Kaiju as Military Weapons

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Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Majin Gojira »

There's a lot of Sci-Fi and Fantasy that have Dragons, Giants, and other huge monsters are employed by armies, alien invaders, and the like. Usually as an "Ultimate Weapon" or terror vehicle for their invasion force.

But how would Kaiju be used in an actual, practical military sense? Would they be some sort of high-end cavalry, or a "Clean" nuclear option? Or perhaps they're something else.

How should Kaiju be employed in a ancient, modern, or future/space military force?
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Zixinus »

The obvious question has to be answered first: what can a kaiju do that a nuke (or other bombs) can't?

For ancient warfare, a kaiju is for all practical purpouses a war-god: nothing but another kaiju or something as powerful magic (because let's face it, you need magic for a kaiju to even exist) can bring it down, able to take any army, any city, anywhere.

For modern warfare? The are two words that sum of a kaiju: big target.
Unless the Kaiju can somehow withstand all but the strongest weapons a military, there is little a kaiju can offer, even with giving things like death-breath. Maybe something like Mortha can move tank over water or mountains otherwise impassable to them or do some other, otherwise impossible, non-combat job like that.

Of course this is all null in the face of thing: how ridiculously much does a kaiju eat? We are talking the input of tons of food, daily, in terms of energy needed to move such large masses (unless, again, they are magically powered). It's a black hole for something that is only occasionally useful.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Solauren »

Kaiju are useful for what the aliens were using them for in Pacific Rim

Disposable first wave invasion/scout force on a planet you want for resources, but not to take over 'as is'. Especially if the locals would be resistant to the idea.

You drop them off to do as much damage as possible, without supervision.

Now, I'll admit, it didn't work to well in Pacific rim, BUT, that's because it took so long for them to be able to send multiple Kaiju through (something like 10 years)

Imagine if 2 - 3 Kaiju from that movie showed up today on modern Earth, and hit major civilian centers. The government could be hard-pressed to justify nuclear weapons to stop them, and they'd eat up a lot of resources trying to stop.

Now, imagine 10 of them. 20 of them. The weapons needed to stop them might be worse then the creatures themselves.

And when the world is destroyed to the point of your actual invasion/colonization attempt, you just unleash your custom anti-Kaiju bioweapon to kill them, or let them starve to death before you arrive.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Depends a lot on which kaiju, and how well you can actually control the kaiju. The Pacific Rim Kaiju appear to have been uncontrollable past the most basic 'front towards enemy' level of planning. That makes them militarily useless by modern standards, nuclear attacks or conventional bombing would have been far more effective at destroying industrial power and even the nukes would actually be safer to use close to friendly forces. The fact that the earth could do such stupid shit as it does in the movie is proof enough of the kaiju they suck at what they do. A B-29 raid would certainly have caused far more damage to Hong Kong.

Generally you'd have two main roles for giant movie monsters, 1) as a self sustaining strategic diversion and 2) as a superheavy breakthrough weapon to disrupt an enemy position, a role in which it's really not important that they cause much absolute destruction, just that they march where you want them to go. The rest of your forces can then exploit this. But if you don't have careful control of the monster then your own forces must keep away too, giving the enemy a chance to form a new defense line behind the kaiju.
Zixinus wrote: Of course this is all null in the face of thing: how ridiculously much does a kaiju eat? We are talking the input of tons of food, daily, in terms of energy needed to move such large masses (unless, again, they are magically powered). It's a black hole for something that is only occasionally useful.
I worked on this before....A tiger in the wild eats about 10% of its weight every couple days. Which means (if he wasn't powered off radiation, which is not physically impossible) even the 50m version of Godzilla with a canon weight of 20,000 tons would need to eat about 2,000 tons of meat every 3-4 days. Which means lowball from those numbers, 182,500 tons of meat per year.

Now a blue whale isn't 100% meat, but call it 200 tons of meat anyway and that means 50m Godzilla eats 900-1000 blue whales or like masses per year....and skipping reformatting my numbers....yeah it turned into something like human fishing in 1950 (which was super unsustainable) could have supported 100 x 50m Godzillas easily, and probably you could have 10-20 of the 100m tall versions swimming around without collapsing the global fisheries at all. Of course this all gets very sensitive to your exact choices of number.

So basically yeah, you could totally get away with feeding multiple kaiju off the earth's resources, but if you had to pay just 1 USD per pound of meat..182,500 tons = 365,000,000 USD a year in food costs. Not that high in military terms, but it would buy you hundreds of long range precision stand off weapons or thousands of tons of conventional bombs, or one new bomber. And the only way you'd get the cost of food that low is if you always could feed the monster somewhere you could bring up shiploads of sea food, the cost of buying these ships not considered, and unload those ships without famished Godzilla monster eating the entire ship whole.

