strength. Now, I get that humanities first scientists would be focused almost exclusively on stopping them, and since they decided to do that with giant mobile weapons platforms, fine. What drives me up the wall is that apparently after designing all these robots, the scientists of the world just... Stopped. No, seriously, there is a period of time in the movie where we are stated to be easily beating Kaiju left and right to the point of merchandising, and humanity stops advancing. Gets complacent. And by the end, there are exactly two knuckleheaded scientists left in the world who apparently care enough about the Kaiju themselves and the Rift -which even by the end is mostly unexplained- to continue researching them. No. Damn. Way. What happened to actual research? Why didn't humans try to capture one of these things alive? Send probes down into the Rift? Or even better, try experiments?! All it would have taken to reveal the secret barcode nonsense about how only Kaiju can go through the Rift wouldbe something as simple as one guy going "Hey, these giant monsters can go through the Rift. Let's try dropping one of their carcasses down it, see if it goes in

!" Then humanity could have even gone on the offensive, or just launched a nukestrapped to a Kaiju corpse. But no. Out of the entire world, the only two people left to care are a Kaiju Otaku and a Hollywood Nerd. And by Anno they are terrible at their jobs.First off, what makes you think that the scientists just stopped? The Jaegers work, so wouldn't you think that they would be working to build better Jaegers? It's explicitly stated that the later models were more advanced, so obviously somebody was working on them.Second, there's no evidence that those two scientists were the only ones in theworld, they were just the only ones at that particular base. Most of the rest were probably working in actual labs. You know, places that aren't functioning military bases? (This leads to a little Fridge Brilliance about why they were so "terrible at their jobs": No respectable lab would hire those two nutcases, so the

y were the only ones available when Marshall decided he wanted his own science division.)Third, Kaiju corpses are explicitly stated to decompose extremely rapidly, so it would be a logistics nightmare to get the corpse back to the rift in time. (This leads to more Fridge Brilliance: Perhaps the creators designed the Kaiju thatway specifically to make it hard to use their corpses to open the rift and mount a counter-attack?) Also, the corpses were useful in other ways: they were presumably being dissected, used as trophies, and/or harvested for the Kaiju organ black market. If anyone had suggested taking this valuable source of information/morale/profit and dumping it back into the ocean, just to see what would happen,they'd be laughed out of the room (remember that the rift was thought to be a natural phenomenon at the time).First, yes I do think the scientists just stopped. The Jaegers worked, but evide

ntly not in any way that was that much more effective. The Gipsy Danger, a Generation 2 mech, ended up out-performing 3 different far more proven mecha. You can state that the later models were more advanced, but when the fastest mecha ever, the Generation 5 mech, still has real trouble against these creatures and mostly fights hand to hand, I don't think the scientists were doing much to advancethem. Also, there's a difference between engineers who kept the mecha working, and scientists who advanced the theory. \\ Second, it doesn't matter if there were hundreds more labs out there, none of them were able to make the kind of advances that were made at the very last minute during the years of relative peace they had while Jaegers were still taking down Kaiju easy. There was evidence that



no other scientists exist because these two were the only ones doing anything. They didn't even have assistants besides each other for crying out loud! \\ Third, considering how much time humanity had on it's hands while Kaiju weren't about to destroy the world, to the point of merchandise and gags on talk shows, theyhad to at least consider how to go through the Rift themselves. Evidently, the only thing they tried was firing missiles at it, which all bounced off. Common logic states that the Kaiju are getting through somehow though, so what would it take to get one of these rapidly deteriorating bodies to the Rift in order to try this theory? ...How about a live captive. If you can kill it with plasma, you can likely find a way to sedate or shock it into unconsciousness, or at the least bind it's body for experiments. Also, Hannibal was keeping entire storehouses of live Kaiju specimens, including somehow skin ticks. If a glorified bone powder dealer can figure out how to keep these things stable, ("AMMONIA!") then an entire government team with years of time should be able to do it. It's not "just to see what would happen," it's figuring out through experimentation how in the hell these things can get through the Rift when nothing else, organic or non-organic, can get through.Minor correction: it was stated in the movie that Gipsy Danger had been rebuiltinto something more unique. Presumably, it ended up being a melding of the Gen 2 designs (nuclear powered, not slaved to the bases' systems) and Gen 3 designs (I don't know exactly what that would entail).Correction: Gipsy Danger was a Mark 3 Jaeger, and Cherno Alpha a Mark 1. Assuming that Striker Eureka is the one and only Mark 5, that means Crimson Typhoon isMark 4. Since Jaegers are only as good as their pilots, we're to understand that

Gipsy Danger's amazing performance in combat is due to the high drift compatibility of its pilots.Pentecost explicitly describes their performance as incredible, so i think it'ssafe to say they where pushing it well beyond any kind of expected performance level. Also the retrofit could have included a bunch of stuff slated for cancelled future jaegers, which would make it a hybrid Mk3/Mk6.Assuming the Rift was a naturally forming phenomenon, that would be a huge scientific endeavour into our understanding of quantum physics, and the kaiju represent a real world example of divergent evolution. Even something as basic as discovering that all the kaiju are clones should have been figured out after only a few attacks due to studying the DNA and physiology of the corpses. Up until the end, it was assumed each kaiju was a different species. I have to agree about the lack of scientific study. Striving to understand the rift would be something th

at might cease once they realized kaiju would continue to come through, but dissecting what was left of them should have been one of the highest priorities. Understanding the tactics and capabilities of your enemy is paramount in fighting a war.The Breach had obviously been thoroughly studied, Hermann (who most likely was a physics expert) had a model on how it worked and there was a public knowledge of it being a passage to another dimension. The part concerning their lack of understanding of Kaiju biology is somehow explained by the Word of God mention that they actually are silicon-based beings, which would require a LOT of new research. It's perfectly possible that by the time of the film's events, only recently scientiests were able to crack the Kaiju's DNA code.Scientific research by no means is something cheap. Although it is one of the top priorities, you need to consider the huge investiment being made in building a

nd maintaining the Jaegers. They are amidst a war, being attacked every once ina while and spending tons of money just to keep themselves from being utterly destroyed, all the time with a very damaged economy. Also, a good part of scientific research is done by Universities, which in this scenario would have lost a good part of their budget, thus being unable to keep research and teaching resulting in a shortage of new scientific minds.That said, Crimson Typhoon had more advanced weaponry than Gipsy Danger and Gipsy Danger had more advanced weaponry than Cherno Alpha, so there WAS scientific research. Just compare Brawler Yukon toany other Jaeger and that becomes pretty clear. It's just that they were putting it all in making better Jaeger tech, most likely because they thought the Kaiju



would eventually stop coming or that the Jaegers would be enough to take care of them until they found a final solution. They didn't expect that there would be stronger Kaiju since the Jaeger Program worked out pretty well until it didn't. And, if nothing of that convinces you, there's still the MST3K Mantra.According to the Fridge page, the Kaiju Bosses may have learned about the three"on-deck" Jaegers when Newt drifted with them and been tailored accordingly. Gipsy Danger was an unknown quantity to Newt, and therefore to them.Remember that this is primarily an action movie, so naturally, it focused on the action. Every second of screentime spent on Technobabble is a second that isn't being spent on Mecha suplexing Kaiju. So, just because these things didn't geteven a passing mention on-screen doesn't mean they didn't happen.1. Yes, Gipsy Danger performed better than the Gen 5 models against Kaiju that were specifically designed to fight Gen 5 models, and that had already been weakend by fighting the first wave of Jaegers (or by having a nuke go off in their face). And, yes, there's a difference between scientists and engineers. Scientist: "I've discovered something! Kaiju stomachs don't produce any acid! Since theirblood is so acidic already, it just uses blood as the acid to start digestion!"Engineer: "Great. How does that help me build a better Jaeger?"2. They were the only ones shown doing anything on-screen. They didn't have anyassistants because they were on a military base that probably wasn't even supposed to have a science division at all. They were probably supposed to ship any recovered Kaiju parts to a properly equipped lab, one that had assistants and everything. And the only reason they were able to make any progress at all is because one of them plugged a Kaiju brain into his own. Because that sounds like somet

hing any sane scientist would do as a matter of routine, instead of something that's likely to scramble your brains and be reserved as a last resort.3. I'm sure they tried all sorts of probes, x-rays, ultrasound, etc. to check out the portal. None of which resulted in militarily significant intelligence, and so wasn't mentioned by the military personel who had the lion's share of the screen time. Also, capturing anything alive is much, much harder than just killing it. Go watch any nature documentary or reality show which involves trapping wild animals, and then imagine how much shorter the episode would be if they'd used a pistol instead. The difference here is that the extra time is measured in danger to human lives even if the Kaiju is in the middle of nowhere, there's stillthe danger to the Jaegers and pilots. And, so, having spent the time, expense, and human lives required to capture the thing alive, you want to drop it into the ocean, just to see if the portal reacts, instead of studying this live specimen

of humanity's worst enemy? Yes, dropping it into the rift would have provided vital information, but they didn't know that, and, based on what they knew at the time, studying the Kaiju itself would be far more likely to result in useful data. Of course, this is all assuming that the creators didn't equip their weapons with a Self-Destruct Mechanism specifically to prevent capture.The not knowing about them all having the same DNA is a little harder to explain, but it could be that he just missed the article that particular fact was published in. Or, he could have known all along, but was just now explaining it to Marshall.I disagree with the above. That scientific data would have been extremely useful. Knowing that the blood is toxic would have allowed the engineers to design a more effective coolant or neutralizing layer to the mechs. They could have also replaced their bladed weapons with blunt force defenses like hammers or flails or

prevent artery breaches, or even super-heated the blade to cauterize wounds. Any information could be used against the enemy.I think his point wasn't about they discovering that the Blood was acidic, theyalready knew about Kaiju Blue, but about the digestive system. The thing is: every practical scientific discovery comes after a lot of not so practical discovery and they were running against time. Maybe they were researching while all they had to fight were Cats. 1 and 2, but once things got ugly, they went desperate. There's also the points posted above around the issue of capturing living specimens. And, besides, we didn't see much of the Kaiju War. As far as I know, somewhere, someone might very well be researching and not being listened to or not co



ming to much results. Studying animals is hard work. Studying beings extremely different of anything we know? Good luck. Also, focusing too much in the scientific side of the thing could've ruined the movies rhythm. That's still an action flick, guys.Along similar lines to the above: if all the kaiju are clones, why are they different? They would have had to undergo massive Bio-Augmentation to go from genetically identical creatures to one with wings and an acid sack and another with an EMP generator etc. Phenotypic plasticity can only go so far. I guess making them clones was an easy way to have Newt discover that they were engineered. Except you can have organisms that are clones just from asexual reproduction. It would have made more sense if they'd put in a couple more lines explaining "they're genetically identical but they look really different and that couldn't happen naturally."One of the scenes when the scientists drift with the kaiju seems to show a kaiju being assembled rather than grown. Presumably the Masters have a stock of genetically identical muscle tissue, bones, eyes, etc. that they then put together, much like how machines can be assembled from various off-the-shelf parts. That does raise the question of why one would be pregnant, but that could be explainedaway. Like, maybe being pregnant makes it more aggressive.Maybe the Kaiju was pregnant simply because the Masters allowed the Kaijus to mate.It's possible that they were basically trying stuff and seeing what worked. Assuming the rift activation schedule was a limitation of the technology, they onlyhave one chance at a time. So, they started by making them bigger and stronger.

