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They're all suffering from the economic collapse that comes from constantly bein g attacked by monsters. Anyway the kaiju were just the first step before the rif t aliens completely exterminated the humans. They're coming from the pacific; that doesn't mean they're staying there. The pl an is to eventually move out over the rest of the world; they're just focusing o n 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 w orld 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 hig hest population density. Coming for that region, the kaijuu are directly attacki ng the biggest chunk of the human species by numbers. Ahem, may I introduce you to Otachi? Now think about what her appearance indicat es of the aliens plans. Energy Weapons as Artillery If they are capable of creating energy weapons for the Jaegers, why don't they c reate artillery units with those things. At the very least, mobilizing a battali on of plasma blaster tanks along the coastline to back up the Jaegers would be s mart. 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 to carry. Gipsy Danger's blueprints states it fires plasma via charge ion carrier rail. Th is, along with the line about unloading the entire clip, suggests a physical com ponent to the ammunition that would provide significant range. Gipsy Danger's po wer source is capable of self-sufficiently powering two plasma cannons and all o f its components and systems without showing signs of taxing. The same power sou rce would probably be able to power a large series of fixed canons and possibly last 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 requi rements 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 techno logical limits aren't explored, so we don't know exactly what the effective rang e 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 th e 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 shot s 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 ran ge is all he's got. IOW, way too short to put on a wall... by the time the charg ing kaiju's in range its close enough that the momentum of its /corpse/ will pro bably 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 s plash and thermal damage rather than kinetic piercing and trauma like a solid ro und. Frankly, I think it would be far more efficient, cheaper, and safer to use either 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. Str iker's missiles worked quite well in Sydney, and your average destroyer packs a lot more munitions than it does. This isn't Evangelion, conventional weapons do work, 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 easi ly. The only reason to use a plasma round would be to cauterize the wound and pr event 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 sto ry, 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 conv entional 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 finall y bled it to death. Conventional artillery is not your solution, and exotic arti llery 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!); y ou have to concentrate it on mobile platforms that can take the firepower right to 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 mis sion 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 nuk e. It's possible that Trespasser was a cat5. Then the cat1's came in after they knew what resistances to breed into them. The scenario that Trespasser was strong and then they went back and started send ing weaker Kaiju seems rather unlikely. All Kaiju are on a suicide mission, to c ause as much damage as they can before they are put down. If the makers send a c lass 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 th em from just sending more Cat 5's. Also, remember, Cat 5 is not the highest end that 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's trying 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 pound ed 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 bec ause of that EMP, but the ease with with Gipsy's blade cut through Otachi would suggest that they would be fairly effective, at least more effective than the pl asma 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 don e 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 and coordinated fire from several miles away, or they could just, y'know, use missil e tracking. Also, Physically, the battle with Slattern is an anomaly. It took a 1+ Megaton nuke, point-blank, which would have been several magnitudes hotter th an the sun, but couldn't handle a jet of reactor venting, which would have been tens 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 the sun, but still not as intense as the explosive). I assumed the nuke managed to damage Slattern enough for Gypsie's reactor vent t o do the trick. IIRC Slattern's skin was visibly cracked and the soft bioluminsc ent 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 thou gh we only saw them work on the rather pathetic Metavore, but the fact is they d o, when our other conventional weapons simply don't besides nuclear force. Perha ps they're simply too large, heavy and short-ranged for fighters to carry, not t o 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 ce rtainly looked worse for wear. Not to mention, swords and explosions work on vas tly different principals, so comparing Otachi's resistance to one but not the ot her doesn't prove much. Kevlar can block a bullet but be pierced by a knife, aft er all.

You're completely right, it is foolish to compare those two different forces. Bu t we can at least assume that if the plasma cannon can cut through Kaiju like a lightsaber through a small child, a series of high impact missiles could probabl y work. Who says the weapons would have to be mounted on a conventional combat a ircraft? A plane the size of a strategic airlifter could probably haul a few gui ded missile pods and engage targets from long range using JDAM kits. Instead of using 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 wo uldnt use refitted versions of the hundreds of combat ships already available. A lso, appreantly the missiles are some kind of specialized anti-Kaiju weapon or w hatever, 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 on Otachi from well across the bay, but didn't until he was in spitting distance, a s it was when up against Metavore. Distance? The writers proved that they had no concept of effective range the min ute they showed jet fighters flying within slapping distance, not once, but twic e. 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 co ntact with Trespasser way out in the bay, given how fast they fly. We see them d oing 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 fro m the bridge. Its the same logic as the Hansens trying to hit Leatherback with f lare 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 a ircraft even attempted to pull up. They might have been going for a deliberate s uicide 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 the se mechs are weighing in at thousands of tons and those punches at their size ar e moving immensely fast. Your talking a minimum estimate of double the momentum of inertia of the plane strikes on the world trade centre concentrated over a fr action the area through a less flexible surface.Yet despite that the Kaiju absor b them almost casually, anything that can absorb that is going to shrug off pret ty 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 h ell of a lot less sturdy), though the rads and thermal would do a hell of a lot of harm, and doubtless are what killed 2 out of 3 at the end. The strikers missi les do work of course, but they're extremely large bore and apparently short ran ged, (there's a correlation between range and warhead power for a given size). W here talking missiles far bigger and nastier than anything the navy currently us es here with dedicated super armour piercing warhead. Your probably looking at e nough explosives to fill a unker buster in each missile and enough penetrating p ower 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 ho w many punches first, (hell it might have been hit by other missiles and stuff b efore that, we only see the kill shots). The other problem is the Kaiju have sho wn 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 cri mson rivers is because of the timely evacuations. It's stated in a number of sources, (mostly supplemental though the movie displa ys this as SOP as well) that the aim of the Jaegers is to intercept them in shal low waters, the Kaiju even making it to land is already a partial mission failur e. 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 capab le of rapid fire once it's warmed up. Given that, why don't they start charging up when the Kaiju's still a mile away, so they can ventilate the thing the secon d 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 c harge shot while trying to do platforming it's doable, but it's something else you have to coordinate. Now scale that up to giant robot levels. It might be a thin g 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 i t before getting into melee. Unless you miss, or holding the concentration on charging the cannon means you'r e not paying enough attention to your surroundings and dodging. The weapons are effective, but the Kaiju are able to dodge unless they're pinned down or it's po int-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 y ourself 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 o nce or twice where the Jaegers have any idea where the Kaiju is before it leaps out and attacks them and if you're holding that plasma charge, then what? You fall over and miss, most likely. And because you were concentrating on holding that charge, 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 i t is. It's just holding the (preferably already weakened) Kaiju in place while y ou get ready to finish it off. Answering the initial question, say you did have a massive artillery piece capab le of firing massive shells (something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwere r_Gustav - 7 ton shells out to 29 miles ). While this is a great amount of fire power, the US alone has 12,479 miles of coast they need to defend. That's 215 pi eces to completely cover the coast without overlapping ranges. Not only that, bu t 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 to n object into something). Not to mention that kaiji are fast moving targets - so mething 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 usef ul as support (as they're used currently) not has a main offensive. And