I leave it to someone else to figure out how many Godzilla's we can feed if they ate corn based hardtack or similar grain food.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Zixinus »

The best use I can think of is a role already mentioned: shock troops. Troops that can withstand tremendous punishment, be massive diversions, bypass fortifications and possibly demoralize enemy. Depending on how well-prepared they are against the enemy, they'd also do tremendous damage, especially to fortifications. But even causing chaos as forces are moved against the thing can be useful depending on how expensive the kaiju is.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Elheru Aran »

Yeah, a kaiju would honestly be a very good distraction. It's the ultimate Distraction Carnifex in a way-- sending in your biggest, flashiest unit, so the enemy focuses on it and tries to bring it down with everything... and meanwhile you're sending your actual important troops down the side alley so you can flank them as they waste munitions and troops.

This could produce amusing results if *both* sides have kaiju...
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Sea Skimmer »

The inability to conceal the kaiju at anything less then continental distances is also a factor, the enemy has so much time to react to anything it does.

I'm actually kinda wondering now on even using a Godzilla as a breakthrough weapon, because while he's great at starting fires he generally only attacks stuff that's already firing at him, and his ground damage path is not that huge otherwise, the width of his walking plus the tail strike, dug in troops 50 yards from his footsteps would be unaffected and tanks could simply try to ignore him. The main advantage of these monsters is persistent high end destruction, but that requires they find crap to step on....
Elheru Aran wrote: This could produce amusing results if *both* sides have kaiju...
I had an idea for a silly story once where basically packs of kaiju roam the landscape fighting each other like street gangs, but meanwhile humanity is also waging a war all around them. But everyone avoids firing at the kaiju because it's useless, in favor of just letting them fight it out while the human war is waged separately. So it leads to silly battle scenarios.

Unless you had fairly good control of the kaiju that's what would probably happen. They can't just be big dumb animals, or else you suddenly have huge problems like delaying an attack by 2 hours...not possible because Godzilla won't change his walking pace.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Majin Gojira »

So many great answers! I guess I'll start at the top.
The obvious question has to be answered first: what can a kaiju do that a nuke (or other bombs) can't?
Depending on the Kaiju, they can basically level a city/base like a nuke would without the radiological long-term damage. Possibly as a 'Clean Nuke strike', though obviously the time it would certainly be longer.
For modern warfare? The are two words that sum of a kaiju: big target.
Unless the Kaiju can somehow withstand all but the strongest weapons a military,
There's actually very few Kaiju that are susceptible to conventional weaponry, and even those need the heaviest of ordinances to be of any real effect (IE: Shin Godzilla shrugging off everything short of a Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP II)). Others have nasty tricks like being able to absorb and grow stronger from heat energy, or regenerate obscenely quickly, or can be blown to bits but will reform quickly after.
there is little a kaiju can offer, even with giving things like death-breath. Maybe something like Mortha can move tank over water or mountains otherwise impassable to them or do some other, otherwise impossible, non-combat job like that.
Much like how the best use for Giant robots is probably construction.
Of course this is all null in the face of thing: how ridiculously much does a kaiju eat? We are talking the input of tons of food, daily, in terms of energy needed to move such large masses (unless, again, they are magically powered). It's a black hole for something that is only occasionally useful.
Most high-end Kaiju don't need to eat but run on things like an internal fusion engine (IE: most forms of Godzilla post-1984), or similar alternate power sources.

They may eat, but they don't need to in order to sustain themselves.
Kaiju are useful for what the aliens were using them for in Pacific Rim

Disposable first wave invasion/scout force on a planet you want for resources, but not to take over 'as is'. Especially if the locals would be resistant to the idea.

You drop them off to do as much damage as possible, without supervision.
There's also the fun fact that the natural processes of the Kaiju (and even their deaths/decomposition) are actually hinted at as being Terraforming agents to make the planet earth more suitable for the invaders.
Generally you'd have two main roles for giant movie monsters, 1) as a self sustaining strategic diversion and 2) as a superheavy breakthrough weapon to disrupt an enemy position, a role in which it's really not important that they cause much absolute destruction, just that they march where you want them to go. The rest of your forces can then exploit this. But if you don't have careful control of the monster then your own forces must keep away too, giving the enemy a chance to form a new defense line behind the kaiju.
Interesting.