Then they started with unique attack abilities.DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleic acid, which is the building block of all life on earth. Most scientist who seriously think about life evolving on different planets doubt that they would have actual DNA- as in the aforementioned molecule. The odds of life from another universe where the laws of physics themselves may well be different being based on deoxyribonucleic acid are, well...suffice to say, the kaiju most likely don't actually have DNA by the true scientific definition of the term. When Newt says they have identical "DNA", he's using that as short hand for whatever molecule they are actually based on. The reason it took so long to discover they're all identical is because it likely took several years tocrack the code on precisely what that molecule is and how to compare it from one to the other.Be careful about the fallacy that better/advanced means better overall. Advances

in tech aren't something you plan - Jaegars could be advanced not because there was some great leap in an arbitrary 'power' rating, but in safety (congrats, no radiation poisoning), responsiveness (congrats, you don't have seizures), cost(congrats, it only takes 1 billion dollars), and so forth. And don't assume that just because they're more advanced or later models, that they have some mystical betterness that makes them better in all areas. Kevlar is highly bullet resistant but it does absolutely nothing for knives and blades which have been aroundfor thousands of years. Fighter jets are incredibly advanced machines but really really suck at short range because they're moving so darn fast (that's why youhave copters). The A-10 is decades old but is still a highly reliable machine. One advert for a new generation of phone touts it as having a highly advanced digital camera component... the same components that have been in your digital camera for years (just now you can talk on it). As far as the Breach, reaching somet

hing at the bottom of the ocean isn't as easy it seems. There's currently 1 ship (the Alvin) capable of deep sea exploration (and even then it can't reach the bottom). It's also barely big enough to hold three people. Kaiji are massive with incredible swim speeds. The combination means that exploring the rift in person is practically suicide if a kaiji is anywhere close by. You could send a Jaegar but that means retrofitting it so that it can perform useful scientific studies. And theres nothing to say that they didn't try to explore it (they do have a lot of information about it) and such difficulties meant they couldn't afford torisk any further loss of life and equipment. And why it may seem silly that people would slowly lose interest in the matter, it's not as silly as it may seem. L



ook at AIDS - after the initial panic, how often does the public actually thinkabout it nowadays? Very little because advances in medicine have made it liveable... just like the Jaegars did.On the subject of scientific progress; The entire timeline of the Kaiju War from when Trespasser made landfall till they bombed the Rift with Gipsy is just barely over a decade. In that time they've learned about Kaiju Blue, known about the chemical composition of the Kaijus, and cracked their DNA (or whatever is the equivallent) code. This is in between having to fight for their lives for most of it and not having any clue on exactly what a Kaiju is. And given that humans only had a handful of specimens to study, most of which were either too radioactive (from the nuking), toxic (from Kaiju Blue) or decayed to be effective to be used, it's amazing they know as much as they do already. What about the islanders?This is a bit of Fridge Horror there... but what about the millions of people who live in the Pacific Ocean? Surely they were evacuated, right? Or even worse... what if there was nobody to evacuate because a Kaiju could take out an entire island nation in only an hour?The kaiju seemed to be focused on heading for highly populated areas, so the islands would probably been fine for a while. They probably intended to exterminate the same way we would, focus on the largest concentration as the source and goafter any outliers or stragglers from there.Also, the news reports implied that only the rich would be able to relocate inland, while the poor were left behind.If it makes you feel any better, when Pentecost is talking to the UN representat

ive from the United States, the US' massive "port cities" are listed as Anchorage, Honolulu, and one other. So that means that the Hawaiian islands, at least, have not been completely destroyed, if Honolulu is still counted as a city rather than a pile of rubble.Travis Beacham, the film's screenwriter, was asked this on his Tumblr. He answered: "Kaiju tend to head for heavily populated areas. So if you live in up around Mendocino or on the island of Nauru or someplace like that, youre probably never going to see one." Why didn't Hansen eject?If the Jaegers have ejection systems, why didn't Pentecost have Hansen eject before detonating the warhead? Unlike Pentecost, Hansen was still young and not terminally ill, so he had no reason to sacrifice himself, and it was clearly shownbefore the mission that he would have wanted to come back alive. Plus, Pentecost

has already proven that he can solo pilot a Jaeger if he needed to. Sure, the ejection pod might have gotten destroyed in the nuclear blast, but he still would have had much better chances of surviving than staying in the cockpit.Not enough time. He can't wait for the escape pod to get out of range of the blast, and a nuclear bomb that size has a lot of range. Raleigh, OTOH, has the advantage of detonating his nuke on the other side of a dimensional portal; all they need is enough seconds to make it to the portal and they're clear. And all this is assuming that any one of the three kaiju surrounding his immobile Jaeger didn't just grab the helpless escape pod and eat it anyway.I doubt that Hansen couldn't have gone for the escape, at least. Pentecost had the Chekhov's Skill of being one of two men to have piloted a Jaeger in combat solo. Combine that with the fact that Pentecost was wanting to go out fighting instead of slowly die from his cancer, he could have stayed behind and kept the oth

er two kaiju distracted with Striker while Hansen escaped. Simple as that.Yes, and Slattern plucks the unarmed, unpowered, drifting escape pod out of thewater as easily as a man grabs a sponge floating by in the bathrub and eats him. Then the Marshal has to blow his nuke alone anyway. Chuck Hansen didn't eject because they were already surrounded and he had nowhere to go, its that simple.Except the Kaiju will always focus on the biggest threat presented to them. In the Hong Kong battle, the kaiju actively ignored the disabled Striker Eureka until the Hansens provoked them. In Mako's flashback the kaiju chasing her immediately broke off the chase when a Jaeger appeared. The kaiju would have been too focused on destroying Striker Eureka to bother with a relatively harmless ejection



pod.The Hansens are precisely my point. The kaiju 'know', from their prior experience, that if the pilots are starting to climb out of the Jaeger, the Jaeger is nolonger a threat and its time to squish the pilots. Obviously, 'solo-qualified pilot still inside with nuclear suicide charge handy' is an exception to this rule, but they're not clairvoyant.Chuck said that half their systems were down so it's possible there was no chance of using the escape pod, maybe the AI knew it was jammed or something?And he was going to...what, outrun and float above the nuclear blast that created a void in the ocean? The blast was big enough that it emptied a section of the biggest body of water on the face of the planet. Even if the escape pod somehow survived the initial blast (hint: It would not), the impact would have sent the pod flying at speeds that would have left the person inside it as some kind ofthick paste. He doesn't eject because ejecting has absolutely no chance whatsoever of improving his odds of survival.Gipsy Danger's pod escapes the Jaeger's nuclear detonation with only minor damage. Your argument is invalid.Gipsy Danger's pod survived because it fell back through the portal and was in another universe from the detonation, not because it was that resilient.Clearly, the escape pods were one of the systems on Striker Eureka that were damaged in the fight.As far as why Chuck didn't use an escape pod, a common belief in fanon and possibly a confirmed fact in canon is that you never leave your co-pilot behind. While it was entirely possible that he could have gone and maybe even survived after

that, Hansen was basically raised in a Conn-Pod. He's had the whole "never leave your co-pilot" thing drilled in his head since he was in the academy, so it was probably a matter of pride for him. Even before detonate the payload when he's saying his awkward goodbyes to Herc, you can tell he had resigned himself to the fact that he was wasn't going to live.This troper believes the reason that Chuck didn't eject is the two-key principle with nuclear weapons: both pilots are required in order to set the nuke off. Pentecost moves forward without approvalPentecost's superiors tell him at the beginning that he can't enact his plan. How come he gets to do it anyway?Because after they pulled his funding, he went and brokered a deal with Hannibal Chau the Rangers' cooperation with the black market in kaiju parts, in return for Chau's money (and presumably some from the city government of Hong Kong's, wh

ich I'm sure liked having its own private defenders) to fund continuing operations. Remember Pentecost's comment as they arrive at the Shatterdome? "We're not the military anymore, we're the Resistance." At the end, Pentecost was fighting his own private war he'd gone rogue and taken the Jaegers, the Rangers, and their support crews with them. They'd basically become Shatterdome PMC at that point, and the only reason they were getting away with it is because why bother to stop them? They're only going to get themselves killed, and besides, its kinda hard to stop angry Jaegers with conventional troops anyway.At the beginning of the "present day" part of the movie, Pentecost was given eight months' worth of funding, very clearly just to shut him up. They didn't carewhat he did with that funding, be it attempting a desperate-seeming plan or buying eight months of Hookers and Blow.If nothing else, as long as Pentecost is fighting Kaiji, from a pragmatic standp

oint, it buys the Wall time to be built or other solutions to be found without any additional cost. So even though funding has been pulled doesn't mean that his general support was pulled too. Why do you need a neural connection?The reason why there are 2 pilots is because the neural link is too strenuous for 1 person to stand for very long. However, why is a direct neural link necessary to pilot the Jaeger? Wouldn't hand and feet controls (which Jaegers have anyway) work just as well?Proprioception. Kinda hard to pilot something that huge and awkward with the finesse and precision necessary for hand-to-hand combat if you have no sense of how



it's moving and exactly where the limbs are. Hell, its hard enough to know exactly where your bumpers are when you're just parallel parking your car, doing itfor your hands and feet in a 250-foot tall giant robot without an actual nervous system connection to them would be impossible... especially when you're not just trying to walk, but also trying to wrestle and swordfight. Pregnant KaijuWhy would the aliens send a pregnant Kaiju?So they wouldn't have to waste resources making more?Possibly simply as an experiment of some short. It seemed Leatherback and Otachi were very experimental kaiju by the aliens.Von Neumann machine. Its a lot easier to scourge the entire earth if your biological constructs are self-replicating. Also, those kaiju were sent on a specificmission to find and kill Newton. If you're going to be looking for something assmall as a human, carrying along mini-kaiju to deploy as 'small craft' to your 'dreadnaught' would be an obvious aid to that mission. Unfortunately, they weren't quite ready to drop yet... but the kaiju were laying that mission on in a hurry, seemingly.Or possibly they'd been intending to wait until Otachi had given birth and theyhad two acidspitters (or even more!) but Newt's hacking into their hivemind scared them and they sent Otachi in out of panic.The film's novelization goes into more detail about the whole pregnancy deal. Newt says that he always thought the Kaiju could breed since they do possess reproductive organs, and confirms that it was within the Masters' plans to make themreproduce locally once the Breach allows the passage of two of them.