if you n eed 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 fi rst shot, it could be a matter of safety and/or combat longevity. A powered up w eapon can potentially explode or a shot accidentally fired. And a powered up wea pon may cause enough wear and tear that holding the charge or keeping the weapon active for prolonged periods might ultimately limit a Jaegers endurance - machi ne guns for instance typically need their barrels changed every few belts becaus e 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 i s 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 w ay 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 jae ger 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 o f the Jaeger's fancy weapons are used as finishers; it appears that heavy blunt trauma are needed to weaken the kaiju first to get through their thick hide befo re a deathblow can be dealt. Gypsy and Striker both were punching their opponent s 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 po wer supply to feed the gun, and the gun itself is about three times the size of a full-sized fishing trawler, going by the intro to the movie. Gypsy's power pla nt 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 t o mount a gun like that would be gigantic and not very mobile, and range restric tions as demonstrated in the movie would mean it would have to get within pointblank range before firing, a prospect that would be daunting in an open field, l et 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 gettin g 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 wit h Knifehead. By the time it gets broken out in the fight with Leatherback, it's been upgraded to be more practical to use rapidly, but initially Gipsy was in a bad 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 k nock Leatherback around a little bit before they sacrificed the use of one hand to bring out the plasma cannon. Chest Missiles as Artillery One of the Jaegers had missile launchers in its chest. These proved highly effec tive against most of the Kaiju they were fired against. So why not mount these s ame missiles on conventional mobile artillery platforms, and launch them from th ere? 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 t urn 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 ever ything 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. Th e best method of applying this is to simply mount the weapons ON the Jaegers. Th e cruise missile could still theoretically be possible, but the size and complex ity of the missiles would make such a thing difficult. And keep in mind; Just be cause 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-unive rse. 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 take s 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 s ince we're explicitly trying to stop them from damaging infrastructure and citie s. And if the first salvo doesn't kill it or there is a need for an escalation i n force, well... you're already screwed at that point because use of something l ike a nuke is going to do as much hard as good. By pushing initial contact out a s far as possible, these options remain viable without causing damage to yoursel f. Also when we see the size of the missiles next to a person they look to be the l ength of a SAM missile and about 5 times as wide. You could fit one of those thi ngs on a truck and no more unless you started using mining equipment. And Depend ing 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 compara ble to medium-range missile artillery like a SCUD or MRLS battery. And these mis siles appear to be short range, with less space given over to fuel and more give n 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 aga inst something as mobile as a Kaiju; the only way you're going to get such a mis sile launcher in range to be effective would be to have it relatively close to t he 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

y, especially when Jaegers are proving effective at stopping the Kaiju with the same weapons. Watsonian answer: it's not practical. Doylist: It's more awesome to see Jaegers than missile batteries. An army of Jaegers Why didn't they create an army of Jaegers as backup units or combat teams to tak e down the Kaiju faster and more efficiently? Because each one of those Jaegers probably costs as much to run and maintain as an entire conventional army. Also, pilot qualifications for giant robots are obv iously going to be on the high side. Add onto this that it still took a lot of time to build them. It took about 14 m onths for a Mark 1, and even the current ones still took a few months. They were able to repair and reload Gipsy Danger in a matter of hours. Given the amount of damage seen fixed quickly in the movie, resources weren't that great a limitation. At the height of the program, they had 20 active Jaegers. It's har d for me to believe that no one had the idea of just keeping the factory running to build a few more while the main one was still active. Especially as attacks started becoming more frequent. They could have at least had multiple Jaegers be ing deployed for each attack since it was always one kaiju coming from a known l ocation for over ten years. And all those Jaegers would be over-priced scrap metal without highly trained, s pecially selected, drift-compatible pilot teams for each one. The comic shows ju st how rigorous and selective the training is, and anything short of that is bas ically handing the Kaiju dinner on a silver platter. Pentecost was able to find twenty recruits for Raleigh's partner, and it is impl ied any one of them would have been adequate. It is hard for me to believe that they were only able to train about 50 total pilots out of the hundreds of thousa nds of eligible people, and that they weren't able to train up people over the c ourse of the war. And, apparently, drift compatibility is tested by your ability to anticipate your teammate's actions like Bash Brothers. Two people with simil ar psychological profiles put through training as a combat team would create you r pilots. A similar method is already used by numerous countries for their elite military and law enforcement teams. The US Navy alone has more than 200 active fighting vessels and a weighs a total of more than 3.1 million tons. With all of the nations of the world working tog ether (hell, even just the industrialized ones), production and maintenance shou ldn't have been an issue. Especially when they can afford to build massive sea w alls almost immediately after funding the Jaeger project. Besides, when extincti on is on the line, I would like to think that money would be no object. After category 3 kaiju began to appear, the Jaegers began to lose and world lead ers began to doubt the program. They started to shift their focus on building a defensive wall against the monsters and lost interest in the Jaeger program. What about bunker busters? Designed specifically to penetrate and destroy harden ed targets, they seem like the perfect conventional weapons for Kaiju combat. Al so about a thousand times cheaper than a Jaeger. I think we can safely assume that if they resorted to nukes on American soil, th ey resorted to every other available option first. They did have an army of Jaegers. They had enough Jaegers that by the time Knife head appeared, the military was confident that they had enough Jaegers to defeat any incursion, right up until the 4's started showing up. By that point, Kaiju were showing up every few weeks, and the Jaegers were getting destroyed faster t han they could be replaced. The movie flat out tells us that the Hong Kong battle-station alone once housed 30 Jaeger's, and we know of at least 4 other stations worlwide, they probably ha d 100's at one time. But most have gotten wreaked in the meantime. supplimentary material states that a total of 22 Jaegers were built. One thing not to underestimate is how much infrastructure would be needed and th e expense of the project. An modern carrier battle group carries compromises ove r 7500 people across over a dozen ships. All to ensure that the carrier (1 ship) can do it's job. But that's not factoring in the even larger logistical ships t

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 t hey wouldn't try or want to build more (extinction and all that), but rather tha t demand may very well out pace supply and the ability to train/provide infrastr ucture. That's, after all, one of the reasons stated in the movie for the declin e of the program to begin with - not that it wasn't effective, but that they sim ply 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 can only fight for so long. And perhaps more importantly, you don't build a multi-bi llion-dollar machine with the intent of using it as a general purpose fighting m achine and not worry about attrition because you have reserves - the resource dr ain would be phenomenal and wasteful. There's no point in winning the fight agai nst 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 bankrupt most 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 ow n countries mark on the world; they probably wanted that mark to be unique for p ropaganda purposes and, at the time, there wasn't a need to mass produce them si nce the handful they had did the job well. It wasn't until Gipsy Danger's fatefu l 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 ju st enough new gadgets to survive until the Kaijus adapted again, at which point they had to overhaul the design again. There's also several hints that each Jaeg er is tailor-made for it's first set of pilots; this is very obvious with the Cr imson Typhoon, who can only be piloted by the Wei Triplets and no one else, whic h 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 interdi mensional 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 op ens 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 thro ugh, 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 t he alien facility on momentum. If anything it looks almost as though it was a ze ro gravity underwater environment. Make it go two ways? If they can require authentication, then why ever allow any thing back through? It's not like they value the kaiju highly enough to recover them once the planet-wrecking is over. You can just make a new portal once it's ready to harvest. It's hard to say since we don't know the limitations of the portal or how the al iens' 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 assum e 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 unpre dictable in nature, and more like a Stargate. It's deliberately built to facilit ate travel between point A and point B. It also helps to consider that the alien s thought themselves more advanced and likely didn't consider that Earth would f igure out how to get back through the door. Wouldn't be the first war lost to hu bris. 