Killing Kaiju?

[Kitsune]

While relatively recent, I know it not a really recent movie and may be already discussed. . . .

Still, thought it interesting to ask how you would try to kill Kaiju in Pacific Rim.
I am putting nukes off the table for initial discussion purposes.

My idea is an incredible sonar net and orbital bombardment, something like Project Thor. See Kaiju and direct a pack of guided mach 10 tungsten telephone poles at them.

Second idea is mount something slightly smaller such an aircraft mounted spinal rail gun. . . .Something like what the navy invented for warships but single shot and take up the whole inside of a 747.

These ideas have just been floating around so thought I would put them out.

[Sea Skimmer]

Fucking trivial? Nearly anything would work, the movie was completely retarded end to end and unable to stick to even its most basis premise of the monsters being hard to kill or impossible/unresonable to fight with guns or other cutting weapons. They have a freaking robot with cannons in its damn chest! They built a sword! You can tear apart the corpse totally unprotected with your hands! Of course considering the 'great wall' was being built and the lavish mecha bases the size of skyscrapers, one can likely conclude that this is a universe in which we never stopped using leaded gasoline and thus everyone is a drooling retard. I imagine the last smart person left alive must have been forced at gunpoint to design a computer system that designed the robots. Maybe this was a prequel to Idiocracy?

But in any case, I am a strong advocate of using the Sprint missile against everything sci fi, and Russia already built us a conventional warhead version of that concept in the form of the 9M82M missile for S-300VM. Weighs 13,000lb, reaches mach 7.8 in under 15 seconds, 150kg fragmentation warhead can be replaced with a penetrating high explosive incendiary dart. Kinetic energy on impact of the 150kg dart alone would be over 470 megajouls, without considering the rest of the missile mass striking at hypersonic speed. Place these on a cargo plane with command guidance, which S-300V already supports as a system, meaning the missiles already have an uplink to talk too, and waste the thing in fifteen seconds. This is basically off the shelf kill. Russia has a huge surplus of Il-76 cargo planes (actual hundreds) too we can convert as launchers without even disrupting the aviation industry.

Though it would be nice to start building HIBEX-UPSTAGE, as it can reach a similar velocity in 1.1 seconds and with the 300lb UPSTAGE booster on top of it which can go even faster, though I'd just put a 300lb dart on top and call 2.5km/s in 1.1 seconds GOOD ENOUGH. This would take some R&D, but result in a mere 3,000lb class missile capable of completely insane short range firepower.

Dropping stuff from orbit is a complete waste of time when the arrival of the Kaiju is entirely predictable.They come from one single point! Sink a 1000 ton conventional depth charge down beside it. Kaiju appears? BOOOOOM. We can make high explosives by the millions of tons per year if we want, we already do with ammonia nitrate production. Even if we rule out this option, it still makes guarding against them trivial even if they can somehow move at supersonic speed underwater. Even mach 2 isn't getting them anywhere all THAT fast. The Pacific is kinda huge.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah; for sheer short-range brute force impact deadliness, Sprint-type missiles* do pretty much take the cake for "I'm designing a bazooka to kill God, what do I load it with?"

Purely bog-standard antiship missiles would be a reasonably good choice too, especially the versions that spread huge fires. If we take the "Kaiju blood is corrosive/toxic/whatever" threat seriously, blasting a crater in its side with a thousand pound shaped charge and then covering the wound in burning jet fuel for added trauma might be a good idea. Though really this is supplementary or an inferior alternative to the massed Sprint launches IMO.
_______________

[Just so everyone other than Skimmer knows, HIBEX and Sprint and so on are fundamentally similar in a lot of ways. They're basically a cone of high-energy solid rocket fuel that is all burned to get a relatively modest warhead up to stupidly high speeds right the hell now. Unless we invent something drastically more energetic than current solid rocket fuels, they're about the highest-acceleration systems that do or can exist. Most existing research on them was done because they're the ideal way to get a ballistic missile interceptor up to high altitude on ten seconds' warning to stop an incoming ICBM warhead.]