The Kaiju creators have gained an understanding of what they're facing through Newt's drift. The "baby" Kaiju may have been thrown in as a last-ditch attempt to get him in case the main attack -which was likely thrown together rather quickly after Newt drifted with the Kaiju brain- was defeated. They would have known Newt wanted another brain to drift with, so it was not too much to expect he would end up near enough to the Kaiju's body for such a trap to work - and it nearly did.Well, you see, when two Kaiju love each other very much...Why wouldn't they send one? Unless the pregnancy inhibited the kaiji's combat ability, they probably don't care. They are weapons of war, after all. And unlessthe pregnancy/birthing period was so debilitating (long period of time for instance), even if the kaiji had reduced combat effectiveness, they might still not care. A baby kaiji requires lots of resources to grow so why not make your enemy

provide it; a defensive protective momma kaiji is always handy. And it may havebeen to help lay the ground work for bigger plans by providing enough of a logistical base for more and bigger kaiji to be brought through. How does Hannibal survive the Kaiju Blue?"Kaiju Blue" is incredibly toxic and dangerous. How is Hannibal able to carve his way out of Otachi Jr., seemingly without ill-effects?Only seemingly, perhaps it might be something due to the creature still being practically fetal, but that should mean it's permeated with more of mom's toxic juices, not less.He's the leading pioneer on the utilization of Kaiju bodyparts, secretions, andother. He may have developed or (more likely) paid someone to develop a counter-agent to Kaiju Blue. It might also explain how he got enough funds that the PPCD could deal with him, (No sense getting in bed with a poor black market dealer)

counties would pay a lot of money for that stuff. Also, Rule of Funny.Also, we know someone else who survived Kaiju Blue exposure without apparent ill effects except slight hair discoloration: Mako.Word of God says Mako's "hair discolouration" is dye, not a symptom of KB exposure.It's possible it's a toxin that requires long term exposure over the course of day's, weeks or years to be deadly.Kaiju Blue kills within hours or days. Tendo's grandfather died from it in San Francisco. But he got covered in Kaiju blood from a wound. Mako did not get exposed to Kaiju Blue. Onibaba went down, but Kaiju Blue happens as decomposition hap



pens. I'd say the baby's Kaiju Blue was probably not powerful enough or ...Because he's Ron PerlmanThe WMG section has a pretty interesting theory concerning Hannibal.Taking into account the fact that kaiju blue takes "hours to days" to kill, it could be as simple as the Stinger being out of chronological order with the ending of the film. Giving the lighting in the scene, it's entirely possible that ittakes place moments after Newt & Numbers left to get back to the Shatterdome. I'd also imagine that whatever steps Hannibal's people took to neutralize the blue on site had an affect on the stuff inside the kaiju & kaiju baby.Almost certainly, the Stinger does take place very soon after Newt's departure;otherwise, Chau would have suffocated long before the kaiju blue could poison him. Salvage Crimson TyphoonOk, I understand why Cherno Alpha was unsalvageable, but why didn't they salvage Crimson Typhoon? I mean yeah, it's head was taken off and its pilots died, butotherwise, it seemed to be completely undamaged except for its claws. And Mark 3 and higher Jaegers seemed to have detachable heads anyway.It may well be salvageable, but it likely wasn't doable in the time they had available to them; even if it was, they probably couldn't come up with a three manteam to pilot it.Yeah, remember, Striker had virtually no damage and Gipsy's was mostly outer plate damage, the internals were largely untouched so both would have been quick repair jobs. Crimson would have taken much longer to assemble a new head for, especially if a lot of important electronics where in the head.

Pentacost actually commands that the three Jaegers be retrieved. I assume that means that Chreno, Crimson, and Striker were brought back, assuming he didn't consider Gyspy since it could move under it's own power. I would assume Crimson Typhoon will be repaired, but it wouldn't be possible to have it operational for the final mission of the movie.Not to mention they'd have to train three new pilots.Salvaging old Jaegers just doesn't seem to be Pentecost's way of doing things. He only brings back Gipsy Danger as a last resort, and requires a significant amount of time to restore it to working order.As stated before, the Crimson is unique in that it needed 3 pilots to work. It's likely that they couldn't even retrofit the rest of the chassis to work with anormal conn-pod, and finding another set of people to do the Thundercloud on such short notice was impossible. There's also the fact that the Crimson went down

hilariously fast; one smack of a grabby tail into the head and the entire Jaeger was crippled. The Cherno, in comparison, actually held it's own for a while until Leatherback and Otachi double-teamed it, and even with it's reactor torn out, arm dismembered and it's cockpit flooded, it was still functioning until Leatherback crushed it's conn-pod. The Crimson was way too fragile now that the Kaijus were actively going for it's weakpoint Pentecoste would definitely have thought it'd be way too much risk for way too little return. Radio back to baseWhy didn't Newt just radio the Shatterdome and tell them what they had found instead of getting on a chopper to tell them personally? Were they that excited?Newt isn't exactly one of the most logical people around. He's a borderline Bunny-Ears Lawyer.Borderline?

They're in the middle of an insanely important combat operation, and the eccentric scientist guys radio in with some weird story about drifiting with a dead kaiju and finding out that the people who control the kaiju (a concept that flies in the face of the conventional wisdom) won't allow the bomb through the rift (another crazy hypothesis) without a kaiju corpse around it. Yeah, it's important if true but it sounds totally insane and mission control has better stuff to be doing right now.Communication between the Shatterdome and the city is probably restricted during an active battle with kaiju, because the operation takes priority over everything else. The Marshal can't afford to be distracted by civilian authorities calli



ng him in mid-battle to bitch about damaged skyscrapers or ask who's going to pay for that oil tanker Gipsy'd just smacked a kaiju in the face with.Except for the part where they rode back to base on what appears to be a Shatterdome chopper. Most likely, he just wasn't thinking logically. DinosaursSo, the aliens realized that Earth's atmosphere is bad for them only after wiping out all dinosaurs? Wouldn't it make more sense to check it before launching an operation that probably (basing on their strategy from the movie) took many years and lots of resources to complete?The dinosaurs were the Kaiju.No, they weren't. Newt was explaining how the Masters were planning to wipe theearth clean of humans using the kaiju...just like they had wiped it clean of the dinosaurs in the past.So, they were here for 135 million years?Plus, the Dinosaurs were only a fraction of the size of the Kaiju. And it wouldalso mean that our modern-day birds somehow are descendants of biological war machines from another dimension.It doubt the Kaiju took that long to exterminate the dinosaurs, since the dinoscertainly lacked any way to put up a defense. The Masters probably debated for a while about what to do since the earths's conditions were less than ideal, andthe consensus was just to wait for a while (remember, we have no idea how long living these aliens are) and pherpas conquer other planets that were more suitable. In the movie it is established that they didn't expect to find the earth inhabited by us Humans.

Well, there is that comet to remember. Perhaps it was a case of incredibly bad timing - Just as they were almost done with the dinosaurs and ready to take Earth for themselves, a giant rock crashes the party and screws up the climate.The real question is, how the heck do the humans know that kaiju had anything whatsoever to do with the dinosaurs? Did somebody dig up a kaiju fossil that dated to the Mesozoic, and just happen to do so simultaneous with the current round of kaiju attacks?Newt was the first person to know anything about that. And no, someone missed the point. The argument was made that if the Kaiju were dinosaurs, then the Kaijusomehow stuck around on Earth for 135 million years. Or, 67.5 times as long as humanity, because that's how long the dinosaurs survived. The comet also doesn'tseem to have anything to do with this, because the aliens were repelled by the oxygen-rich atmosphere the dinosaurs thrived in. The comet had nothing to do with

foiling them.Indeed, far more likely is that a Kaiju showed up ~65 million years ago, possibly as a scout, causes significant ecological damage to wipe out the most dominant form of life on the planet at that time (dinosaurs), then retreats after planetary conditions are considered sub-optimal by the Masters.How do we know? We know because Newt drifted with a Kaiju brain and hacked intotheir hive mind. He got all his data from their memories. Why are the Jaegers so spread out?So the kaiju all come from a single location, and up until recently only appearone at a time in long intervals apart. So why were the Jaegers stationed all over the world, rather then circled around the rift?Because the Rift is in the middle of the ocean (where it is hard to build a base and you don't want to build a floating or on-stilts base over Kaiju Central), t

he Kaiju have always swam absurdly fast, and they tend to go out from the portal towards numerous destinations worldwide.Also, as was demonstrated in the final battle, Jaegers don't fight very well underwater.There's a reason why the Jaegers stay at the "miracle mile" off-coast: so that they can intercept the kaiju close enough to the shore that they can fight with maximum effectiveness while avoiding damaging the cities and putting people at risk. Why are the Jaegers so big?Rule of Cool aside, why did they make they Jaegers so damn big? It's quite likel



y that a Jaeger with half the mass of the ones depicted in the film would be able to operate with only one pilotand the highly exclusive Drift Compatibility factor goes right out the window. Anyone qualified to be a fighter pilot could be aJaeger pilot. Hell, judging by what we see in the film, a slightly tech-savvy Mixed-Martial-Arts fighter could be a Jaeger pilot. These smaller Jaegers, due tothe lower resource cost and far more simple (and durable) bodies, could be built and maintained by the dozens, rather than, at the most, twenty. That means, rather than fighting one on one, Jaegers could take Kaiju in packsThese are questions that would technically apply to any giant robot show. Giantrobots are inherently Awesome but Impractical.Not to mention that half-size Jaegers would get crunched like Peter Dinklage vs. the Rock in close-combat with the cat 4s. The Jaegers are built that damn big because they're fighting things that are that damn big and getting bigger all the time. They'd likely build the Jaegers even bigger if they had the engineering,time, and resources to do it. And yes, pack tactics. Pack tactics assume that you'll be losing some mini-Jaegers in every fight. But a war of attrition favors the kaiju.The Jaegers were made with the priority of stopping the kaiju from making landfall. They're a defensive mobile wall with offensive capabilities, meant to stop kaijus in their tracks; hence the "grapple with them" idea behind their conception. It's almost like football in that regard; you want huge, tough linebackers who can tackle hard and stop the kaiju from making their play. Smaller Jaegers would get ignored or brushed aside as the kaijus make their way onto the cities, and once they're there, Kaiju Blue will do the rest.

Neural linking didn't burn solo pilots' brains out because the Jaegers were big, it burned them out because they're complicated. Piloting a thirty-foot robot of comparable complexity would be just as hard as piloting a two-hundred-foot one.They are so big because can you imagine trying to build something with that many moving parts and complexities AND be built to withstand the punishment of the Kaiju without it being massive? It was my thought that they are not that big "only" to fight the big monsters, but also, they can't build them much smaller due to all the components that go into them. It is a matter of durability plus offense plus moving parts plus current tech. All that equals big damn robot. Second headsetWhere did Newton get the second headset for the drift with Herman and Otachi Junior?That looked like an actual drift rig the second time, instead of his homemade ki

t-bashed version. Standard-issue drift rigs come in pairs.He most likely asked it to be delivered from the Shatterdome. Marshal Stacker did support Newt's endeavor, so he probably issued orders akin to "give this man whatever he requests". Open another breachWhy can't the aliens just open another Breach? If they had the power to do it twice (dinos and Pacific Rim), then they can do it a third time. Fridge Horror much?Actually we don't know that the breach was ever closed between the dinosaurs and the events of the movie. It was established that when a Kaiju isn't coming through, it's not possible for anything to enter through the breach, and seeing howlittle of the ocean floor we've explored, it's not that ridiculous to assume that the breach stayed 'open' but unused the whole time.