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 n eeded to come back and forth between the rift after the kaijus have finished the ir extermination to coordinate their exodus. They probably never counted on anyo ne but them going back through the gate. They're not planning on colonizing, but harvesting. They aren't looking to expan d onto Earth, but to take all the resources and leave a lifeless rock. Hence the need for a two-way door. Kaiju codenames and categories Who determines a kaiju's codename and category? The nicknames seem very on-the-n ose despite the apparent complete lack of pre-mission briefings, while categorie s 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 was more than double the weight of the heaviest Cat 4 (Scunner at 3,230 tons) and we ll over 100' taller than any previous one. The naming convention seems to be pre tty 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". A nother comes out shaped like a giant gorilla, let's call him "Leatherback". One is named "Sydney" because, well it's about to attack Sydney, Australia. Don't th ink 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 Saffir Simpson hurricane w ind scale was created by a civil engineer and a meterologist, the kaiju scale wa s probably also created by people who research the kaijus. What it comes to the names, is there really some logic to why a hurricane gets a name like Katrina? L ike 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 tonna ge 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 man for the Cat-4s. But when Slattern stands in front of Gipsy at the Rift's edge, i t'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 Slatte rn - 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 depar tment or the scale, but the idea applies. Narrow rift? Did they really think originally that the reason they couldn't fit a bomb throug h the rift was that it wasn't wide enough? Despite the fact that massive kaiju w ere getting through? The impression I got was that, prior to the events of the film, they believed th e rift to be an unstable natural phenomenon and the kaiju to be gigantic wild an imals 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 it s time being too small to send anything through. Yep. When Newton suggested they were essentially biological weapons, it complete ly 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 insur ance on top of that. Why build a wall? Why would you ever think that a wall of all things was a better method of dealin g 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 wa ll(thereby weakening it for the next attack) until it's dealt with, or worse, ju st goes over it. There is no reason to think that they'd just give up and go awa y - as far as anyone knows at that time, they're mindless. They also know the ka iju 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 Sydn ey's) barrier than something that actively fights against the monsters and is ca pable 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 the m. The breach in Sydney is the first ever recorded in at least half a decade since the walls first went up. It was incredibly fortunate that Striker Eureka was sti ll there to fend Bladehead off, but up until very recently, the walls worked. An d the alternative was pouring untold billions, if not trillions, into constantly constructing new Jaegers and finding warm bodies skilled enough to become pilot s when the Kaiju keep on killing them. I'm decently sure the wall had mounted defensive turrets on it. I *could* be wro ng and those might have been cranes for the construction, but one would think th ey weren't going to assume the kaiju were just going to run into a wall and go a way, they were going to run into a wall and get shot at either until they died o r 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-rev ering religions exist in this universe; we saw some in Japan. Whether they call the 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 t hem had infiltrated governments, they could have turned public policy and/or opi nion against the Jaegers because they were effective. I realize there's little e vidence of this in the movie, but it's not a terrible explanation for all the Id iot Balls being juggled. It's possible that the "suits" had been assuming the kaiju, like their skin para sites, wouldn't actually be able to survive in Earth's environment for long due to incompatibility between their physiology and Earth's biosphere/atmosphere/hyd rosphere. If they'd been told there isn't enough ammonia or digestible food avai lable 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 i nevitable death throes, then walling them off until they croak of natural causes might genuinely have sounded like a better plan than continually sacrificing bi llions of dollars on Jaegers. This reasoning falls apart if you know the kaiju a re biological war machines, hence don't need to live long to fulfill their funct ion, but nobody told the "suits" about that until too late. The idea that they were dying animals is somewhat disproven by the first Kaiju s urviving six days of airstrikes before dying. When something that big is attacki ng, six days is a long time to hold a wall. The wall is quite possibly a simple vanity project to maintain some illusion of protection while the government works to protect what and whom it can. A bit col d, but had the last-ditch effort to close the rift not worked a fully-funded Jae ger 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 bil lions of coastal poor, who d otherwise overrun inland refuge settlements, a false sense of protection and purpose. Also, it's likely the governments knew that the kaiju were attracted to population centers, so maintaining mass metropolitan po pulations 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 i t's there. So logically, if a Kaiju encounterd a big wall, it would probably jus t 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 percepti on 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 occured in-universe - is that while walls are impressive, as this headscratcher notes, w alls are defensive. Sieges worked not because they were able to destroy the cast le, but because the defenders more often ran out of supplies before re-inforceme nts came. Up until they learned that the kaiji had an actual purpose (war), a wa ll could very well have been seen as a good idea by both the majority of governm ents 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 seemingly ineffectual point-blank cannon shots in the Hong Kong fight? It had two swords b uilt 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 pieces in the middle of the city would have created a major biohazard. The above argument is confirmed by the co-author to be true: http://travisbeacha m.tumblr.com/post/61739018157/so-one-thing-that-bothers-me-is-how-so-many-people Why would they even mention that the blood is toxic if they had no intention of making it a plot point? There were dozens of Hannibal's people fully exposed to the 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. Pre tty tragic, actually. And, given China's often callous attitude toward worker safety, he might've simp ly not cared. For the most part, they never really needed anything more than that until now. A lso, Raleigh didn't know about the blades since they were an upgrade to Gipsy Da nger; he still should have known from drifting with Mori. It could also be becau se the pilots may not have been proficient in that kind of armed combat during t he early days, and it would have resulted in problems with the drift for the pil ots 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 fil m. 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" wi th the plasma weapon. Raleigh didn't know about the sword or couldn't learn abou t it from drifting? Then why didn't the people in charge tell him about this imp ortant addition that could save his life? (Especially since I think they listed some other improvements that had been made.) Raleigh hadn't mastered it? He was pretty 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 the y 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 stil l unfamiliar with using the sword, though he does adjust very quickly. There wou ld still be the concern of breaking the drift because he might have to start thi nking 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 reference for). 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 see if 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 punc hes and the like is that this is what the Jaegers are designed for and what the first generations of pilots where trained in. The whole idea was to replicate th e 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 conce ntrating 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 appear to use them to soften the target up so they can use the long charge up time plas ma casters and missiles we see.The swords appears to be a new addition to grant even greater concentration of force for taking on the new bigger Kaiju's. Everybody got complacent The entire world is facing gigantic monsters. Completely new creatures with unhe ard of capabilities and strength. Now, I get that humanities first scientists wo uld 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 t hat apparently after designing all these robots, the scientists of the world jus t... 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 exactl y two knuckleheaded scientists left in the world who apparently care enough abou t 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 in to 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 would be something as simple as one guy going "Hey, these giant monsters can go throug h 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 nuke strapped 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 terri ble at their jobs. First off, what makes you think that the scientists just stopped? The Jaegers wo rk, 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 some body was working on them. Second, there's no evidence that those two scientists were the only ones in the world, they were just the only ones at that particular base. Most of the rest we re probably working in actual labs. You know, places that aren't functioning mil itary bases? (This leads to a little Fridge Brilliance about why they were so "t errible 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 d ivision.) 