[Sea Skimmer]

Launch video, it isn't sped up. It moves that fast.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vq4mWyY ... lpage#t=98

Basically Sprint didn't use conventional rocket fuel at all, it was riding on top of a composition more like nitrocellulose-nitroglycerien double base gunpowder for well, guns. The pressure inside the rocket motor case was more akin to a gun barrel then normal solid rocket motors as well. We actually can do better even around the time it was fielded too which is just amazing, one option explored for Sprint II in static firings was adding sizeable solid zirconium metal chunks to the mixture. This added both more raw energy and conducted heat to speed up the burn rate even further; now some pretty exotic nanotechnology propellents exist in the lab, heck we now have explosives in the lab with 13 times the thermal energy of TNT, but why waste time developing them for service? Sprint would explode on the first ten tests if we restarted work, but we know we can build it, and afterall, already did put in on combat duty. PAC-3 is not that far divorced from the technology concept already, if completely different in detail. But fuck it, Sprint would work so well. It can be the point defense while S-300VM based systems are area defense.

If you want to really set the target on fire after its dead manwhile, I'm sure for 1/10,000 the price of the base they had the robots in at Hong Kong alone we could fund a huge fleet of 20,000 gallon capacity snorkel trucks turned into flamethrowers for every single Pacific city. Or flamethrower monitors, or tugboats. Or freaking flamethrower submarines, with underwater flamethrowers, since apparently we have unlimited funding for stupid. We can mod an SSBN with fuel and O2 tanks in place of the missile silos! Why can't we get THAT in a movie? Fighting armies of alien rape dolphins or something. And flamethrower helicopters to deal with the alien space bats!

To be all ecofriendly and crap though, it would be easy enough to just cover the monsters with giant tarps heat pressed together via helicopter, then install truck mounted vent fans to maintain negative pressure into a filter bank while we use construction equipment to dismember them. We kinda have to do that anyway with the corpses no matter how they die. The Kaiju are big, but not that big. EveCovering them in a tent is trivial compared to building even 100 yards of that pacific wall thing. Cleanup in the water would be a job for modified dredges pumping into some kind of tanker to store the stuff until it can be processed. Something like a cutterhead dredge shouldn't have a huge problem ripping apart the corpse, explosives can be used to turn it into chunks of need be. Floating curtains can contain the water circulation, you can make those several hundred feet deep if need be. Any chunks that get blown off are dealt with the same way. Pour bleach on the blood and throw oil dry on that. Horrors this will be so hard.

Speculating about cleanup methods seems more interesting then how do we kill them to me. They are way too easy to kill and not nearly numerous or fast enough. A hundred 50ft tall monsters appearing all over the Pacific that breathed fire would be a bigger problem. The Kaiju weren't even super aggressive at destroy things, I guess that much fits with them being some evolved monster creature rather then a totally unnatural creation. The 'destroy' instinct might be hard to breed into them.

[madd0ct0r]

builders foam.

Clusterbombs full of builders foam. Even if the kajui gets back to the water, it'll float.

[Lord Relvenous]

builders foam.

Clusterbombs full of builders foam. Even if the kajui gets back to the water, it'll float.

The mental image of Kaiju hands and feet sticking out of a ball of foam and waving wildly was worth a laugh.

But yeah, if the fist of a Jaeger can significantly damage a Kaiju, it seems to me there are a LOT of ways to impart that much kinetic energy.

[atg]

Sink a 1000 ton conventional depth charge down beside it. Kaiju appears? BOOOOOM.

The Cat 5 Kaiju at the end did tank a 1MT nuke to the face so that part probably wont work. If they were nuke charges they may take out the lower sized ones but then you gotta hope they swim pretty close to them.

[biostem]

Sink a 1000 ton conventional depth charge down beside it. Kaiju appears? BOOOOOM.

The Cat 5 Kaiju at the end did tank a 1MT nuke to the face so that part probably wont work. If they were nuke charges they may take out the lower sized ones but then you gotta hope they swim pretty close to them.

If Gipsy was able to plunge its sword through that cat 5, AND was able to burn through it using its reactor exhaust as an improvised blowtorch, then even something like an A-10's main cannon should shred Kaiju at range. Heck, I'd bet that a modern battle tank's kinetic impactor round has more force behind it than Gipsy's sword, (given that it was underwater, didn't have room to perform a full swing, and was already heavily damaged by that point).