Several points. 1: We just detonated a nuke inside the alien base. Presumably, this destroyed the portal generator, killed most or all of the Masters supervising the attack, and probably destroyed most of the Kaiju they'd been breeding forthe primary assault. 2: The Kaiju must take an insane amount of resources to grow and feed, especially the Cat5 (and 6 and 7) monsters that were about to be sent through. 3: The Masters have no clue how we got though their gate. As far as they know, we could do it again as soon as they open the next gate. For all these reasons, they'll probably write Earth off as too dangerous and expensive to attack again.They have more than one parallel earth to conquer it seems. Maybe they will try



one who does not fight back.Related to the above, why didn't the Masters open a second Breach, say in the Atlantic? More than double the territory to defend means more than double the Jaegers needed to keep up, and a far greater chance of getting Kaiju through to destroy our cities and manufacturing.There's no reason to assume the Masters can pinpoint where on a planet's surface their rifts will open. Heck, if they had that level of control, they'd probably have placed their first one somewhere on the Eurasian continent instead of wayout in the Pacific where each kaiju would have to swim hundreds of miles beforeit got to a city worth attacking.The Masters aren't exactly in a hurry. Last time they were on Earth it was several million years ago, and they just decided to wait for a while. For them, opening another breach to save some years of conquest would be akin to buying an expensive sports car just to get a couple seconds earlier at work. Not worth the effort.Why are we assuming the dimension-spanning giant monster building alien race waited several million years from their perspective? If they've mastered portals between dimensions, what's to say they can't just pick the time of their invasiontoo? Or that their time matches up with ours? That's probably more appropriate to a WMG, but I think it's worth noting that from the aliens' perspective they could have tried once to test the waters, noted it wasn't optimal, then just skipped forward until it was.Breaches are probably ridiculously expensive to open. They definitely weren't making full use of the Pacific breach up until the end, and even then it wasn't cl

ear whether they were. Besides, it's an obvious Sequel Hook.If nothing else... they were winning the war of attrition and if it weren't forNewt, they would have won in a few years once the Jaegers were gone (the Walls would not have stopped them and the ramp up time to make something even better than Wall or Jaegers would be years down the line). And we know they're a patientbunch. So there's not really a lot of compelling reasons for them to change tactics or speed up their schedule of escalation. Send all the Kaiju at onceWhy do the Kaiju come only in intervals? Wouldn't it make sense for all of the kaiju to be sent through at once?The Breach operates like the wormhole junctions from Honor Harrington; it can only pass so much mass per individual transit, and then it 'closes' and remains close for X period of time. Unlike the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, however, the

Breach actually improves with repeated transit... gradually. So, at the very opening of the Breach it can only open once every few months and only let through something as large as a Cat 1. But after repeated uses it gets slightly bigger and bigger, and the dimensional conduit is more... 'stable', we'll say... and so it can be opened more often, and transmit more mass per jump. Until finally, after a dozen years of regular use, it becomes big enough to finally start sending through the Cat 5s. Short version: If the aliens could dump all the kaiju out atonce, they would have. However, the Breach has a harsh mass limit per unit timeas to how much it can move, so, they have to take the openings as they come.I thought they were just sending them through in mathematical progression.The mathematical progression was due the limitations of the Breach.It could also be that the Masters just don't want to waste resources, so if we hadn't invented the Jaegers they'd have just sent through a Cat1 or Cat2 every fe

w months because nothing more was needed.It's more likely from the limitations of the portal. Gottlieb's theory about the rate of Kaiju appearances and their predictability kind of lends itself to theidea that the portal was steadily becoming more stable, allowing more mass to be shoved through. No one realized that the Kaiju were more than just animals?I can buy that the general consensus for a while was that the Breach was an unfortunate freak occurence of nature, and that the Kaiju were just animals from another dimension. But after seeing that the Kaiju came up stronger and stronger with each wave, and that they always went headfirst for a heavily populated city,



woulnd't be pretty logical to assume there was more to them? I mean, it took 12years for a scientiest to say "Hey, lets run two DNA tests on different Kaiju samples to see if something is up".He says DNA, but they might run off of a completely alien biology. It might have taken that long to even realize which microscopic bit carried the information they needed to compare.It also might be a fluke, remember it's not that all the kaiju are identical it's that they're all clones and the two samples Newt had were identical. It couldalso be noone had samples of two identical ones to compare before especially since it's mentioned at some point that dead kaiju decay very quickly if left unclaimedUp until Newt made a discovery, they had never seen anything like kaiju as a weapon of war. What reason would they have to think that? The getting stronger could be seen any number of things (we were weeding out weakers ones allowing other, stronger, ones to breed and look for food). And heavily populated cities wouldnaturally attract them due to resources and food supply. Coyotes for instance actually thrive better in urban environments than they do in wilderness. Clearly the rift does not admit non-Kaiju materialWhy was it necessary to drift with a kaiju brain to learn that the Rift wouldn't admit matter that wasn't a kaiju? Doesn't the simple fact that the Pacific Ocean hasn't been draining away into the Rift already establish that?Because the Breach isn't open 24/7.Because of ^ that ^ and this Ocean with a Drain. It would still take a long time for a major drop in water level. And because the aliens "launch bay" appeared t

o be underwater as well, so equal pressure maybe?You wouldn't need a major drop in the whole ocean to detect if seawater was coming through, just the current created by the outflow would be proof. Instead, there's an outward displacement of water when each kaiju arrives, which is how they get rated by category. So, the sensors installed around the Rift are reading outwelling of water, not water moving the other way. Ergo, matter comes in, no matter goes out.Except the break expands every time a Kaiju comes thriough, if water and the breach can't occupy the same physical space you'd see the opening shove the water away first, plus the breech only opens exits as big as the Kaiju coming through,so with it in the way, a lot of water draining down would be unlikely.They didn't need the drift to learn it wouldn't admit anything not a Kaiju; they needed the drift to learn it WOULD admit a Kaiju, since up to that point they h

ad simply assumed it to be a one-way conduit.Wrong. They had already assumed that the portal was 2 way long before those 2 scientists ever drifted with the Kaiju, which is why they started on their "go through with a massive bomb and blow them all up" plan to begin with. It was only when those 2 drifted with the Kaiju that they realized that there was a DNA lockon their side to keep them from going in.They probably just assumed (or hoped) that the rift was specifically set up to repel liquids (like seawater) and small objects (like nukes), but it accepts massive mostly-solid objects such as Kaiju. Under that logic, a jaeger is massive enough to trick the system. What they didn't know is that the rift actually scansfor Kaiju DNA.Actually, what they thought was that was that the Breach opens up to admit Kaiju and then closes again, and that all the previous attempts failed because it was

closed at the time. The hope was that a multiple transit would hold the Breachopen long enough to get the bomb through. Kaiju skin parasitesif the Kaiju are artificially grown/assembled in some alien lab, why do they have skin parasites?Why bother sterilizing your war machine when its entire purpose is to go crap on an alien ecology anyway?Maybe they serve some sort of purpose, like cleaning the Kaiju of dead skin or something.We call them parasites because of our incredibly limited understanding of the Ka



iju (beyond how to kill it). They might actually be part of their immune system.Immune systems aren't external. That would defeat the purpose. They're separatelifeforms feeding off a larger one. It's the very definition of a parasite. You're also forgetting that the guy calling them parasites is a Kaiju scientist with detailed knowledge of their biology. The Kaiju may be giants, but they're still living beings.Your immune system actually does include your skin and the secretions of your skin. It's part of the first layer of defense. More likely than not, the "parasites" are used as a cleaning mechanism that helps regulate the kaiju's skin and repair damage to the armor. Remember that up until Newt drifted with the brain of the dead kaiju, he didn't know that they were bioweapons, so he'd automatically assume that tiny (relatively) bugs living on the kaiju's skin were parasites.Ugly thought: If the "parasites" are actually something the makers deliberatelyincorporated into their bioweapons, could they be hooked into the same Hive Mind as the kaiju? If so, that would mean that there's still a bunch of creepy-crawly little spies for the makers alive on Earth, wherever one of Chau's customers have managed to keep those bugs alive...Which is how you get a sequel.This troper asked Travis Beacham about the Kaiju skinmites and got this as a result No air supportWhy no air support for the Jaegers? A simple flare gun hurt one, and helicopters were constantly circling around yet do nothing but give dramatic lighting. Even a single minigun would at least distracted a Kaiju to some agree, let alone som

e Hellfire missile pods to annoy it and make it divide it's attention and less focus on the one thing that can actually kill it and which humanity only has a handful of.The flare gun hurt the kaiju the same way a mosquito would hurt you. They got lucky in that they hit its eye, but beyond that it was merely an annoyance. As far as the helicopters or jets getting involved, they don't want to run the risk of friendly-fire in either direction (from one of the jet's hellfire missiles hitting a jaeger, or a jaeger being thrown into a jet/copter). The jaeger and kaijuare in extremely close combat and constantly moving/spinning around. It's better to not get the little ones involved and let the two giants duke it out.Also where told in the supplementary material that they hit the first Kaiju with everything below a nuke and didn't so much as scratch it. Anything the Coptorsor an existing jet could have carried.

The choppers, from a Watsonian perspective, were there to light up the battlefield and act as spotters. Which is why Raleigh specifically asks one if they haveeyes-on the Kaju. Poisoned cities?Is it ever addressed that the Otachi corpse spilled thousands of tons of Kaiju blue right in the middle of Hong Kong? And what about the Kaiju in Tokyo and Sydney? Were those cities abandoned?Presumably, people had become better at neutralizing it after the first incident, since it's never again brought up after that. I mean, because honestly, killing Kaiju in the ocean, where KB can be diluted and spread into water sources, probably did.They are alot better at neutralizing it, Hannibal Chau managed to literally sell parts off kaiju after neutralizing them, odds are he wouldn't keep that knowled

ge to himself if he could sell it to the government.As they're cleaning up Otachi, Hannibal actually has a quick line about them acting fast to neutralize the stuff. Why test with a live Jaeger?Who thought it was a good idea to have Mako and Mr. Beckett's first drift take place in an actual Jaeger with live weapons?No doubt, that was probably a dumb oversight for the sake of the plot. But, if I have to Fan Wank an argument, I'd say that the plasma weaponry on Gipsy Dangerwas probably inherent into the system. It's just energy being redirected, not ammunition fitted into a ballistic weapon.



They tried a shutdown as soon as the caster started charging but the system locked up. Basically Failsafe Failure. They end up having to cut the computer connection to Gipsy which seems to function as a proper failsafe switch would, (i..e cut the flow and it goes off)There's also the fact that Raleigh wanted her to know what a real Drift was like before they had to go live against a Kaiju. She had an awesome simulator record, but simulator and real action are not the same thing.It's because they're idiots. They knew perfectly well that one's first drift tends to have problems, but instead of having Raleigh and Mako drift for the firsttime in an empty room somewhere, they decided to do it in a fully armed Jaeger.A drift machine like the one the scientists used to drift with the Kaiju that simulated the strain that drifting puts on the pilot would have worked just as well, at the very least it would have made the drift between the two work better.They are not idiots, they were saving time. Stacker trusted Hermann's predictions (how refreshing is that for once, the high ranking military does listen to the scientiests?) that the odds were about to get desperately against the PPDC. They were testing both the compatibility of the Rangers AND the systems of the newly reffited Gipsy Danger, and if everything went fine (and Leatherbakc and Otachi hadn't attacked), Stacker most likely would have deployed the four Jaegers to assault the Breach that very same day. They were racing against a doomsday clock, don't forget that.The Drift is a neural connection between the pilots and the Jaeger. It could bethat having critical systems for fighting in a Jaeger off during the first run would damage the pilots understanding of the neural framework of the Jaeger. They

don't have time for Mako to futz around trying to use the plasma caster if shecan't find "where" it is in the network. Super-powerful helicoptersHow in the hell can mere helicopters carry thousands of tons of giant robots? What? No way in hell they'd be be able to life an arm, let alone the ENTIRE thingacross several miles presumably.Let's see, a kaiju is said to be about 2500 tons. Let's assume that's metric, and the average Jaeger would be around that mass. The Mi-26, the largest and mostpowerful helicopter in current production, has a load capacity of around 20 tons. Therefore to lift a Jaeger, you'd need around one hundred and twenty five Mi-26's. Oh, wait, some guy did the calculations better than I did.The Jaegers are almost certainly lighter than the kaiju, considering they can walk down city streets without collapsing the streets below them or trundle around

offshore without getting bogged down in sand. Giant robot shows in general assume the weight of the robots is much lower than it would be realistically.Gipsy Danger is almost 2000 tons, Cherno is over 2400. These measurements are known thanks to the artbookRule of Cool.It's worth the mention that in the early version of the script, the Jaegers were deployed using special VTOL tiltrotor aircraft designed for such purpose, not normal choppers.Tiltrotor VTO Ls have exactly the same physical limits on lifting capacity as ahelicopter. Their advantage comes not from lifting capacity, but from range, asthey can fly like an airplane and take advantage of wing lift for fast flight. That's not possible to do when carrying something at slow speed, like a Jaeger, so Tiltrotors would be no more effective than a large helicopter.