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. (Thi s leads to more Fridge Brilliance: Perhaps the creators designed the Kaiju that way 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 presu mably being dissected, used as trophies, and/or harvested for the Kaiju organ bl ack market. If anyone had suggested taking this valuable source of information/m orale/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 na tural 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 Gener ation 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 most ly fights hand to hand, I don't think the scientists were doing much to advance them. Also, there's a difference between engineers who kept the mecha working, a nd scientists who advanced the theory. \\ Second, it doesn't matter if there wer e hundreds more labs out there, none of them were able to make the kind of advan ces that were made at the very last minute during the years of relative peace th ey 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. T hey 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, they had to at least consider how to go through the Rift themselves. Evidently, the o nly thing they tried was firing missiles at it, which all bounced off. Common lo gic states that the Kaiju are getting through somehow though, so what would it t ake 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 c an 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 o f 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 ent ire government team with years of time should be able to do it. It's not "just t o see what would happen," it's figuring out through experimentation how in the h ell these things can get through the Rift when nothing else, organic or non-orga nic, can get through. Minor correction: it was stated in the movie that Gipsy Danger had been rebuilt into 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. Assumin g that Striker Eureka is the one and only Mark 5, that means Crimson Typhoon is Mark 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 compatibi lity of its pilots. Pentecost explicitly describes their performance as incredible, so i think it's safe to say they where pushing it well beyond any kind of expected performance l evel. Also the retrofit could have included a bunch of stuff slated for cancelle d future jaegers, which would make it a hybrid Mk3/Mk6. Assuming the Rift was a naturally forming phenomenon, that would be a huge scien tific endeavour into our understanding of quantum physics, and the kaiju represe nt a real world example of divergent evolution. Even something as basic as disco vering that all the kaiju are clones should have been figured out after only a f ew attacks due to studying the DNA and physiology of the corpses. Up until the e nd, 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 diss ecting what was left of them should have been one of the highest priorities. Und erstanding 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 o f it being a passage to another dimension. The part concerning their lack of und erstanding 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 resear ch. 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 to p 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 in a while and spending tons of money just to keep themselves from being utterly de stroyed, all the time with a very damaged economy. Also, a good part of scientif ic research is done by Universities, which in this scenario would have lost a go od part of their budget, thus being unable to keep research and teaching resulti ng in a shortage of new scientific minds.That said, Crimson Typhoon had more adv anced weaponry than Gipsy Danger and Gipsy Danger had more advanced weaponry tha n Cherno Alpha, so there WAS scientific research. Just compare Brawler Yukon to any 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 o f 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. Gip sy 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 get even 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 w ere specifically designed to fight Gen 5 models, and that had already been weake nd by fighting the first wave of Jaegers (or by having a nuke go off in their fa ce). And, yes, there's a difference between scientists and engineers. Scientist: "I've discovered something! Kaiju stomachs don't produce any acid! Since their blood 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 any assistants because they were on a military base that probably wasn't even suppos ed to have a science division at all. They were probably supposed to ship any re covered Kaiju parts to a properly equipped lab, one that had assistants and ever ything. And the only reason they were able to make any progress at all is becaus e 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 th at'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 ou t 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 sc reen time. Also, capturing anything alive is much, much harder than just killing it. Go watch any nature documentary or reality show which involves trapping wil d 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 dan ger to human lives even if the Kaiju is in the middle of nowhere, there's still the danger to the Jaegers and pilots. And, so, having spent the time, expense, a nd 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 v ital 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 da ta. 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 publi shed in. Or, he could have known all along, but was just now explaining it to Ma rshall. 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 m ore effective coolant or neutralizing layer to the mechs. They could have also r eplaced their bladed weapons with blunt force defenses like hammers or flails or prevent artery breaches, or even super-heated the blade to cauterize wounds. An y information could be used against the enemy. I think his point wasn't about they discovering that the Blood was acidic, they already knew about Kaiju Blue, but about the digestive system. The thing is: eve ry practical scientific discovery comes after a lot of not so practical discover y 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 speci mens. And, besides, we didn't see much of the Kaiju War. As far as I know, somew here, 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 d ifferent of anything we know? Good luck. Also, focusing too much in the scientif ic side of the thing could've ruined the movies rhythm. That's still an action f lick, guys. Along similar lines to the above: if all the kaiju are clones, why are they diff erent? They would have had to undergo massive Bio-Augmentation to go from geneti cally 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 the m 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 g enetically identical but they look really different and that couldn't happen nat urally." 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 genet ically identical muscle tissue, bones, eyes, etc. that they then put together, m uch like how machines can be assembled from various off-the-shelf parts. That do es raise the question of why one would be pregnant, but that could be explained away. Like, maybe being pregnant makes it more aggressive. Maybe the Kaiju was pregnant simply because the Masters allowed the Kaijus to ma te. It's possible that they were basically trying stuff and seeing what worked. Assu ming the rift activation schedule was a limitation of the technology, they only have 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 plan ets doubt that they would have actual DNA- as in the aforementioned molecule. Th e odds of life from another universe where the laws of physics themselves may we ll 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 lo ng to discover they're all identical is because it likely took several years to crack 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 mystica l betterness that makes them better in all areas. Kevlar is highly bullet resist ant but it does absolutely nothing for knives and blades which have been around for 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 you have copters). The A-10 is decades old but is still a highly reliable machine. O ne advert for a new generation of phone touts it as having a highly advanced dig ital camera component... the same components that have been in your digital came ra 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 b ottom). 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 l ot of information about it) and such difficulties meant they couldn't afford to risk any further loss of life and equipment. And why it may seem silly that peop le 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 think about it nowadays? Very little because advances in medicine have made it liveabl e... 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 bare ly 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 e quivallent) 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 on ly had a handful of specimens to study, most of which were either too radioactiv e (from the nuking), toxic (from Kaiju Blue) or decayed to be effective to be us ed, 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 wh o 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 i sland nation in only an hour? The kaiju seemed to be focused on heading for highly populated areas, so the isl ands 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 go after any outliers or stragglers from there. Also, the news reports implied that only the rich would be able to relocate inla nd, 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 Anchorag e, Honolulu, and one other. So that means that the Hawaiian islands, at least, h ave 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 answer ed: "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, you re probably never going to see one." Why didn't Hansen eject? If the Jaegers have ejection systems, why didn't Pentecost have Hansen eject bef ore detonating the warhead? Unlike Pentecost, Hansen was still young and not ter minally ill, so he had no reason to sacrifice himself, and it was clearly shown before 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 e jection 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 bla st, and a nuclear bomb that size has a lot of range. Raleigh, OTOH, has the adva ntage 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 did n'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 t he Chekhov's Skill of being one of two men to have piloted a Jaeger in combat so lo. Combine that with the fact that Pentecost was wanting to go out fighting ins tead 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 the water 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 b ecause 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 t he Hong Kong battle, the kaiju actively ignored the disabled Striker Eureka unti l the Hansens provoked them. In Mako's flashback the kaiju chasing her immediate ly broke off the chase when a Jaeger appeared. The kaiju would have been too foc used on destroying Striker Eureka to bother with a relatively harmless ejection