The control aliens and the like have over Kaiju have varies quite a bit. Some have human-level intelligence (or close to it) so can actually follow a plan to some degree. Some have "Point in genral direction and hope it works" level control, while others have direct movement control over the monsters (Godzilla vs. Gigan had the aliens not only control every move the monsters made but had planned out things so meticulously that every move and event was pre-programmed, and another one had a remote control interface in Terror of Mechagozilla).

So that might up the viability of them for breaching defenses.
The best use I can think of is a role already mentioned: shock troops. Troops that can withstand tremendous punishment, be massive diversions, bypass fortifications and possibly demoralize enemy. Depending on how well-prepared they are against the enemy, they'd also do tremendous damage, especially to fortifications. But even causing chaos as forces are moved against the thing can be useful depending on how expensive the kaiju is.
Depending on how Kaiju work in this world, it could also be a form of plausible deniability. If Kaiju are a regular natural phenomenon (like it is in the Ultraman series), a terrorist organization could send a Kaiju against a target and then blame the things they don't like as the reason the Kaiju attacked. That might sound silly, but aside from pollution, sheer negative emotions can, depending on the series, create Kaiju like a beefed up form of the mood slime from Ghostbusters II.
The inability to conceal the kaiju at anything less then continental distances is also a factor, the enemy has so much time to react to anything it does.
Actually, Kaiju are surprisingly stealthy.

Some can burrow underground at high speeds (Baragon, Anguirus, Godzilla, Megalon, Yongary) and deep enough to avoid detection unless there are military grade seismometers available.

Others fly at ridiculously fast speeds (Mach 5+ in some cases), which might make even satellite tracking difficult depending on the flight patterns (unless satellite tech is far more advanced than I think it is).

Others come with built-in jamming technology, up to and including full EMP blasts to disable electronics.

And some have out and out stealth capabilities, like Godzilla himself, who is difficult to track with Sonar, and only reliably trackable through his radioactivity underwater.

That all might make them more viable.
This could produce amusing results if *both* sides have kaiju...
It might tbe the best counter to an offensive Kaiju attack. The area is already compromised, but having your Kaiju "Defend its territory" might make it easier to control, adding to a fortification's defenses.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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Majin Gojira wrote: Actually, Kaiju are surprisingly stealthy.
That's more an issue of the typical movie government is even more incompetent then the Assadist hoards in Syria then anything even remotely connected to a competent military scenario. So, while I don't rule out stealth in specific situations, as a rule your literally talking about something the size and signature of a walking operating industrial scale power plant. This isn't even remotely going to be hard to track in prepared battle standoff situations.

Remember any tactic or idea can work once by surprise, this doesn't prove much about its actual capabilities.

Some can burrow underground at high speeds (Baragon, Anguirus, Godzilla, Megalon, Yongary) and deep enough to avoid detection unless there are military grade seismometers available.
Tunneling at high speed would be absurdly loud, and depending on ground conditions also very surface uplifting-collapsing. You would physically hear this activity on the surface with the human ear in many conditions unless it was extremely deep. I like tunneling monsters, but stealthy this could not be. More like river diverting obvious.

What is a military grade seismometer anyway? That's a mainly civilian field, even when it comes to anything a military might actually buy. The worlds fixed arrays for earthquake and nuclear test monitoring would pick this stuff up. Establishing a better tracking system would just require adding more listening posts, hardly an overwhelming task if anyone had a reason to bother.

Syria has seen a fair bit of underground warfare, for the record too, and countermining from the government as a response.

Most of these monsters would be easy enough to track if you just had a telegraph network and 1860s technology in general. Humanity really started to kick ass by that point.

Others fly at ridiculously fast speeds (Mach 5+ in some cases), which might make even satellite tracking difficult depending on the flight patterns (unless satellite tech is far more advanced than I think it is).
They are, and been such a while. The latest state of the art fielded is thermal imaging that tracks specific missile warheads in space optically. A mach 5 flying powerstation like object would be tracked by 1980s thermal imaging satellites. Any large supersonic aircraft and all hypersonic air vehicles are fairly easy to track at this point, for the same reasons that we now have such insane cellphones.

When your surface temperature goes as high as 3,000F and you have a surface area larger then a quarter your pretty damn obvious against the entire rest of the planet, and near anything else but the sun itself for that matter.