If you look, there's a whole webwork of cables linking each Jaeger to dozens ofcopters. Add the possibility of huge Jaeger-program-byproduct helicopters, and it becomes feasible...assuming your cables are strong enough.Nope, it's simply not feasible, as the prior calculation demonstrates. The filmis simply using Artistic License to make it look Cool.A frightening thought about the helicopters is what becomes of them after they release the Jaegers. They aren't exactly letting the 2000+ ton robots down gently which means 2000+ tons of lift is transferred to the helicopters as soon as the let the Jaegers go. With that kind of lift, these helicopters would be careening into the sky a ridiculous rate.



Not really. Since the total load is broken up over multiple helicopters, every one is not lifting anything more than its current design max. So it would be no different for each helicopter than if each one suddenly cut loose its normal maximum payload. There would certainly be an unbalanced upward impulse from the engines (presumably running near maximum power), but that's entirely within a pilot's designed flight envelope expectation.But even spreading 2000 tons of lift across the eight helicopters still gives each helicopter 250 tons of lift. That is still a significant amount considering the best lifting capacity of current helicopters is about 26 tons.As pointed out above, I think it's pretty safe to say that using any possible helicopter configuration isn't feasible in the least. It's not possible to createhelos with enough lift, and any sort of cabling arrangement using real helos iscompletely impractical, if not impossible. We just have to accept it as Artistic License - Physics in service of Rule of Cool, and leave it at that. That said,it's not as obvious of a break from reality (as compared to, say, the "baseballboat" ).Considering the power generation and tech base of the setting, it is possible that helicopters have been dramatically improved in the fifteen years that the Kaiju War has been ongoing. I mean, look at the Jaegers' technology. Fifteen yearswith everything being thrown into human survival against an existential threat can do a lot to boost technology. Attack them with coolantOk, so if coolant/antifreeze turns kaijus into ice as quick as a Sonic the Hedgehog on a treadmill (if I remember correctly), then why couldn't they just dump t

he stuff all over the things from the sky? It would make the mission a lot easier.Normally the Jaegers are supposed to be fighting kaiju out at sea, not on land.Dumping a bunch of coolant there would just mean you're fighting in an ice field instead of water; Gipsy only managed to direct the spray at Otachi's tail longenough to have an effect because her tail was grappling an arm directly in front of the cooling vents.That's a lot of coolant you're getting airborne and then have to get in range of the kaiji. Not an easy task.Horizon Brave, the Chinese Jaeger, had two coolant tanks on it's shoulders to use in "Cryo" attacks. Needless to say, after we saw the Jaeger's "Corpse" after the intro, it probably didn't pan out too well after the Kaijus started adapting. The masters are not crippled

Why do people keep assuming that the Masters are offensively crippled because humanity blew up a single lab? Sure, that would be a blow, but even we Puny Humans were able to churn out at least one Jaeger for every 1st world country. The only reason they weren't able to exterminate us outright was because of the limitations of the Rift; if they had been able to send more than one Kaiju from the start, we would have been dead before the Mark IV's were an idea. The Masters are far more advanced than we are, and at least a portion of their culture is based on inter-dimensional conquest. Why wouldn't they have more than one Rift generator? Why would they not have more labs that could just continue where the first one left off?No one is assuming that they're crippled in-universe, or at least no one we seeis assuming they've been defeated. Since a sequel's already in the works, they likely do resume the offensive eventually.

Several points. First, I got the strong impression that sealing the Breach undid all the progress they'd made stabilizing it, so it will take another decade before they get the Breach up to invasion strength again. Second, the main point is not that we annihilated them, it's that we are the only world so far that has managed to hurt them. Even though we only destroyed one base, that's still terrifying to a race accustomed to being able to leave the fighting to the kaiju. High probability that they won't risk opening another gate, since they know we could just drop another nuke down it. For that matter, we could send an intact Jaeger through and rampage over their world like reverse Kaiju. The Kaiju probably wouldn't make very good defenders, too bestial.



Or, simply, that kind of fighting would do the master's homeworld what it did to the humans - be a massive drain on resources and infrastructure (not to mention any possible side effects of kaiju blue on them).This. We have no way of knowing what the fallout from the attack is. There's noguarantee that The Masters would be immune to the Kaiju Blue (Are we immune to the things we fill our war machines with? Go drink Diesel and eat Uranium and see.), their home world just got nuked and covered in the stuff. It would be the equivalent of someone teleporting a nuke into a densely-packed nuke silo on Earth. Extensive damage would be done, poisonous fallout would spread for hundreds ofsquare miles and a major blow against their military would be evident.Experience has taught humanity that neutralizing a beach head and destroying the materiel of an invading force can deter future attempts at invasion. Or at least slow it down enough for us to mount an effective defense. Now that the rift will need time to restabilize, the kaiju will be fighting against Mk V Is right off the bat that are designed to combat category 5 kaiju and we will only keep improving them from there. Instead of hastily cobbled together war machines and similarly trained crews, humanity now has the experience necessary to effectively fight the Masters. If a rift (or many rifts) opened the next day, nations aroundthe world would go back to war footing, build Mk VI jaegers and expect that category 6 or higher kaiju will arrive eventually if they cannot close the rifts. It would be like the German army of 1939 having a rematch with the Allies from 1945. It would not end well for them. Nuke the rift!Given that once the aliens are known to be hostile, and that there's a single po

int of entry for them (out in the middle of the ocean, near no one), can someone please tell me why the first reaction isn't to nuke the living heck out of therift every time something pops through? There's reasonable warning of when they're coming through, and nuclear torpedoes (in the high 100s of kT range) alreadyexist. And please don't say that this would cross the Godzilla Threshold, because we're way over that with the Kaiju just appearing. Sure would have saved a lot on the cost of building Jaegers...Raleigh does mention they tried to engage the Breach before and it always endedin failure. Notice the Kaiju are MUCH faster in water, the warning you mention is the Kaiju getting in our world and displacing water, so there is a window of scarce seconds where they could nuke the creature. Plus we have no idea of the depth where the Breach is located, it could be way beyond the operational limits of modern day submarines. Another thing, I can't find anything about nuclear torp

edos on the high 100s kt range, it seems the one nuclear torpedo the US navy had was a 11Kt warhead (similar to the yield of the Russian equivalent).Raleigh's dialogue concerns the idea that they were trying to close the rift via nukes, NOT that they were using them to merely engage anything that came through. I did re-look up, and the largest torpedo/mine warheads were indeed in the 10-20kt range. However, the 500kT warhead of the various ALCM is roughly the samephysical size, and making nuclear mines which could survive the 10,000 foot depth where the rift was is trivial. No Keiju is going to be able to outrun a nuclear explosion from a mine a few hundred meters from the rift. At least until we get to the Category 5 Keiju. It just seems like something completely practical todo that was obviously ignored. Not a biggie, just kind of a "huh, why not do itfirst?"There's a problem to simply just surround the rim with a dozen nuclear mines. It

's not going to stop the Kaiju from coming through portal, just delay the inevitable. Also, the constant usage of nukes to combat the Kaiju would be extremely costly given the fact that all of the nuclear energy in one nuke would have beenused up to destroy one Kaiju, whereas a giant robot powered by nuclear energy would at least be used to kill several Kaiju in its service of duty. Then there'sthe fear of the Pacific Ocean being contaminated permanently due to the constant use of nukes. One, two nukes might be fine, but a daily use of it would just raise fear for the public, especially when it doesn't solve the root of the problem, the closing the rim where the Kaiju arrive.^ Yes, if you nuke the Kaiju after they come through the portal, it doesn't stop



more of them from showing up later on. However, Jaegers have the exact same problem! They've been killing Kaiju for well over a decade and they still haven't come up with a permanent solution. So that's not an argument in favor of Jaegers(until the final attack on the rift, perhaps.) And energy efficiency doesn't matter, because we have thousands of nukes sitting in storage. (You could modify them to work at depth, I'm sure.) Wouldn't you rather spend 10 nukes and risk nobody's life, than use one Jaeger and risk millions of lives? If you're going to use Jaegers at all, they should be the secondary line of defense, protecting the cities. The first line of defense should be a bunch of nuclear sea mines surrounding the rift.If you don't think regularly detonating nuclear bombs in the middle of the ocean is going to risk millions of lives, you clearly don't have any real grasp of what radiation and nuclear bombs do. Do the terms fallout, contamination, and nuclear winter ring any bells?^ That's not how underwater nuclear detonations work. Underwater nuclear detonations (even in the megaton range) at the depth of the Rift (10,000+ ft) cause absolutely no fallout or substantial radiation outside the immediate blast zone. The contamination would be very minimal (though measurable due to our sensitive instruments nowadays). It's unlikely that ANYTHING from the detonation would actually reach the surface (as demonstrated by the French and American submerged tests in the 60s). And the contaminants would be extraordinarily diluted by the volume of the oceans. Fears of nuclear winter and mass land contamination (which, turned out to be overstated when the mathematical models were redone) is based onhuge number of distinctly separate surface detonations (not even airbursts). Ver

y different scenario, very different effects.Uh, can you cite some credible research on that? No, I mean really. I'm not saying you're wrong, I've just never heard that. However, even if that's true, wouldn't the act of repeatedly detonating nuclear devices at the bottom of the Pacific cause tidal waves and such, just by virtue of the amount of water the blast would displace?I'm not the above Troper, but I think this looks interesting: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/nukeffct/enw77b2.html . Keep in mind that this paper defines a"Deep Underwater Explosion Phenomena" as being at only 500 feet, much shallowerthan The Breach, yet "There was no airborne radioactive cloud" from it. As for waves, the energy from the blast goes down by the square of the distance from the blast. Here's an interview of someone who witnessed an underwater nuke (as it happens, the same one discussed in the first link). The wave was thousands of fee

t high near the blast, but by the time it got to his little island, 2.5 miles away, it was only a few tens of feet tall. Randal Munroe, NASA scientist turned comic author, had this to say about it.The film's early draft actually had an answer to this headscratcher: They couldn't use such nukes because they had none left, all the fissile material available was consumed during the years of war against the Kaiju. Of course, this doesn't apply to the finished film, but it's worth the mention.How could you possibly use up all the nukes? We have thousands of them left over from the cold war, and we can easily build more if we want to! (Especially considering that the entire world is teaming up to fight the Kaiju.) Even one nuke should be sufficient to kill a Kaiju. And until the main events of the movie, Kaiju only showed up about once per month. So our current stockpile should easily be enough to deal with that threat.