pod. The Hansens are precisely my point. The kaiju 'know', from their prior experienc e, that if the pilots are starting to climb out of the Jaeger, the Jaeger is no longer a threat and its time to squish the pilots. Obviously, 'solo-qualified pi lot 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 chanc e 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 create d 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 of thick paste. He doesn't eject because ejecting has absolutely no chance whatsoev er of improving his odds of survival. Gipsy Danger's pod escapes the Jaeger's nuclear detonation with only minor damag e. Your argument is invalid. Gipsy Danger's pod survived because it fell back through the portal and was in a nother universe from the detonation, not because it was that resilient. Clearly, the escape pods were one of the systems on Striker Eureka that were dam aged in the fight. As far as why Chuck didn't use an escape pod, a common belief in fanon and possi bly a confirmed fact in canon is that you never leave your co-pilot behind. Whil e 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 leav e your co-pilot" thing drilled in his head since he was in the academy, so it wa s 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 th e 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 approval Pentecost's superiors tell him at the beginning that he can't enact his plan. Ho w 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 f or 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 operatio ns. Remember Pentecost's comment as they arrive at the Shatterdome? "We're not t he military anymore, we're the Resistance." At the end, Pentecost was fighting h is 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 sto p 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 eig ht months' worth of funding, very clearly just to shut him up. They didn't care what he did with that funding, be it attempting a desperate-seeming plan or buyi ng 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 a ny 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 fo r 1 person to stand for very long. However, why is a direct neural link necessar y to pilot the Jaeger? Wouldn't hand and feet controls (which Jaegers have anywa y) work just as well? Proprioception. Kinda hard to pilot something that huge and awkward with the fin esse 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 exac tly where your bumpers are when you're just parallel parking your car, doing it for 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 jus t trying to walk, but also trying to wrestle and swordfight. Pregnant Kaiju Why 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 biolog ical constructs are self-replicating. Also, those kaiju were sent on a specific mission to find and kill Newton. If you're going to be looking for something as small 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 hurr y, seemingly. Or possibly they'd been intending to wait until Otachi had given birth and they had two acidspitters (or even more!) but Newt's hacking into their hivemind scar ed them and they sent Otachi in out of panic. The film's novelization goes into more detail about the whole pregnancy deal. Ne wt says that he always thought the Kaiju could breed since they do possess repro ductive organs, and confirms that it was within the Masters' plans to make them reproduce locally once the Breach allows the passage of two of them. The Kaiju creators have gained an understanding of what they're facing through N ewt'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 quickl y after Newt drifted with the Kaiju brain- was defeated. They would have known N ewt wanted another brain to drift with, so it was not too much to expect he woul d 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 ab ility, they probably don't care. They are weapons of war, after all. And unless the pregnancy/birthing period was so debilitating (long period of time for insta nce), even if the kaiji had reduced combat effectiveness, they might still not c are. 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 have been to help lay the ground work for bigger plans by providing enough of a logis tical 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 hi s way out of Otachi Jr., seemingly without ill-effects? Only seemingly, perhaps it might be something due to the creature still being pr actically fetal, but that should mean it's permeated with more of mom's toxic ju ices, not less. He's the leading pioneer on the utilization of Kaiju bodyparts, secretions, and other. He may have developed or (more likely) paid someone to develop a counteragent 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 exposu re. It's possible it's a toxin that requires long term exposure over the course of d ay's, weeks or years to be deadly. Kaiju Blue kills within hours or days. Tendo's grandfather died from it in San F rancisco. But he got covered in Kaiju blood from a wound. Mako did not get expos ed 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 Perlman The WMG section has a pretty interesting theory concerning Hannibal. Taking into account the fact that kaiju blue takes "hours to days" to kill, it c ould be as simple as the Stinger being out of chronological order with the endin g of the film. Giving the lighting in the scene, it's entirely possible that it takes 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 hi m. Salvage Crimson Typhoon Ok, 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, but otherwise, 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 ava ilable to them; even if it was, they probably couldn't come up with a three man team to pilot it. Yeah, remember, Striker had virtually no damage and Gipsy's was mostly outer pla te damage, the internals were largely untouched so both would have been quick re pair jobs. Crimson would have taken much longer to assemble a new head for, espe cially if a lot of important electronics where in the head. Pentacost actually commands that the three Jaegers be retrieved. I assume that m eans that Chreno, Crimson, and Striker were brought back, assuming he didn't con sider Gyspy since it could move under it's own power. I would assume Crimson Typ hoon will be repaired, but it wouldn't be possible to have it operational for th e 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. H e only brings back Gipsy Danger as a last resort, and requires a significant amo unt 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 a normal conn-pod, and finding another set of people to do the Thundercloud on suc h 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 unt il 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 Leathe rback 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 base Why didn't Newt just radio the Shatterdome and tell them what they had found ins tead 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 Bunn y-Ears Lawyer. Borderline? They're in the middle of an insanely important combat operation, and the eccentr ic scientist guys radio in with some weird story about drifiting with a dead kai ju and finding out that the people who control the kaiju (a concept that flies i n the face of the conventional wisdom) won't allow the bomb through the rift (an other crazy hypothesis) without a kaiju corpse around it. Yeah, it's important i f true but it sounds totally insane and mission control has better stuff to be d oing right now. Communication between the Shatterdome and the city is probably restricted during an active battle with kaiju, because the operation takes priority over everythi ng 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 pa y 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 Shatter dome chopper. Most likely, he just wasn't thinking logically. Dinosaurs So, the aliens realized that Earth's atmosphere is bad for them only after wipin g 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 yea rs 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 the earth 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 would also mean that our modern-day birds somehow are descendants of biological war ma chines from another dimension. It doubt the Kaiju took that long to exterminate the dinosaurs, since the dinos certainly 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, and the consensus was just to wait for a while (remember, we have no idea how long l iving these aliens are) and pherpas conquer other planets that were more suitabl e. In the movie it is established that they didn't expect to find the earth inha bited by us Humans. Well, there is that comet to remember. Perhaps it was a case of incredibly bad t iming - 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 wh atsoever 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 o f kaiju attacks? Newt was the first person to know anything about that. And no, someone missed th e point. The argument was made that if the Kaiju were dinosaurs, then the Kaiju somehow stuck around on Earth for 135 million years. Or, 67.5 times as long as h umanity, because that's how long the dinosaurs survived. The comet also doesn't seem to have anything to do with this, because the aliens were repelled by the o xygen-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, possibl y 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 planet ary conditions are considered sub-optimal by the Masters. How do we know? We know because Newt drifted with a Kaiju brain and hacked into their 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 appear one at a time in long intervals apart. So why were the Jaegers stationed all ove r 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 und erwater. There's a reason why the Jaegers stay at the "miracle mile" off-coast: so that t hey can intercept the kaiju close enough to the shore that they can fight with m aximum effectiveness while avoiding damaging the cities and putting people at ri sk. 