If the Kaiju went mach 5 at low altitudes the skin temperature would turn into more like 6,000F or something like that, it gets silly but very dependent on how aerodynamic you are at which point you'd have a kaiju that's something like a constant string of tactical nukes exploding. At which point it'd be damn powerful, but a massive ICBM strike would be too, and that can fly at about a mach 20-25 average speed.
Others come with built-in jamming technology, up to and including full EMP blasts to disable electronics.
The US actually has a system to track the origin of nuclear effects from space piggybacked on every GPS satellite. Using differential time of arrival this can plot locations with very high accuracy. While not much in real life has high hardness against nuclear effects anymore, a few key things still do deal with it well, and provide a capability for the US to actually know what happened on the planet's surface.

The EMP effect on 2014 Godzilla didn't seem all that long ranged either. Comparable to the source region effects from a nuclear blast, but not what happens if a high yield device goes off in low orbit. Also we totally have and can make EMP proof aircraft. Lots of smaller aircraft in the world today would just not be fatally affected by anything like that. They don't have any AC/DC conversion and no semiconductors. Protecting radio equipment is also entirely possible, though you might need to start manually change fuses if you kept getting hit over and over again.

Simple HPMs typ wapons are much easier to protect against meanwhile, but can constantly attack a target, if you had a monster with microwave generator lobes on it's head it could then notionally screwover anything. Also use them as focused MASER death rays because fantasy says yes.

And some have out and out stealth capabilities, like Godzilla himself, who is difficult to track with Sonar, and only reliably trackable through his radioactivity underwater.
In 1954 when as seen in the film, Japan had 300 ton police sub chasers fora navy it might have been hard to track Godzilla. Today if he moved slow he might really be able to be invisible to passive sonar, but even then only if his damn heartbeat is near perfectly insulated. But how the hell is something that big supposed to hide from active sonar hunting it to death? Sonar can image bolt heads off sunken wreckage if you want it too now and active pinging sub detection ranges are up to several hundred miles. Being a physically big and irregular target is a tremendous disadvantage at this point.

Lots of satellite methods apply here too, like actual displacement of the waters surface by passage of object can get high enough to be detected. Its a concern with an 45ft diameter SSBN, with something like godzilla it'd be a lot more so. Thermal signatures from the water mixing also become relevant, and hyperspectral imaging to show the surface wake water mixing in other optical bands, this is due to different water composition and how much plankton is in it.

So kaiju are going to need magic if you want them stealthy and faster then a couple knots at 10,000ft deep.

Lots of modern weapons could be negated by high kaiju speed and diving depth though. If they were part of an actual military force that could protect them from simply being swarmed by aircraft actually destroying them while they lay in the deep ocean would be nearly impossible. For kaiju strategic basing it makes lots of sense, but hiding almost anything under the ocean would make sense, if it wasn't so absurdly expensive to build submarines. Thus the logic of the SSBN loaded down with 200 nuclear warheads in the first place. Pretty good seamonster mankind built.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Thinking more, depending on how big and fast a borrowing worm you want, that might serious turn into a traveling nuclear bomb effect itself. At some point you'd actually just need to make this a hydrodynamic event with an enormous starting thrust.

Pretty epic, but I think a kaiju like that would literally kill everyone and everything on earth in short order. Threat type: Continental Boundary Layer Flow Worm.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Majin Gojira »

Sea Skimmer wrote:Remember any tactic or idea can work once by surprise, this doesn't prove much about its actual capabilities.
I'll keep that in mind, thanks.
Tunneling at high speed would be absurdly loud, and depending on ground conditions also very surface uplifting-collapsing. You would physically hear this activity on the surface with the human ear in many conditions unless it was extremely deep. I like tunneling monsters, but stealthy this could not be. More like river diverting obvious.
It's always portrayed as so quiet in films, but films have never been good at portraying just how loud things of that scale would be.

Though the deepest a Kaiju has ever gone in was "Swim through the earth's mantle and burst from a volcano."

Ridiculous is a key word there.

Though the best use of burrowing would be storage of the Kaiju. A military aware of Kaiju capabilities would only track sismc activity for so much as more and more of them are stockpiled, and possibly throwing off the numbers known.
They are, and been such a while. The latest state of the art fielded is thermal imaging that tracks specific missile warheads in space optically. A mach 5 flying powerstation like object would be tracked by 1980s thermal imaging satellites. Any large supersonic aircraft and all hypersonic air vehicles are fairly easy to track at this point, for the same reasons that we now have such insane cellphones.

When your surface temperature goes as high as 3,000F and you have a surface area larger then a quarter your pretty damn obvious against the entire rest of the planet, and near anything else but the sun itself for that matter.