Perhaps the Kaiju were engineered to be heavily nuke-resistant, in terms of raw radiation and such - though the heat and pressure from said explosions should have been much greater than the aforementioned blowtorch and sword attacks...

[Sea Skimmer]

Ah yes the same anti logic explosion which was caused by a nuclear reactor and generated a dark dry bubble underwater? Yeah somehow I think that was just reality breaking further and trying to suck the movie premise into another dimension where it wouldn't have to be dealt with. It certainly wasn't a real nuke. Anyway, not the typical threat. If one appears we can drop a 25 megaton bomb on it. That will I think be vastly less destructive to the earth then the Venus like CO2 emissions we'd need to build the Great Wall of stupid.

For that matter, why were they building the great wall, and not a mile thick giant block of concrete with a hollowed out dome on the bottom to drop on top of the rift? If they ever believed concrete could stop the things (cause swimming out of the Pacific = IMPOSSIBLE!) then this would work fine. Build it as a giant cassion and fill in the voids once it sinks. They could use the robots the world government randomly decided were useless as workers to help build and position it too!

Also considering the size of the rift, which makes the giant dome-cassion feasible, the mnster don't have an option to not swim close. We could build a anchored semi buoyant supertanker sized bomb if we wanted that would more or less span the gap. Or like, a pile of supertanker bombs if you think 1000 tons of pure shattering effect isn't enough. HE should be more effective against hardened targets then X-rays.

Seriously, the movie was not thought out, and not meant to be thought about at all. Look at the robots! Ignore everything else, cause it sure didn't have compelling characters, story or really anything but a bunch of visual effects. Makes me wonder if it was originally meant to be somewhat different and the director changed a bunch of scenes independently of each other, introducing so many extra inconsistencies.

See what biostem just said while I was typing this on bonus inconsistencies in that end bit.

And this makes me laugh every time even if many of the problems just don't matter.

[biostem]

I realize the rift is big enough for Kaiju to travel through, but how big is it, actually? Could they just construct a giant hollow metal form offsite, barge it over to the site, drop it, then pump it full of millions of tons of concrete - it'd definitely take a fraction of the materials needed to construct the coastal wall.

Plus - How many people die each year from things like Tsunamis or other natural disasters? I bet it's more than the Kaiju killed - and they should be relatively easy to track and follow.

[Zaune]

Mustard gas, or similar blister agents. You'd probably need a truly ridiculous concentration to kill the thing outright, but I bet it wouldn't take an excessive amount to drive it off.

[Sea Skimmer]

I realize the rift is big enough for Kaiju to travel through, but how big is it, actually? Could they just construct a giant hollow metal form offsite, barge it over to the site, drop it, then pump it full of millions of tons of concrete - it'd definitely take a fraction of the materials needed to construct the coastal wall.

The movie shows it actively opening to let the Kaiju through, IIRC at one point the monitors in the base say '40m' as how much the crack has opened, though it appeared to be somewhat longer then it was wide. Still we can build concrete arches 500m across, and steel even further, then stack the arches on top of each other so each layer is self supporting. Then pour solid concrete into that to fill the voids. This would be a rather better idea then my giant caisson concept yeah.

[Darmalus]

Containment dome to hold in the toxic monster guts and a giant blender or three directly over the rift made out of those arm-swords.

This scenario would be a bit more challenging if the kaiju could come out anywhere along the sea floor. The single point of entry makes them rather vulnerable to alpha strikes.

[Kitsune]

One other question is they state that they were destroying Jaegers faster than they could build them.
Building Yaegers has to be less expensive than superwall.
Also if we assume before this one Kaiju every two weeks, that is only 26 per year.
In World War II, how many Liberty ships were built? I read 2710?

[madd0ct0r]

less expensive =/= slower.
of
sufficently mobilised, we could build a LOT of concrete wall very very very very very quickly. of course, in movie they didn't, but that's the movie for you.

[biostem]

To be honest, it was probably harder to replace skilled pilots than it would be to build Jaegers. Speaking of which, I find it odd that they didn't, for instance, try to figure out what the maximum size Jaeger a single pilot could control, reliably, then just produce them en mass - arm them with smaller versions of the plasma cannon and sword, perhaps. Or, heck, just do some sort of remote-piloting of the Jaegers in the first place - even at the bottom of the ocean, they seemed to be able to communicate w/ the Jaegers, so remote control isn't totally ruled out.