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 abl e to operate with only one pilot and the highly exclusive Drift Compatibility fact or goes right out the window. Anyone qualified to be a fighter pilot could be a Jaeger pilot. Hell, judging by what we see in the film, a slightly tech-savvy Mi xed-Martial-Arts fighter could be a Jaeger pilot. These smaller Jaegers, due to the 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, rat her than fighting one on one, Jaegers could take Kaiju in packs These are questions that would technically apply to any giant robot show. Giant robots 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 b ecause 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 yo u'll be losing some mini-Jaegers in every fight. But a war of attrition favors t he kaiju. The Jaegers were made with the priority of stopping the kaiju from making landfa ll. They're a defensive mobile wall with offensive capabilities, meant to stop k aijus in their tracks; hence the "grapple with them" idea behind their conceptio n. It's almost like football in that regard; you want huge, tough linebackers wh o can tackle hard and stop the kaiju from making their play. Smaller Jaegers wou ld get ignored or brushed aside as the kaijus make their way onto the cities, an d 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 K aiju without it being massive? It was my thought that they are not that big "onl y" to fight the big monsters, but also, they can't build them much smaller due t o all the components that go into them. It is a matter of durability plus offens e plus moving parts plus current tech. All that equals big damn robot. Second headset Where did Newton get the second headset for the drift with Herman and Otachi Jun ior? 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 di d support Newt's endeavor, so he probably issued orders akin to "give this man w hatever he requests". Open another breach Why can't the aliens just open another Breach? If they had the power to do it tw ice (dinos and Pacific Rim), then they can do it a third time. Fridge Horror muc h? 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 thro ugh, it's not possible for anything to enter through the breach, and seeing how little of the ocean floor we've explored, it's not that ridiculous to assume tha t the breach stayed 'open' but unused the whole time. Several points. 1: We just detonated a nuke inside the alien base. Presumably, t his destroyed the portal generator, killed most or all of the Masters supervisin g the attack, and probably destroyed most of the Kaiju they'd been breeding for the primary assault. 2: The Kaiju must take an insane amount of resources to gro w and feed, especially the Cat5 (and 6 and 7) monsters that were about to be sen t through. 3: The Masters have no clue how we got though their gate. As far as t hey 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 att ack 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 At lantic? More than double the territory to defend means more than double the Jaeg ers needed to keep up, and a far greater chance of getting Kaiju through to dest roy 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 way out in the Pacific where each kaiju would have to swim hundreds of miles before it got to a city worth attacking. The Masters aren't exactly in a hurry. Last time they were on Earth it was sever al million years ago, and they just decided to wait for a while. For them, openi ng another breach to save some years of conquest would be akin to buying an expe nsive sports car just to get a couple seconds earlier at work. Not worth the eff ort. Why are we assuming the dimension-spanning giant monster building alien race wai ted several million years from their perspective? If they've mastered portals be tween dimensions, what's to say they can't just pick the time of their invasion too? Or that their time matches up with ours? That's probably more appropriate t o a WMG, but I think it's worth noting that from the aliens' perspective they co uld have tried once to test the waters, noted it wasn't optimal, then just skipp ed forward until it was. Breaches are probably ridiculously expensive to open. They definitely weren't ma king 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 for Newt, they would have won in a few years once the Jaegers were gone (the Walls w ould not have stopped them and the ramp up time to make something even better th an Wall or Jaegers would be years down the line). And we know they're a patient bunch. So there's not really a lot of compelling reasons for them to change tact ics or speed up their schedule of escalation. Send all the Kaiju at once Why do the Kaiju come only in intervals? Wouldn't it make sense for all of the k aiju to be sent through at once? The Breach operates like the wormhole junctions from Honor Harrington; it can on ly pass so much mass per individual transit, and then it 'closes' and remains cl ose for X period of time. Unlike the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, however, the Breach actually improves with repeated transit... gradually. So, at the very ope ning of the Breach it can only open once every few months and only let through s omething as large as a Cat 1. But after repeated uses it gets slightly bigger an d bigger, and the dimensional conduit is more... 'stable', we'll say... and so i t can be opened more often, and transmit more mass per jump. Until finally, afte r a dozen years of regular use, it becomes big enough to finally start sending t hrough the Cat 5s. Short version: If the aliens could dump all the kaiju out at once, they would have. However, the Breach has a harsh mass limit per unit time as 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 h adn'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 the idea 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 unfo rtunate freak occurence of nature, and that the Kaiju were just animals from ano ther dimension. But after seeing that the Kaiju came up stronger and stronger wi th 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 12 years for a scientiest to say "Hey, lets run two DNA tests on different Kaiju sa mples 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 t hey 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 could also be noone had samples of two identical ones to compare before especially sin ce it's mentioned at some point that dead kaiju decay very quickly if left uncla imed Up until Newt made a discovery, they had never seen anything like kaiju as a wea pon of war. What reason would they have to think that? The getting stronger coul d 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 would naturally attract them due to resources and food supply. Coyotes for instance ac tually thrive better in urban environments than they do in wilderness. Clearly the rift does not admit non-Kaiju material Why 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 Ocea n 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 comi ng through, just the current created by the outflow would be proof. Instead, the re'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 ou twelling of water, not water moving the other way. Ergo, matter comes in, no mat ter goes out. Except the break expands every time a Kaiju comes thriough, if water and the bre ach can't occupy the same physical space you'd see the opening shove the water a way 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 sc ientists ever drifted with the Kaiju, which is why they started on their "go thr ough with a massive bomb and blow them all up" plan to begin with. It was only w hen those 2 drifted with the Kaiju that they realized that there was a DNA lock on their side to keep them from going in. They probably just assumed (or hoped) that the rift was specifically set up to r epel liquids (like seawater) and small objects (like nukes), but it accepts mass ive mostly-solid objects such as Kaiju. Under that logic, a jaeger is massive en ough to trick the system. What they didn't know is that the rift actually scans for 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 Breach open long enough to get the bomb through. Kaiju skin parasites if the Kaiju are artificially grown/assembled in some alien lab, why do they hav e 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 s omething. 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 separate lifeforms 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 sk in. It's part of the first layer of defense. More likely than not, the "parasite s" are used as a cleaning mechanism that helps regulate the kaiju's skin and rep air damage to the armor. Remember that up until Newt drifted with the brain of t he dead kaiju, he didn't know that they were bioweapons, so he'd automatically a ssume that tiny (relatively) bugs living on the kaiju's skin were parasites. Ugly thought: If the "parasites" are actually something the makers deliberately incorporated 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-crawl y little spies for the makers alive on Earth, wherever one of Chau's customers h ave 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 res ult No air support Why 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 f ocus on the one thing that can actually kill it and which humanity only has a ha ndful of. The flare gun hurt the kaiju the same way a mosquito would hurt you. They got lu cky 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 hitt ing a jaeger, or a jaeger being thrown into a jet/copter). The jaeger and kaiju are 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 Coptors or an existing jet could have carried. The choppers, from a Watsonian perspective, were there to light up the battlefie ld and act as spotters. Which is why Raleigh specifically asks one if they have eyes-on the Kaju. Poisoned cities? Is it ever addressed that the Otachi corpse spilled thousands of tons of Kaiju b lue right in the middle of Hong Kong? And what about the Kaiju in Tokyo and Sydn ey? 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, killin g Kaiju in the ocean, where KB can be diluted and spread into water sources, pro bably 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 act ing 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 p lace 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 Danger was probably inherent into the system. It's just energy being redirected, not am munition fitted into a ballistic weapon.