If the Kaiju went mach 5 at low altitudes the skin temperature would turn into more like 6,000F or something like that, it gets silly but very dependent on how aerodynamic you are at which point you'd have a kaiju that's something like a constant string of tactical nukes exploding. At which point it'd be damn powerful, but a massive ICBM strike would be too, and that can fly at about a mach 20-25 average speed.
I did not know this, thank you!
The EMP effect on 2014 Godzilla didn't seem all that long ranged either. Comparable to the source region effects from a nuclear blast, but not what happens if a high yield device goes off in low orbit.
200 Miles is what I remember it being, which I think is within the range of a high yield nuke's EMP field.
In 1954 when as seen in the film, Japan had 300 ton police sub chasers fora navy it might have been hard to track Godzilla. Today if he moved slow he might really be able to be invisible to passive sonar, but even then only if his damn heartbeat is near perfectly insulated. But how the hell is something that big supposed to hide from active sonar hunting it to death? Sonar can image bolt heads off sunken wreckage if you want it too now and active pinging sub detection ranges are up to several hundred miles. Being a physically big and irregular target is a tremendous disadvantage at this point.
I keep forgetting that modern sonar found Nessie recently (or a prop from the film Young Sherlock Holmes that sank to the bottom of the loch).

Though in Godzilla vs. Biollante, they treated going under as him disappearing unless a sub was very close by to ping him actively. To the point where a major plot point is centered around his general direction being between one of two bays, and have to choose which one to fortify fully to stop him (as they don't have enough equipment left to stop him with split forces, I think). When he surfaces again . . . they find they chose the wrong bay to fortify.

But that was in 1989.
So kaiju are going to need magic if you want them stealthy and faster then a couple knots at 10,000ft deep.
The use of various kinds of magic in a military situation is another thread entirely (that I think we've had before).

Sadly, there are some that have that too. Or might as well have that. Darn Ultra-series monsters and alien giants!

I mean, in that series alone, there's at least five monsters that can turn practically invisible for short periods of time (Gobagos, Eledortus, Neronga, Sartan, & Elec-Mikuras).
Lots of modern weapons could be negated by high kaiju speed and diving depth though. If they were part of an actual military force that could protect them from simply being swarmed by aircraft actually destroying them while they lay in the deep ocean would be nearly impossible.
Absolutely. Darn things use the Mariana's Trench for a resting spot regularly.
For kaiju strategic basing it makes lots of sense, but hiding almost anything under the ocean would make sense, if it wasn't so absurdly expensive to build submarines. Thus the logic of the SSBN loaded down with 200 nuclear warheads in the first place. Pretty good seamonster mankind built.
One that can end the world almost single-handed if it hits the right places!
Thinking more, depending on how big and fast a borrowing worm you want, that might serious turn into a traveling nuclear bomb effect itself. At some point you'd actually just need to make this a hydrodynamic event with an enormous starting thrust.

Pretty epic, but I think a kaiju like that would literally kill everyone and everything on earth in short order. Threat type: Continental Boundary Layer Flow Worm.
That does indeed sound epic! Also sounds like the Dholes from Lovecraftian lore. They're like apple worms for planets.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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Someone mentioned Lovecraft, and he's the source of my first, last, and only thought on the subject of this thread:
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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Sea Skimmer wrote:Depends a lot on which kaiju, and how well you can actually control the kaiju. The Pacific Rim Kaiju appear to have been uncontrollable past the most basic 'front towards enemy' level of planning. That makes them militarily useless by modern standards, nuclear attacks or conventional bombing would have been far more effective at destroying industrial power and even the nukes would actually be safer to use close to friendly forces. The fact that the earth could do such stupid shit as it does in the movie is proof enough of the kaiju they suck at what they do. A B-29 raid would certainly have caused far more damage to Hong Kong.
A B-29 raid would've caused less damage than the San Fran attack, though. I mean, aside from being interceptable.

And they had some control- Note they could send the Kaiju after Newt, have them wait while the humans were making a mistake on the Breach defenses, having Leatherback lie low to wait til enemy reinforcements moved in so they could be sure of getting a Jaeger kill, etc.. I think mostly just 'forward current mission objective' stuff, but they were more than dumb brutes.

Also one of the early Kaiju used cover of hurricane to bypass closer cities and go further inland without being noticed. Onibaba did a hit and run strat in Tokyo vs Coyote Tango. Each Kaiju had it's own behavior pattern.



---
On the food topic, I think the Kaiju are designed to start with a big energy supply (their blood was some fancy chemistry, I bet they have plenty of energy storage in their advanced biotech). They may eat some but long-term survivability isn't the highest priority... if they can last for two-three weeks, they can accomplish their objectives.