Actually, IRL a lot of Cold War-era nukes have been repurposed into reactor fuel already. Nearly 45% of US nuclear-plant fuel comes from Russian nukes. (In fact, the current US supply of those will be gone within this year, unless another disarmament treaty comes along). Even still, there's about 10,000 viable nuclearweapons still left on earth at this point in time. Why do the masters want Earth?Why do the aliens want Earth so badly? If they came here when the dinosaurs were still kicking, and then left for a few million years until we showed up, Earthcan't be that valuable. And even if it is, they know they want the air and water to have more carbon based pollutants, what was stopping them from say... hookin



g the portal up to a car muffler?Who says that the aliens focus on Earth alone? The aliens have conquered other worlds in the past according to the movie. They might have focus conquest somewhere else before focusing on Earth again. And the reason they came back to Earth is because humans have polluted the environment and caused global warming, the right conditions for an invasion.That's one half of the question. Surely a race capable of building giant biological war machines has access to Model T Technology. Why wait for Gaia to spit out a race evolved enough to both pollute the planet and actively resist them, when you can just send the chemicals yourself?I don't think they were "waiting for Gaia to spit out a race that would pollutethe planet" so much as they just happened to look towards earth again when the conditions were right.Maybe they were going to after they were done with the Dinosaurs but the asteroid/comet messed up Earth so much they had to write it off.Simpler answers: Everything has a code nameWhy do the Jaegers have those nifty code names? Normally you use code names to conceal purposes, capability, and deployments from an enemy's intelligence-gathering. But the monster-Masters don't have any intel capability on Earth. They just send in monsters. So why not call the giant robots Jaeger 1, Jaeger 2, etc.? Or Jaeger I-A, I-B, II-A, or whatever? Or Jaeger Sydney, Jaeger Anchorage, JaegerSanta Monica, etc.?Because humans like to name and/or nickname their stuff. Seriously, we name our

cars, our boats, our space shuttles, anything that strikes our fancy. We even named our first nuclear bombs. Why wouldn't we name our badass giant robots?The F-16 bears a name that is very Jaeger-ish, the "Fighting Falcon".Jaegers are themselves effectively avatars of humanity's hopes and technological capability. They're going to be named something more than just a numerical code. Humans name fighter jets and tanks as well, because they both like nicknames and they anthropomorphize the weapons system.In the movie it's shown that both the Jaegers and the Kaiju are heavily marketed, so the cool sounding names make sense.The names would also be callsigns. "Gipsy Danger engaging Knifehead" is a lot less of a mouthfull than "United States third generation Jaeger number two engaging Kaiju number seventy-six." for example.They also do most of their fighting at sea, presumably with backup and guidance

from naval forces. Navies have been naming their ships for thousands of years; sailors are used to using vessels' names in communications.Clarity too. The jaegers might have actual designations, but in the field, codenames might make things easier to keep track of on the fly as well as being easyto read. "Jaegar 23" is kind of meaningless since you have to correlate that into both capability and pilot. Listing out Jaeger I, Jaeger II, Jaeger III, can be confusing if you're in a hurry. But Gipsy Danger... you know immediately who that is. Look at the Humvee or Huey for real life examples. Naming the KaijuThe moment a Kaiju emerges from the Breach, it's catergory is automatically determined using measurements of water displacement and a codename is given. But how does that work with the more descriptive names? How do they know Leatherback is gorilla-like or that Knifehead has a knife-like head without seeing them first?

One can get a pretty good idea of size and shape with a good sonar system, and they're going to have enough sensors pointed at the Breach to pick out some pretty hefty details. Why they're called "Kaiju"Why were they called kaiju? They hit San Francisco first, not Japan. I know they were leaning pretty hard on anime tropes, what with the giant mechas fighting godzilla monsters. But they could have done that by having the first attack be on Japan or something so the name makes more immediate sense.Because American culture doesn't have a common name for generic giant monster other than kaiju?



Kaiju is a well known name for giant monsters, which whomever it was that decided to name them that in-universe decided to give them. In fact, I'm surprised tosee the name NOT used for giant monsters in movies outside Japan more often.It would be like undead humans appearing, and not calling them with the pre-existing, popular Z word. Of course, Not Using the Zed Word is a trope in itself, but the movie simply avoids it.There happened to be an anime con taking place when the first Kaiju struck, andso anime fans were among the first survivors to be interviewed by reporters, and they unconsciously used the term, and it stuck. Was Mako the only survivor?Was Mako literally the only survivor of the Tokyo attack? While I get that a kaiju attack would no doubt kill tens of thousands if not millions of people, I'm having a hard time imagining how one of them could kill off an entire populationcenter, especially one as large as Tokyo, for the same reason I'd have a hard time imagining a single human completely annihilating an ant colony by hand.The kaiju was able to detect where Newt was even without being connected to himduring then. Perhaps kaiju can track humans by smelling them or seeing their heat signature.What we saw was the memory of a frightened little girl, not a video recording of the event.In one of the making of videos on YouTube they stress that the sequence is a subjective memory and not an exact recording. For example, the kaiju is larger than the others seen in the film.And, of course, most of the population was probably already evacuated. Which lea

ds to...When did they ever say that Mako was the only survivor? Just because she was the only human in that area doesn't mean that she was the only one left in the entire city. Tokyo is huge. Mako is probably just stuck in an area which was evacuated; she got left behind somehow. Evacuating Hong KongHow come it took so long to evacuate Hong Kong? It seemed like people weren't even moving until the Kaiju took out Typhoon and Alpha and made landfall.It takes a long time to evacuate any major population center.Due to the geography and high population density it would be impossible to quickly evacuate out of Hong Kong. The people were visibly being moved to undergoundlocations, and it is noticeable that by the time Gipsy finds Otachi, the streets and buildings seemed desert.

Just for comparison, during the Cold War, both the US and USSR assumed that thecities couldn't be evacuated without at least a week's prior notice. Moving millions of people out of a heavy urban area is extraordinarily difficult, especially if you have to move them more than a dozen miles or so. Movies like Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow radically understate the time that large-scale evacuations require. In a place like Hong Kong, which has a huge number of narrow choke points and few external roads or transit to mainland China, moving the 7 million people a distance of 50 miles (a good "safe" distance away from the kaiju), would take weeks. My bet would be almost a month to do a full evacuation. Shelter-in-place is by far the more practical strategy. Build a wall around the riftInstead of build a gigantic, continent-spanning wall around the entire Pacific rim, why not just build a smaller, thicker shell around the portal itself? It'd p

robably be a hell of a lot more cost-effective and much stronger (instead of having 50-foot-thick walls around the entire ocean, you could have a 500-foot-thick shell around the portal). Yeah, it would still be a temporary solution, but why not focus all the effort around the portal itself instead of spreading the wall thinly across the whole Pacific ocean?Because that wall would need to be taller to compensate for the increase in depth at that site. Additionally, you'd get much less people volunteering to work on it if it's so much closer to where a kaiju could come out at any minute.Kaiju attacks began at a pace of one every 24 weeks. Perhaps it was deemed impossible to construct such shell around the Breach, since it is located somewhere i



n the bottom of the Challenger Deep, and quickly constructing large scale structures at such depths would be exceptionally difficult. For all we know it was something they tried and ended in disaster, the war lasted for a period of ten years and we were only shown the very end of it and some brief glimpses of the early days.They wouldn't have to build it all underwater- they could just build it in sections on land, fly it over, drop them in the ocean, and then put the sections into place with submarines.For that matter, why didn't they try planting nukes in the face of the Mariana Plate and blow the whole cliffside into a trillion tons of rubble, burying Challenger Deep in a gargantuan undersea landslide? Sure, it'd probably kick off a tsunami, but at least they'd know exactly when it'd start and where it'd hit months in advance, unlike kaiju attacks.The walls appear to be armed to some degree, and we don't have any weapons thatcan function at that depth that a kaiju would give a damn about. They can swim and water resistance doesn't seem to really slow them down much; good luck hitting with a torpedo. The Walls at least managed to hold off Mutavore for an hour; while pathetic in real terms compared to what a Jaeger can do to it, that's an hour during which they can pound the kaiju with everything they have. It's still a terrible plan, but I don't see any reason why the Wall wouldn't have been successful if all they had to deal with was a Category 3 every few weeks. As for just burying the portal, it's not a bad idea but one wonders how long it would actually hold them off; how long would it take Otachi or Leatherback to get through a little rubble?

Soldiers on footWhat was the purpose of all those armed soldiers who constantly show up, appearto be in large numbers yet do not seem to serve any real function as they are useless against Kaiju and there is no indictation there is a human threat againstthe Shatterdomes or Jaegers to justify their presence or carrying more than a sidearm.Just a guess, but we were shown at least one good sized cult that reveres/worships the kaiju. It's not too much of a stretch to assume that they might carry out a jihad on the ones responsible for killing their gods.When you're dealing with a threat to the entire human race, you do not skimp onthe human security. The moment you only have sidearms to defend yourself with is the moment a conventional enemy shows up to cause trouble. And if you're well-funded enough to deploy skyscraper-sized giant mecha in battle, you can afford to

equip a rifle battalion for security with your pocket change.Take a look at the kind of future we have here. Giant monsters destroy every coastal city they come across, the rich and powerful have homes inland while the poor have to live on the coast, and every time you kill one of these monsters a blue acid seeps into the ground causing death and contaminating the area. Riots would be a very real threat, especially in an area so close to the Shatterdome, and especially on a very populated island near several more highly populated countries with gigantic wealth disparity. Not to mention the Kaiju-worshipping cultsthat might be trying to wage a holy war on the people who threaten their gods. Re-applying Jaeger technologyWouldn't people have found other applications for jaeger technology? Perhaps inconstruction maybe? Or was it just more dramatic to see workers fighting over jobs at the wall.

The workers are cheaper. The world's resources and industrial capabilities wereput to their limit, if building more Jaegers for defense wasn't considered a viable option anymore, then building the hundreds of Jaegers necessary for construction (even smaller, less complex ones) would be out of the question. Plus, the Wall was in big part a propaganda vehicle to make the population feel good, so it makes sense that giving lots of blue collar work would be part of the plan.Jaegers don't exactly seem to be precision machines. Using a giant like that might be like using a baseball bat to make an incision.I don't know, Gipsy could take that fishing boat and then place it safely againin the water, without crushing it. That shows a pretty good level of precision f



or a machine of that size. Jaeger tech certainly will be repurposed for civilian purposes after the world recovers.Some of it probably already is with The Wall, no way you could build something that size and length so quickly without considerable technological advancement somewhere along the line. Either in the Rn D, logistics, or industrial output even if not the building itself. I bet some spin-off technology is in place there somewhere. How did they get back through the rift?At the end, how did Mako and Beckett's escape pods get back through the breach without a bit of Kaiju to let them through like they did on the way in?It's possible the rifts only worked that way for something going in from our world, as a safety measure so we couldn't throw a bomb in (you know, like how theyplanned). They probably never figured anyone would figure out how to get in to begin with.The rift was falling apart as they were heading back, so perhaps the "software"scanning for DNA was one of the first bits to go, allowing them to pass.Also, Slattern's corpse was still floating around in there, keeping the door open. Why sacrifice the most successful Jaeger?Why wasn't the original plan to detonate Gipsy Danger or Cherno Alpha? Both areolder-model nuclear powered Jaegers capable of collapsing the rift when detonated, but instead Pentecost decides to strap a nuke to his most successful Kaiju killing machine and drop that into the hole instead while the "walking nuclear reactors" run escort? Surely it should have been the other way around, with Striker

Eureka defending Gipsy?Because the ideal plan was for all four of the Jaegers to get in, drop the bomb, then get out againyou don't sacrifice a whole, functional giant killer robot ifyou can avoid it. Also, Striker is not only the most successful Jaeger, but it's specifically noted as the fastestit has a better chance of getting in, droppingthe bomb, and getting out than the older, slower models.