They tried a shutdown as soon as the caster started charging but the system lock ed up. Basically Failsafe Failure. They end up having to cut the computer connec tion to Gipsy which seems to function as a proper failsafe switch would, (i..e c ut 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 ten ds to have problems, but instead of having Raleigh and Mako drift for the first time 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 si mulated the strain that drifting puts on the pilot would have worked just as wel l, 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 prediction s (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. The y were testing both the compatibility of the Rangers AND the systems of the newl y 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 a ssault 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 be that having critical systems for fighting in a Jaeger off during the first run w ould 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 she can't find "where" it is in the network. Super-powerful helicopters How in the hell can mere helicopters carry thousands of tons of giant robots? Wh at? No way in hell they'd be be able to life an arm, let alone the ENTIRE thing across several miles presumably. Let's see, a kaiju is said to be about 2500 tons. Let's assume that's metric, an d the average Jaeger would be around that mass. The Mi-26, the largest and most powerful 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-2 6's. Oh, wait, some guy did the calculations better than I did. The Jaegers are almost certainly lighter than the kaiju, considering they can wa lk down city streets without collapsing the streets below them or trundle around offshore without getting bogged down in sand. Giant robot shows in general assu me 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 kn own thanks to the artbook Rule 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 n ormal choppers. Tiltrotor VTO Ls have exactly the same physical limits on lifting capacity as a helicopter. Their advantage comes not from lifting capacity, but from range, as they can fly like an airplane and take advantage of wing lift for fast flight. T hat's not possible to do when carrying something at slow speed, like a Jaeger, s o 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 of copters. Add the possibility of huge Jaeger-program-byproduct helicopters, and i t becomes feasible...assuming your cables are strong enough. Nope, it's simply not feasible, as the prior calculation demonstrates. The film is simply using Artistic License to make it look Cool. A frightening thought about the helicopters is what becomes of them after they r elease 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 careenin g into the sky a ridiculous rate.

Not really. Since the total load is broken up over multiple helicopters, every o ne is not lifting anything more than its current design max. So it would be no d ifferent for each helicopter than if each one suddenly cut loose its normal maxi mum payload. There would certainly be an unbalanced upward impulse from the engi nes (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 ea ch helicopter 250 tons of lift. That is still a significant amount considering t he 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 he licopter configuration isn't feasible in the least. It's not possible to create helos with enough lift, and any sort of cabling arrangement using real helos is completely 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 "baseball boat" ). Considering the power generation and tech base of the setting, it is possible th at helicopters have been dramatically improved in the fifteen years that the Kai ju War has been ongoing. I mean, look at the Jaegers' technology. Fifteen years with everything being thrown into human survival against an existential threat c an do a lot to boost technology. Attack them with coolant Ok, so if coolant/antifreeze turns kaijus into ice as quick as a Sonic the Hedge hog 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 easie r. 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 long enough 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 us e in "Cryo" attacks. Needless to say, after we saw the Jaeger's "Corpse" after t he 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 hu manity 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 onl y reason they weren't able to exterminate us outright was because of the limitat ions of the Rift; if they had been able to send more than one Kaiju from the sta rt, we would have been dead before the Mark IV's were an idea. The Masters are f ar more advanced than we are, and at least a portion of their culture is based o n inter-dimensional conquest. Why wouldn't they have more than one Rift generato r? Why would they not have more labs that could just continue where the first on e left off? No one is assuming that they're crippled in-universe, or at least no one we see is assuming they've been defeated. Since a sequel's already in the works, they l ikely 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 bef ore 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 m anaged to hurt them. Even though we only destroyed one base, that's still terrif ying 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 wou ldn'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 no guarantee that The Masters would be immune to the Kaiju Blue (Are we immune to t he 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 eq uivalent of someone teleporting a nuke into a densely-packed nuke silo on Earth. Extensive damage would be done, poisonous fallout would spread for hundreds of square 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 leas t slow it down enough for us to mount an effective defense. Now that the rift wi ll need time to restabilize, the kaiju will be fighting against Mk V Is right of f the bat that are designed to combat category 5 kaiju and we will only keep imp roving them from there. Instead of hastily cobbled together war machines and sim ilarly trained crews, humanity now has the experience necessary to effectively f ight the Masters. If a rift (or many rifts) opened the next day, nations around the world would go back to war footing, build Mk VI jaegers and expect that cate gory 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 194 5. 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 the rift 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) already exist. And please don't say that this would cross the Godzilla Threshold, becaus e 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 ended in failure. Notice the Kaiju are MUCH faster in water, the warning you mention i s the Kaiju getting in our world and displacing water, so there is a window of s carce seconds where they could nuke the creature. Plus we have no idea of the de pth where the Breach is located, it could be way beyond the operational limits o f 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 throug h. 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 same physical size, and making nuclear mines which could survive the 10,000 foot dept h where the rift was is trivial. No Keiju is going to be able to outrun a nuclea r explosion from a mine a few hundred meters from the rift. At least until we ge t to the Category 5 Keiju. It just seems like something completely practical to do that was obviously ignored. Not a biggie, just kind of a "huh, why not do it first?" 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 inevit able. Also, the constant usage of nukes to combat the Kaiju would be extremely c ostly given the fact that all of the nuclear energy in one nuke would have been used up to destroy one Kaiju, whereas a giant robot powered by nuclear energy wo uld at least be used to kill several Kaiju in its service of duty. Then there's the 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 ra ise fear for the public, especially when it doesn't solve the root of the proble m, 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 pro blem! They've been killing Kaiju for well over a decade and they still haven't c ome 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 mat ter, because we have thousands of nukes sitting in storage. (You could modify th em to work at depth, I'm sure.) Wouldn't you rather spend 10 nukes and risk nobo dy's life, than use one Jaeger and risk millions of lives? If you're going to us e Jaegers at all, they should be the secondary line of defense, protecting the c ities. The first line of defense should be a bunch of nuclear sea mines surround ing 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 wh at radiation and nuclear bombs do. Do the terms fallout, contamination, and nucl ear winter ring any bells? ^ That's not how underwater nuclear detonations work. Underwater nuclear detonat ions (even in the megaton range) at the depth of the Rift (10,000+ ft) cause abs olutely no fallout or substantial radiation outside the immediate blast zone. Th e contamination would be very minimal (though measurable due to our sensitive in struments nowadays). It's unlikely that ANYTHING from the detonation would actua lly reach the surface (as demonstrated by the French and American submerged test s in the 60s). And the contaminants would be extraordinarily diluted by the volu me of the oceans. Fears