Oh wait, I forgot someone actually did an article on this!

How many people do Kaiju need to eat every day?. It uses the stupidly-low weights, so I'd add an order of magnitude or two more, but some data.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Zixinus »

If Kaiju can be controlled somehow then its use and control would be on the level of a WMD. Governments would either wrestle control or heavily regulate it on the sheer reason of what a Kaiju can do. A terrorist group getting control of one is as a big deal as them getting biological or nuclear weapons. Random ones appearing trough things like pollution would mean mayor policy shift to prevent that.

The classic Kaiju travels via ocean floor or swimming, so how detectable it is would depend on how hard would it to notice that.
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LadyTevar
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by LadyTevar »

Zin? Fix your signature. It's doing weird shit to the formatting. Remove the Spoiler Tag, that might be the problem.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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Q99 wrote: A B-29 raid would've caused less damage than the San Fran attack, though. I mean, aside from being interceptable.
That's doubtful, since the attack was said to have killed thousands and not say, millions, and San Francisco is still mostly made out of wood. As far as interceptable goes, that just bogs down in how dumb the movie is, but I will point out that probably only Moscow of all the cities on earth is actually seriously prepared for a bolt from the blue attack by 1,000 Superfortresses. Also consider that if you used just 100 x C17s as bombers it would be a similar tonnage of bombs to the B-29, but to a much longer range and ~150mph faster. Modern airlift can move really impressive tonnages.

So...military Kaiju logically should compete with notional near future Spanish civil war inspired scenarios like Operation Assadist Victory in the Trump Declares War on Everybody War, the code name for when all the worlds jet airliners are reequipped as carpet bombers, no matter how bad of ones and how long it actually takes to throw all the bombs out of the plane over the target region. That should be at least 7,000 aircraft that each crush a B-29 on range-payload specs and all we need are crews movie crazy enough to fly them in combat. Obviously you'd want some kind of escort.

So 7,000 world airliner bomber raid on the entire San Francisco Bay area is my new competition. Total explosive weight dropped from an attack like that could be over a hundred thousand tons easily. Keep that in mind the next time earth lames it out against the kill aliens in the next movie of whatever. Getting the explosives and napalm wouldn't be a problem at all the way we blow up whole mountains.

Anyway I think the point does still stand that for massive area destruction some of these monsters are not actually all that effective compared to actual waged means of war. If nothing can oppose them they could be much worse then air raids by the way they could prevent repairs, but as a practical matter this does require a lot of mobility. Air raids are a problem since the planes can hit somewhere completely different the next night. The Kaiju can inflict a more absolute level of destruction, but usually only over a narrow path. Vulnerability to fire becomes a big deal. WW2 proved crap is way harder to destroy then anyone might think when it comes to industry and when you have a repair service with a serious interest in doing anything, like saving the planet from aliens.

Think about how much tornado damage the world repairs each year.
And they had some control- Note they could send the Kaiju after Newt, have them wait while the humans were making a mistake on the Breach defenses, having Leatherback lie low to wait til enemy reinforcements moved in so they could be sure of getting a Jaeger kill, etc.. I think mostly just 'forward current mission objective' stuff, but they were more than dumb brutes.
It points to a dog like level of control yes, but that might not translate further. The Jaegers were killing the Kaiju for years before the Kaiju ended up just getting physically stronger.
Also one of the early Kaiju used cover of hurricane to bypass closer cities and go further inland without being noticed. Onibaba did a hit and run strat in Tokyo vs Coyote Tango. Each Kaiju had it's own behavior pattern.
Is this from the novel or something? Doesn't really matter though, it's still only an animal level of tactical thought. In contrast Kaiju are not improvising weapons and for example, even though they are loosing to the Jaegers on a persistent basis. They also weren't trying to maximize damage to earth heavy industry, or say if one attacks an oil refinery, it doesn't exploit its enormous physical size to smash all the berms blocking oil spills and then intentionally channeling as much oil as possible at some other objective for maximum effective destruction effects. It'd just plow through the place and keep going. A smart monster could be far more effective then air raids at actually annihilating key stuff beyond repair and with the widest possible collateral damage while doing it, and so imploding the ability of earth to defend itself the fastest and bestest.