Really, the failure of Mako and Raleigh's first drift is the catalyst for the whole plan degenerating and falling apartif it had gone well, Gipsy would've joined Cherno and Typhoon to intercept Leatherback and Otachi, and a 3-on-2 fight in the Jaegers' favor would've ended a lot differently. This would've led to them being able to launch the final assault with double the strength, and sooner (lesslengthy repairs on Gipsy and Striker), meaning they might have made it to the Ri

ft when only the two Cat 4s were out (making it a 4 on 2 fight), or maybe even before they popped out.Pretty sure the original plan was for Striker to jump into the hole on a one way trip to deliver the bomb, with the pilots ejecting afterwards (if possible). Striker actually would have jumped into the hole if Newt hadn't shown up in time to stop it. It was definitely a one way trip for the Jaeger in question, so why voluntarily blow up your best one? Tactically speaking, the carrier can only move as fast as its escorts; there's no point in outrunning your escorts, especially if you're running toward the place where the alien monsters are crawling out of.At that point, the plan was one of desperationit was two Jaegers vs. two Cat 4 Kaiju, on the Kaiju's turf and in an environment where the Kaiju hold the advantage. At that point, with the plan such that it was, the best option was believed t

o be to just rush the portal and get the bomb in there at all cost before the Kaiju killed them. If they'd been there sooner, with the other two Jaeger, actually killing the Kaiju and having the extra time to set up the bomb would've been feasible.

And it's not about outrunning your escortsit's about getting there with the escorts, then rushing to the portal while the escorts keep the Kaiju busy. A runningback is a faster sprinter than a lineman. The linemen only have to create an opening and tie up the defense, not keep up with the running back down the length of the field.



Sure, if sending your runner to run straight at the opposing defensive line with no backup sounds like a good idea to you. An analogy isn't even needed to prove this one. In the film, Striker Eureka took point and headed straight for the rift while Gipsy held back. Look who ended up creating an opening for who? Effectively, Striker did end up running escort for Gipsy, which is what the plan should have been the entire time. I think the "plan" was just a big plot excuse by the writers to give Striker a nuke.Your football analogy doesn't hold up. Not only do giant robots underwater not have anything near the level of agility possessed by athletes, the end zone is also where the bad guys are coming from and defending from, and the play was to have the carrier head straight at them ahead of the backup.I have to ask it, why was it absolutely necessary that Striker was the one carrying and deploying the bomb? A much more tactically sound strategy would be to have your best Jaegers to keep the defenses busy and leave the path free for the weakest one to use the bomb.Because, again, Striker was the fastest. Priority One was to get the bomb to the rift. You don't give that job to the weakest link in the chain. If all else failed, that bomb still had to get to the rift, and your best chance of that happening is to give it to your best man.

Not to belabor the analogy, but in football, you don't give the ball to the worst athlete on the team, you give it to the best, the fastest. The runner might well be a solid hitter in his own right (like a fullback), but if he's the fastest one on the field, he gets the ball and everyone else goes blocking for him.

Yeah, and if they actually put their best Jaeger on escort, doing the job of killing kaiju, as it was originally designed for and most successful at, not only would the plan have a much smaller chance of failing, they'd have saved themselves a nuke as well. Seems to me that it was just a plot excuse to give Striker nuclear capabilities.Striker WASN'T the best Jaeger, it was the FASTEST - i.e. the most athletic.Fastest and most powerful without sacrificing any of the armor other Jaegers have. Also the most successful at killing Kaiju with 11 kills, as well as being the most technologically advanced and modern. Objectively the best.You're missing a key point: What happened at the ending was not the original plan. What happened at the end was a desperate rush to get the bomb to the rift before the Kaiju killed both Jaegers. The original planwhere it would've been 3 Jaeger escorting Striker against two Kaiju at most, would have gone a lot differentl

y.OP here. I'll buy that explanation, but you have to admit that Pentecost isn't much of a tactician if he didn't switch tactics given the new circumstances, with the original plan seemingly having a weak, if any, backup strategy in event offailure.Even the best tactician can only work with what he has, and what Pentecost has is two Jaegers, one bomb, a strict time limit, and no support. You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. He doesn't have a back-up strategy in the event of failure because he is throwing literally all he has into this last ditch effort.He has 2 Jaegers, one of which doubles as a bomb. He straps his bomb to the Jaeger that doesn't double as a bomb, which is a valid decision, since it makes both Jaegers walking bombs. But given that his goal is to throw one bomb down the ho

le, and that giving up one Jaeger is necessary, choosing to give up the one better at killing Kaiju doesn't seem to be the best choice, given that they were both at the hole and ready to jump. Of course, Pentecost was piloting Striker at the time; maybe he had a death wish?

As it is, Striker ended up escorting Gipsy, which was the most effective plan, and what the plan should have been from the start when there were 2 Jaegers left. You do go into battle with the army you have, but not without revising your plans first in light of new circumstances.Prior to the Hong Kong attack, their plan seemed to have factored in the possibi



have several, considering that as a country they consist almost entirely of pacific coastal real estate and stuff within a few hours of pacific coastal real estate.The PPDC is an international organization that is jointly funded by every member nation. Presumably the wealthier nations chip in to help the poorer ones with funding and whichever country hosts the construction and provides the pilots is chosen before production by The Omniscient Council of Vagueness. Otherwise everyother Jaeger would be of American manufacture. (Assuming the opinion of the US Government was "we finally have something to sink our defense budget into that no one can bitch about!")The country of the Jaeger just denotes where it was built. The PPDC is composedof a nation that's pooled their resources and manpower. There's no guarantee that a Japanese Jaeger would be constructed by Japanese people either, just that it was built in Japan. Global cooperation might be hard to comprehend for some, but in this movie that was the case.Multinational corporations with interests in the less-affluent Pacific Rim nations might have funded some of the construction projects, too. Even a Corrupt Corporate Executive isn't going to place profit-margins ahead of preservation of the human race, and getting to brag about how your company's Jaegar saved Guayaquil or Manila is bound to boost your brand image. Bury the riftRelated to something mentioned above, but I think it deserves its own entry, why not take the Stargate approach and just bury the rift?That'd fail for the same reason the wall idea did.

They even state earlier in the film they have tried before to close or bury therift, but have failed since it must be closed from the other side. Air supportWhere were the A-10s? The only aircraft shown fighting Kaiju were fighters and helicopters, but A-10s are perfect for the task; they're armed with ideal anti-armor weaponry, and speed and maneuverability are a non-issue because until Otachi and Leatherback none of the Kaiju have any anti-air capabilities.A-10s are probably just too small. Heck, at the scales we're talking about, Jaeger punches probably carry a greater force per square inch than Gau-8 rounds.The A-10s were offscreen with all of the other military hardware that fought the kaijus and were only able to put down the weakest ones after six days of constant assault.The GAU-8 shoots a projectile that weighs about 400g at 1000 m/s, with a project

ile diameter of 30mm. Kinetic energy is Ke = 0.5mv2, and penetration is definedby Ke per unit area. Both the GAU-8 and modern Kinetic Penetrators from artillery/tanks have far more penetration capability that even the largest Kaiju could manage. (Kaiju attacks are based on huge mass, which can smash through defenses,but have very small penetration rating. Similar math applies to Jaeger physicalattacks. Think of the different in penetration of a baseball bat vs a pen knife.) Outside of magic, there's no way any biological protection could defend against this type of attack. That said, given the size of the kaiju, it's entirely possible that these weapons couldn't do sufficient damage once penetrating the hide of the kaiju to cause it any substantial harm (think: poking a human with a small needle).Considering that the Kaiju were created by a species that has been around for quite literally tens of millions of years and is capable of interdimensional trave

l, it is entirely possible that yes, there is some kind of biological protection capable of resisting modern anti-armor rounds thanks to the simple fact that their technology is so far beyond humanity's. So, yes, magic, for a given definition of "magic."A-10 weapons were not penetrating, just like every other conventional weapon used on the Kaiju. The first Kaiju tanked everything the US military threw at it for a week straight. The GAU-8 simply was not getting through, just like everything else they used.They are probably at the bottom of the ocean having been thrown against the Kaiju at the very, very, very beginning of the first incursion because they were see



he essentially peacetime US air force's B-2 fleet alone is worth 6 of those.Given that, how could a wartime US with exactly one major weapons program only have 3 Jaegers, instead of building the entire listed fleet twice over just by itself? And how could a skyscraper-sized wall several thousand miles long possibly be cheaper?We don't know exactly how much damage the early Kaiju did before they were stopped. It took a week to stop the first one, throwing everything short of nukes atit, which means that a lot of regular military assets had to be replaced due tobeing trashed, plus infrastructure and regular rebuilding (and I imagine most insurance companies would cite force majeure when asked to pay out, so up to the government and private enterprise to make good), plus loss of land which was toocontaminated to reuse or the costs in even trying to decontaminate it... Plus lots of things I probably can't even imagine in hidden costs. Then further early attacks all over the place before someone said "you know what, lets try plan Voltron". I can see that bill running into several trillion dollars.Then once you have the Jaegers, you have R'n'D, but also training costs, maintenance costs, repair costs (which is not the same as maintenance costs), weapons refueling, transport costs (jeez how much must it cost to transport those things!?), various support costs for the Jaegers and its associated personnel.Then the damn Kaiju get stronger than the Jaegers and no matter what you do they just keep getting more and more trashed, and there is less and less in the economy to spend it on because half the population is living in shanty towns and everything is starting to collapse because the entire economy is slowly grinding to a halt due to knock on effects. Then someone says "lets just build a wall inste

ad with the money we spend on this fleet of robots and once it is up, then it is up and we won't be constantly paying out. Maybe with the security of a wall wecan get the economy going again. It'll pay for itself within 30 years", and it probably seemed like a good idea at the time because it has turned into a war ofattrition and those things really kill economies.The bottleneck seemed to be with obtaining the materials necessary to constructJaegers, with each one being pretty much filled to the brim with machinery, along with other requirements. That said, Jaegers did seem much more viable than building a solid wall around the coastline.The problem with those calulations is that we have absolutely no idea how much the Jaegers cost. You say "7x as expensive as a Zumwalt per weight" but in reality could be "700x as expensive as a Zumwalt per weight". Again, we have no idea.Bear in mind that the entire world was united in building those machines, which