[Simon_Jester]

less expensive =/= slower.
of
sufficently mobilised, we could build a LOT of concrete wall very very very very very quickly. of course, in movie they didn't, but that's the movie for you.

The problem is that the idea of building a wall several hundred feet high, equal in length to the entire Pacific coastline, is beyond "lots."

Also, "sufficiently mobilized" translates into plain English as "willing to spend unlimited money and all available labor on the project." If you're already willing to spend that kind of money, it becomes common sense to spend it in the most efficient way possible.

To be honest, it was probably harder to replace skilled pilots than it would be to build Jaegers. Speaking of which, I find it odd that they didn't, for instance, try to figure out what the maximum size Jaeger a single pilot could control, reliably, then just produce them en mass - arm them with smaller versions of the plasma cannon and sword, perhaps. Or, heck, just do some sort of remote-piloting of the Jaegers in the first place - even at the bottom of the ocean, they seemed to be able to communicate w/ the Jaegers, so remote control isn't totally ruled out.

Jaegers cost billions of dollars. You could probably recruit and fully train thousands of Jaeger pilots for that kind of money, and then only select the very best to crew each machine. The "good pilots are hard to find" argument really works better for machines that cost in the thousands or low millions.

[Sea Skimmer]

The only real requirement for a Jaeger pilot is the ability to drift, and apparently we can figure that out by having two people fight with sticks. They don't fight in a very fast or elaborate manner, and the Kaiju are dumb animals in how they act. Anyone could be trained to do the fighting part. Meanwhile the need to drift is never satisfactorily explained. They already are in an elaborate motion capture suit, and they still have physical displays and controls they must use inside the cockpit. What the hell is the point?

Kinda annoying to me even as a plot device because all it ends up amounting too is, oh your partner is dead, fight a bunch of random people until you find a replacement and this will work fine. No harder, if not easier then pairing up a pilot and WSO.

[Highlord Laan]

This is Pacific Rim we're talking about here. Stop thinking and punch the damned monster.

No. Shut up. Stop thinking like an engineer and hit the skyscraper sized monster in the face. The face!

[Kitsune]

This is Pacific Rim we're talking about here. Stop thinking and punch the damned monster.

No. Shut up. Stop thinking like an engineer and hit the skyscraper sized monster in the face. The face!

No, I enjoyed the movie and it is far better than Bay-Formers
Sometimes I think it is fun to pick the movie apart none the less.

[Simon_Jester]

The entertainment comes from the puzzle-solving aspect- how would we really, seriously, attempt to solve this problem?

[Sea Skimmer]

This is Pacific Rim we're talking about here. Stop thinking and punch the damned monster.

No. Shut up. Stop thinking like an engineer and hit the skyscraper sized monster in the face. The face!

Hey, I didn't start the thread, and I did enjoy punching monsters in the face. But that's the limit of it. The movie is far too inconsistent to go further with before more or less instantly concluding that existing weapons would be absurdly effective. They'd be effective against far more powerful monsters too.

The rocket punch was major weak lame though. That needed a Sprint motor bad. Maybe in movie two...

[Gaidin]

The rocket punch was major weak lame though. That needed a Sprint motor bad. Maybe in movie two...

I'm just curious. Would that just rip the arm right off the Jaeger for sheer acceleration? I know those where missiles and it might be, you know, controllable for how much force they put on the Jaeger's arm, but...you know...still.

[Simon_Jester]

The Sprint is a very uncontrollable rocket engine, as it is basically a stick of burning explosives inside a pipe. On the other hand, you could reasonably downscale the engine into something that wouldn't destroy the joint.

[Venator]

For the amount the world collectively spent on sci-fi robots, just imagine how many conventional nuclear subs you could churn out. Large enough fleet to surround the breach and have regular rotations to keep supplies and morale up, certainly.

Kaiju appears, launch a few dozen purpose-built nuclear torpedoes. If that doesn't put it down, somehow, launch a few dozen more. Rinse and repeat.