But this is no how Kaiju operate in anything I can think of it, not really a trait of the type. Sometimes they are moth like attracted to powerplants though.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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One thing that might be interesting is how Kaiju would change ocean warfare. For example, in both Pacific Rim and Godzilla the kaiju are quite at home in the water, and quite fast. What if kaiju could be deployed (or even just decided to take up residence) to secure areas of ocean? Imagine if the Godzilla kaiju immediately went after anything with a nuclear 'scent' like they did in the movie- able to sniff out nuclear material buried in a mountain a thousand miles away? Nuclear vessels could be taken out of play entirely, especially subs if the kaiju can sniff them out at massive distances. Any kaiju could easily catastrophically damage a sub or cause horrible damage to the bottom of a carrier.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Elheru Aran »

In an nautical context, I would expect nuclear-tipped torpedoes and nuclear depth charges to become a thing, as well as anti-surface and anti-submarine missiles being repurposed to deal with kaiju.

Pacific Rim kaiju were an interesting case, I seem to recall there being some bullshit reason about why they couldn't just nuke them?

As for their impact on human environments... it would be roughly comparable with say a severe tornado outbreak or a major hurricane, depending on the kaiju. It'd be expensive and bad, but unless there's some horribly toxic component to the kaiju attack like Pacific Rim Kaiju Blue poisonous blood, it wouldn't be impossible to recover. A Category 5 hurricane is comparable to a major nuclear attack IIRC as far as amount of damage goes.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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Kojiro wrote:One thing that might be interesting is how Kaiju would change ocean warfare. For example, in both Pacific Rim and Godzilla the kaiju are quite at home in the water, and quite fast. What if kaiju could be deployed (or even just decided to take up residence) to secure areas of ocean? Imagine if the Godzilla kaiju immediately went after anything with a nuclear 'scent' like they did in the movie- able to sniff out nuclear material buried in a mountain a thousand miles away? Nuclear vessels could be taken out of play entirely, especially subs if the kaiju can sniff them out at massive distances. Any kaiju could easily catastrophically damage a sub or cause horrible damage to the bottom of a carrier.
Yeah, they'd sink anything by hitting it. This could be very destructive and disruptive if the kaiju was the Indian Ocean or Atlantic. The Pacific is huge and the main limitation to this would be the ocean is huge factor. Normally merchant ships follow some super predictable routes, but those can change given a reason and warships roam about. To be effective against the ~65 million GRT tons of shipping the world built last year, let alone make a dent in the existing fleet a Kaiju needs to sink at ~200,000 GRT tons per day, every damn day.

On the other hand in a kaiju + conventional forces naval situation, the kaiju becomes a way of destroying convoys, forcing the enemy to keep ships scattered. Then they'll be much easier to sink by other means.



I really don't see how the poisonous blood would stop us, since its plainly not a spill of nerve gas in the movie. It's not like we'd be forced to kill the monster in the most inconvenient possible location, just not when its physically standing in a river. Then the power of the bulldozer says these damn monsters are big, but they aren't that big. We dug it up and clean it up and get stuck with impounded hills of waste material. We are man, we blow up mountains so we can burn stuff nature said was garbage a hundred million years ago to keep our butts warm, after we invented the technology for near perfect insulation. These monsters better be toxic as fuck or else disrupting the economy in China might clean up the environment more then any possible toxic spill!

Lets recall for maximum win points on this that as we speak China still can't figure out how to cleanup the Tianjin explosion site, the place where a small atomic bomb's worth of conventional explosives converted what was functionally a toxic waste and cyanide depot with the capacity of a large ship into a gargantuan toxic cluster bomb that exploded. It's a year later and they've got some big holes in the ground filled with super toxic ground water. But not far away the port isn't just booming, it's still being physically built way bigger full bore. You could set off several more of the explosions around the damn place and it'd still keep booming. That's just one big port, humanity has a lot of those.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was interesting as an early monster where the blood spilled from shooting it spreads a plague that begins striking people down at once. That kind of threat would be much more serious then environmental pollution, since if it then spread person to person you have a world wide plague in short order. In that movie they then kill the lizard with a highly radioactive slug in a rocket while riding a roller coaster, instead of machine gunning it some more.

Also the jagers thought nothing of slaughtering them anywhere they pleased anyway.

On a localized basis the turds dumped by creates this size could be realllly disruptive if delivered to human drinking water supplies.

Billions of dollars, even tens of billions of dollars of cleanup per kaiju, but not world ending even if the damn things really were some worthy heap of toxic sludge. If you want a proper death monster I have some keen ideas, but the whole Pacific Rim setup is just silly Not some of the more threatening Kaiju in general. We are told to fear them, but clearly earth had time to dick around. Who knows, maybe the earth government is actually in a conspiracy with the aliens! I mean, it almost has to be for how mind boggling dumb it is. Putting on some giant theater act to turn earth into a police state ahead of a takeover.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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Elheru Aran wrote: Pacific Rim kaiju were an interesting case, I seem to recall there being some bullshit reason about why they couldn't just nuke them?
All the early ones died to nukes. It took two to kill Trespasser, one each for the next two. The problem is they're too deep and fast in the water, then surface right near cities, so there is not much target opportunity. Jaegers were invented as a way to fight without killing large sections of cities.