(together with the damage done by the Kaiju) left the world's economy in ruin, to the point that the norm is that people work for food. They are probably a LOTmore expensive than you think.Supplimentary material states that Striker Eureka cost approximately $100 billion, or as much as the International Space Station). Countries generally have no problem racking up and maintaining debt; China and Japan, for example, have beenin perpetual debt for decades, and the current US debt acrued over just 13 years could buy 165+ Strikers. I doubt money would be much of an issue, especially with extinction on the line.It might be possible sure... but even with the Zumwalt, the US only plans on building 3. THREE! Iowa-class battleships? 4 were made. Just because a country CANdoesn't mean it will or even should - dumping everything into the Jaegar might very well mean there's no budget left over to do anything else... like look for o

ther options or encourage advancement in research.A Jaeger is a fully functional combat robot armed with state of the art weaponry, god-knows how many servomotors and joints, some kind of on-board nuclear powerplant, a delicate on-board neural interface, and experimental technologies suchas plasma cannons. That's not accounting for the hundreds of crews in it's maintenance bay, the cost of maintaining specialized Shatterdome launch bays for each one's deployment, frequent replacement parts, and the amount of spotter helicopters for it. As advanced as the Zumwalt might seem to us, it's little more thana floating brick with a fancy gun welded to it compared to the technological mess that is a Jaeger. It's part of the reason why we don't have combat robots righ



t now; they're doable, just that the production and maintenance costs alone doesn't justify their deployment. The Kaijus justified those costs. Electronics don't work that way....So let me get this straight, apparently because Gipsy Danger is running off a Nuclear reactor and "analog" it's immune to Electromagnetic Pulses? Did the writers not do research? EM Pulses wreck ANY electronics. Also, the fact the EMP knocked out Hong Kong's power grid and disabled a Jaeger would mean that the electronics in the Jaeger would have been permanently fried. That little bit just irkedme. And shouldn't have the EMP done something to the pilots as well? I know thehuman body is more chemically-controlled than electronically-controlled, but still. That would not be pleasant to get whacked by at all.Arguably, since Gipsy had a nuclear reactor (and wasn't one of the hastily made1st gen Jaegers), it would have been shielded pretty well against radiation. And no, an EMP pulse would not harm a person in any significant way, or even be felt like you think it would. People get exposed to pretty powerful sources of electromagnetic radiation every day due to medical MRI scans, and as far as I know there is no evidence that magnetic fields produce any sort of damage to biological tissue.The EMP did electrocute the pilots as it occurred, or maybe that's was just strain from neurally feeling their Jaeger's electrical systems fluctuate. Either way, it did a bit to them.Remember, we're dealing with aliens with strange and unusual technology. It is entirely possible that it wasn't actually a typical EMP, but rather something more exotic. Note how all of Hong Kong's power systems seem to remain online; the o

nly thing really affected by the burst were the Jaeger systems and the Shatterdome. It is possible that the burst only affected Striker Eureka and the Shatterdome's own power/electrical systems, so it possible that the weapon that was usedwas specifically tailored to target Mark IV Jaegers and the Shatterdome's C&C systems. In that case, an older model Jaeger might be immune due the layout of its electrical grid and power source. Why stop building Jaegers?Striker Eureka was completed in 2019, before Category 4 Kaiju began coming out of the breach. The PPDC cutting funding to the Jaeger Program citing "losing Jaegers faster than they can be built" is entirely wrong, since they weren't building Jaegers at all. Knifehead only emerges in 2020, a full year after Striker Eureka's completion. Isn't the halting of Jaeger construction the ultimate sign of complacency?

Perhaps they were referring to repairing destroyed Jaegers, or they were so busy repairing that they didn't have time to make new ones. Presumably it's easier to fix the old Jaeger than to build a new one from scratch.Gipsy Danger was left in Oblivion Bay until 2023, 4 years after Striker Eureka's launch. The news segments also show several other Jaegers just left as scrap where they were disabled, with no new ones replacing them.They could very well have reached a point where they simply couldn't maintain any more Jaegers, especially when the Jaegers were winning the war. After Knifehead's appearance, the resources that would have gone into building new Jagers were being funneled into simply keeping the intact ones in repair, and from there into the Wall. Mako and the Right Plasma CannonDuring the RABIT fiasco, Mako inadvertently activates Gipsy Danger's right plasm

a cannon. But she's on the left side, so how is she activating the right? Otherscenes in the cockpit show the pilot only controls their respective arm, and uses their other arm to handle the control panel.Other scenes in the cockpit also show that the Jaegers mimic the exact actions of the pilot(s), e.g. walking, swinging a club, etc. Mako using her right arm todo what happened to be the activation gesture for the right plasma cannon wouldactivate the right plasma cannon, her trauma-induced increased brain activity negating and overriding Raleigh's inputs to the system.During the fight in Hong Kong, Raleigh offers to remain in position to hold Otachi's tail while Mako uses both her arms to vent the coolant. He's on the right s



ide then but controlling the left arm on his own, so presumably pilots can temporarily override their partner's control of the other half for brief periods without brain damage.The artbook mentions that Crymson Typhoon operated by having two of the triplets moving the Jaeger, while the the third acts as a gunner until the ThundercloudFormation is engaged. Of course it could be something specific to the Chinese Jaeger, but it could be that the Jaeger's co-pilot (which IIRC is a term used in the movie for both Mako and Herc Hansen) normally operates all the weapons systems.It's not that each pilot controls one side of the Jaegar exclusively, it's thateach pilot uses one side of his or her brain to link up to the Drift. The reason the Jaegars need multiple pilots is because having both of a person's cerebralhemispheres linked at the same time causes too much brain damage; linking just half the cerebrum allows the unaffected side to take up the slack when the Drifting half gets over-strained. When the pilots call out that they're "left side" or "right side", they're talking about their own brains, not the Jaegar's systems. If anything, Mako using her "left side" would give her more fine control over the right arm than her partner has, because the human cerebrum is contralateral:your left hemisphere controls your right side and vice versa. Definitely Just AnimalsBefore Newt's first drift, had it not been considered before that the Kaiju arecreated? Each one looks different from the rest, which suggests an artistry involved and would have hinted to the commissioners of the Wall that the beasts simply won't be deterred like any other wild animal.

Earth has many animals that look different from each other. There are people who believe they were created with artistry involved. Those people are called creationists. Scientists as a whole tend to believe in biodiversity and evolution asgeneral rules for why not all living creatures look the same.

It's only later when he has enough samples to look into their genetic makeup that he realizes that all Kaiju have the same DNA, and immediately considers the possibility that they're manufactured.But Earth's animals look different because they're different species, and it's observable that their individuals look alike. But the kaiju are one species and yet are always different, and many of their structures veer more towards Rule ofCool than practicality (what did Trespasser need that giant bone mohawk for?) If the kaiju had really evolved, then there should have been a repeat species at s

ome point, and if there was competition to get through the rift, then only the strongest kaiju should be getting through. But that none of that was happening should have been a hint.Sorry if all the Kaiju looked the same to you, even though the director explicitly went out of his way to pick different designs for each one. There were only 46 confirmed Kaiju attacks by the end of the film, so it's not exactly a large sample size to base judgement on. There are definitely more than 46 species of animal (or even dinosaur) on Earth to choose from without worrying about repeats.

Trespasser has a mohawk for the same reason a giraffe has a long neck, a hammerhead shark has a flat head, a triceratops has a flange and 3 horns coming out the top of its head, and a swordfish has a pointy head. Out of context it's hard to guess what it's for, but it's reasonable to assume that it's there for an evolu

tionary reason.

Remember, nobody knew that there was competition among Kaiju. Even so, each time they weren't pitting the same pool of Kaiju types since each one was individually built. Assuming you didn't know that to begin with, and didn't know that Kaiju were genetically identical, seeing a different type of Kaiju each time isn't very surprising, especially given that you don't know where they came from or why they're here.I didn't say the kaiju look all the same. The point of my argument is derived from that they all look different. And with a bit of observation, one can easily g



e built. The Headscratcher was specifically asking why nobody considered the possiblity of Kaiju being created before Newt's first drift.EMPs and acid can't have been the only anti-Jaeger weapons mounted on Kaiju. And it's already been confirmed by Beacham that Otachi wasn't the only flying Kaiju. So even before Newt's drift there may have been other types of anti-Jaeger abilities. Tons of Jaegers had fallen, after all. Pentecost's contradictory ordersOK, so Otachi and Leatherback are heading for Hong Kong and Crimson Typhoon, Cherno Alpha and Striker Eureka are deployed to stop them. All well and good, but Pentecost's orders to Herc and Chuck are horribly contradictory. During the briefing in the mission control room, he tells them to "only engage as a final option." While Cherno and Typhoon are being airlifted and Striker is walking into theharbor, Pentecost tells them to "engage at their discretion." So he tells Herc and Chuck to engage whenever they see fit. And yet when Otachi is roughing up Cherno and Typhoon and Herc wants to engage, Pentecost tells them not to because they need Striker to carry the bomb."Engage as a last resort" and "engage at your discretion" aren't actually contradictory instructions. Pentecost was basically saying "engage only if you need to, but I'm leaving it up to you to decide if you need to."Exactly. But when Herc decides that Striker needs to step in, Pentecost says no. Only after Crimson Typhoon has fallen does Herc defy Pentecost's orders and charge into battle.Speaking of the bomb, that's another thing that doesn't entirely make sense. Why do they need Striker to carry the bomb? Sure, it's the fastest Jaeger, but I do

n't see why Gipsy Danger, Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon wouldn't be capable of carrying the bomb if they had to. Pentecost compromised his own plan. If Striker joined Cherno and Typhoon in the fight from the get-go, maybe they wouldn't have been destroyed and Otachi and Leatherback would've been dealt with much easier. Then, Pentecost would've been able to run the operation as planned: with Striker carrying the bomb and the other three Jaegers running defense.This is pretty much covered above in the folder "Why sacrifice the most successful Jaeger?". Long story short, they don't want to risk any chance of the Kaiju getting a second's advantage when the Jaegers head to the Breach. The Kaiju are coming out faster and faster, so likewise the fastest Jaeger has the best chanceof dodging them and delivering the bomb successfully.

It's also not guaranteed that they would have won at Hong Kong if Striker had go

tten in the fight earlier. Otachi was holding its own against two Jaegers, and they two had a chance only because Leatherback had yet to enter the fight. Had Striker fought with them from the beginning, Leatherback might have decided to burst out immediately rather than ambush, and so unleash his EMP earlier.True, but 3 against 2 offers a better chance of victory than 2 against 2. And perhaps they could've taken out Leatherback before it had a chance to unleash itsEMP. Or kill Otachi before being shut down by the EMP. And even then, the EMP wouldn't have affected Cherno. If Gipsy (a Mark III) is immune to the EMP becauseit's a nuclear Jaeger, then surely the Mark I Cherno Alpha must be immune to itas well.No one knew about the EMP at the time.Cherno would be immune, but would now have to fight two kaiju alone. And we know how that went.

Rewatching that scene, its clear that Pentecost is not giving the Jaeger pilotsactual tactical orders. He's giving them their roles in the battleplan. Once the battle begins, he gives them tactical orders to hold position. There is no contradiction there, just the difference between pre-battle planning and mid-battleorders. Wading into the ocean.What bothers me is that a 300-odd foot Jaeger can wade out ten miles and still be submerged only about half-way. I also would point out Gipsy Danger rising outof the ocean to engage Knifehead. We DO see a large platform that a Jaeger rides upon exiting the Shatterdome, but is it carried along, like a rocket with the t



readed platform? Like the platform is propelled and gives the jaeger something to stand on, which raises the question of how a kaiju and jaeger stand and fightout at sea?I'm not the best at looking at naval charts, but this chart (Hong Kong far right) seems to suggest a depth of 45-50 meters is about right, which is 145-165 oddfeet give or take. Really we need a troper who can actually read charts properly to tell us. The escape pods.Okay, the Jaeger escape pods fire the crew up to the surface and then deploy flotation devices, which is very useful and makes perfect sense. And then they automatically open out into completely flat rafts with no protection from the elements, which means if the sea is even a little choppy and the crew are even a little injured (quite likely, if they're ejecting), they're going to be swept overboard long before a rescue team can get there.I rewatched the ending scene, and the hatch on the escape pods very obviously doesn't blow automatically. Mako's hatch does open, but Raleigh's doesn't. Since he is uncounscious, logic dictates there there is a manual control for the pilot. Plus, the Jaeger vs Kaiju engagements occured close to the city coastal lines,if needed help would arrive very quickly.Oz: The Great and Powerful Headscratchers/Film Pan's Labyrinth

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