Also I have no idea how the San Fran casualties were so astonishingly light.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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Casualties might be very light if the monster was slow and lumbering enough, and not starting a firestorm such that people simply ran off. Non incendiary monsters are much less dangerous then incendiary monsters.

Did they say how big of nukes? Because once we started mass producing neutron bomb atomic field artillery projectiles one should recall that no technical reason exists why these cannot be fired like standard rounds. Then you only need a few small batteries to cover a major urban area with a very quick reaction time and multiple round capability. It would be crazy not to do this even with the Jeager program effective. Also such warheads would be wanted for SAMs and AAM use in case flying Kaiju appear.

Also....seriously, if monsters are attacking our coastlines then we would begin a certain amount of physically pull back from the actual waters edge. No reason exists why people MUST keep living right on the damn waters edge. They can move, the buildings become fortifications or giant traps. Nuclear artillery is deployed, and huge conventional mines made of thousand ton barges of RDX are sunk in shipping channels.

At industrial sites too valuable to expensive to move meanwhile drilled air raid shelter plans can be put into effect tailored to the need. If your told to take cover before the damn nuclear artillery, you better do it! You'd kind of want somewhere to hide anyway. This is of course also far cheaper then building an anti monster wall that was apparently hollow and not even filled with water for some insane reason.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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Sea Skimmer wrote:Yeah, they'd sink anything by hitting it. This could be very destructive and disruptive if the kaiju was the Indian Ocean or Atlantic. The Pacific is huge and the main limitation to this would be the ocean is huge factor. Normally merchant ships follow some super predictable routes, but those can change given a reason and warships roam about. To be effective against the ~65 million GRT tons of shipping the world built last year, let alone make a dent in the existing fleet a Kaiju needs to sink at ~200,000 GRT tons per day, every damn day.
I was actually thinking if the Kaiju were just...living in the oceans, like the classic sea monsters. It'd be particularly interesting if they were drawn to nuclear powered vessels. Enough of them and nuclear tech could be limited to land based operations. Untrackable kaiju living in the deep, occasionally munching on a sub or carrier would change things I imagine, if there were enough of them.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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If they are drawn to nuclear vessels though we'd use decoy ships with simple nuclear reactors installed to draw them into ambushes. They would need to be fairly smart about it. Otherwise the idea would be nuclear Q-ship built out of a bulk hauler containing 400,000 tons of bulk RDX explosive.

As far as munching goes, depends all on the rates, carriers and subs would just get laid up in port for safety. Building nuclear reactors just to generate radiation signatures isn't hard. If you had a hundred monsters, sure. But then you might as well attack earth's ports at that point anyway, effectively attacking even thirty of the largest ports of the world at once would be ultra crippling for a while.
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Sea Skimmer wrote: We are told to fear them, but clearly earth had time to dick around. Who knows, maybe the earth government is actually in a conspiracy with the aliens! I mean, it almost has to be for how mind boggling dumb it is. Putting on some giant theater act to turn earth into a police state ahead of a takeover.
This actually sounds like a plausible plot for a Godzilla movie and so the human-alien government conspiracies need epic kung fu assbeatings with the likes of samurai sword-wielding, Stalin-mustached Don Frye and a bunch of Final Fantasy rejects. :P

And I bet the aliens and human conspirators kidnapped Baby Godzilla to blackmail Godzilla and his kaiju friends to wrecking Earth. By freeing Baby Godzilla, Godzilla will be happy and will fight the aliens' forces and then he and his kaiju friends can retire to Monster Island.

I mean goofy human-element sideplots always exist in the traditional Godzilla movies anyway. :D
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Re: Kaiju as Military Weapons

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Godzilla also fights pollution in that one drug trip movie, he'd have Pacific Rim Kaiju ripped in half in five minutes for daring think of despoiling the soil of Japan, or touching any of his stuff like Tokyo.

The human side plot in Pacific Rim approached painful to me, which is about par the course for this kind of movie but you would have thought they could do better. MOAR CLICHE MOAR DUMB was the objective though. All logic indicates to me that Pacific Rim 2 should aspire to be even cooler and stupider then Godzilla Final Wars, but I'm not holding my breath.
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