of nuclear winter and mass land contamination (which, tu rned out to be overstated when the mathematical models were redone) is based on huge 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 sayi ng you're wrong, I've just never heard that. However, even if that's true, would n't the act of repeatedly detonating nuclear devices at the bottom of the Pacifi c cause tidal waves and such, just by virtue of the amount of water the blast wo uld 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 shallower than The Breach, yet "There was no airborne radioactive cloud" from it. As for w aves, 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 h appens, 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 aw ay, it was only a few tens of feet tall. Randal Munroe, NASA scientist turned co mic 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 cons idering that the entire world is teaming up to fight the Kaiju.) Even one nuke s hould be sufficient to kill a Kaiju. And until the main events of the movie, Kai ju only showed up about once per month. So our current stockpile should easily b e 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 d isarmament treaty comes along). Even still, there's about 10,000 viable nuclear weapons 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, Earth can'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 w orlds in the past according to the movie. They might have focus conquest somewhe re else before focusing on Earth again. And the reason they came back to Earth i s because humans have polluted the environment and caused global warming, the ri ght conditions for an invasion. That's one half of the question. Surely a race capable of building giant biologi cal 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 pollute the planet" so much as they just happened to look towards earth again when the c onditions were right. Maybe they were going to after they were done with the Dinosaurs but the asteroi d/comet messed up Earth so much they had to write it off. Simpler answers: Everything has a code name Why do the Jaegers have those nifty code names? Normally you use code names to c onceal purposes, capability, and deployments from an enemy's intelligence-gather ing. 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, Jaeger Santa 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 na med 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 a nd 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 le ss of a mouthfull than "United States third generation Jaeger number two engagin g 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; s ailors are used to using vessels' names in communications. Clarity too. The jaegers might have actual designations, but in the field, coden ames might make things easier to keep track of on the fly as well as being easy to read. "Jaegar 23" is kind of meaningless since you have to correlate that int o 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 th at is. Look at the Humvee or Huey for real life examples. Naming the Kaiju The moment a Kaiju emerges from the Breach, it's catergory is automatically dete rmined 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 t hey're going to have enough sensors pointed at the Breach to pick out some prett y 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 g odzilla 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 ot her than kaiju?

Kaiju is a well known name for giant monsters, which whomever it was that decide d to name them that in-universe decided to give them. In fact, I'm surprised to see 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-exis ting, popular Z word. Of course, Not Using the Zed Word is a trope in itself, bu t the movie simply avoids it. There happened to be an anime con taking place when the first Kaiju struck, and so 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 kai ju attack would no doubt kill tens of thousands if not millions of people, I'm h aving a hard time imagining how one of them could kill off an entire population center, especially one as large as Tokyo, for the same reason I'd have a hard ti me 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 him during then. Perhaps kaiju can track humans by smelling them or seeing their hea t 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 sub jective 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 enti re city. Tokyo is huge. Mako is probably just stuck in an area which was evacuat ed; she got left behind somehow. Evacuating Hong Kong How come it took so long to evacuate Hong Kong? It seemed like people weren't ev en 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 quick ly evacuate out of Hong Kong. The people were visibly being moved to undergound locations, 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 the cities couldn't be evacuated without at least a week's prior notice. Moving mill ions of people out of a heavy urban area is extraordinarily difficult, especiall y if you have to move them more than a dozen miles or so. Movies like Deep Impac t and The Day After Tomorrow radically understate the time that large-scale evac uations require. In a place like Hong Kong, which has a huge number of narrow ch oke points and few external roads or transit to mainland China, moving the 7 mil lion 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. Shelt er-in-place is by far the more practical strategy. Build a wall around the rift Instead of build a gigantic, continent-spanning wall around the entire Pacific r im, 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 hav ing 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 dept h 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 impos sible 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 struct ures at such depths would be exceptionally difficult. For all we know it was som ething they tried and ended in disaster, the war lasted for a period of ten year s 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 secti ons 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 P late and blow the whole cliffside into a trillion tons of rubble, burying Challe nger Deep in a gargantuan undersea landslide? Sure, it'd probably kick off a tsu nami, 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 that can function at that depth that a kaiju would give a damn about. They can swim a nd water resistance doesn't seem to really slow them down much; good luck hittin g with a torpedo. The Walls at least managed to hold off Mutavore for an hour; w hile pathetic in real terms compared to what a Jaeger can do to it, that's an ho ur 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 succe ssful 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 actua lly hold them off; how long would it take Otachi or Leatherback to get through a little rubble? Soldiers on foot What was the purpose of all those armed soldiers who constantly show up, appear to be in large numbers yet do not seem to serve any real function as they are us eless against Kaiju and there is no indictation there is a human threat against the Shatterdomes or Jaegers to justify their presence or carrying more than a si dearm. Just a guess, but we were shown at least one good sized cult that reveres/worshi ps 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 on the 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-f unded 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 coa stal city they come across, the rich and powerful have homes inland while the po or have to live on the coast, and every time you kill one of these monsters a bl ue acid seeps into the ground causing death and contaminating the area. Riots wo uld be a very real threat, especially in an area so close to the Shatterdome, an d especially on a very populated island near several more highly populated count ries with gigantic wealth disparity. Not to mention the Kaiju-worshipping cults that might be trying to wage a holy war on the people who threaten their gods. Re-applying Jaeger technology Wouldn't people have found other applications for jaeger technology? Perhaps in construction maybe? Or was it just more dramatic to see workers fighting over jo bs at the wall. The workers are cheaper. The world's resources and industrial capabilities were put to their limit, if building more Jaegers for defense wasn't considered a via ble option anymore, then building the hundreds of Jaegers necessary for construc tion (even smaller, less complex ones) would be out of the question. Plus, the W all 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 mig ht 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 again in 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 t hat size and length so quickly without considerable technological advancement so mewhere 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 so mewhere. How did they get back through the rift? At the end, how did Mako and Beckett's escape pods get back through the breach w ithout 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 wor ld, as a safety measure so we couldn't throw a bomb in (you know, like how they planned). They probably never figured anyone would figure out how to get in to b egin 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 ope n. Why sacrifice the most successful Jaeger? Why wasn't the original plan to detonate Gipsy Danger or Cherno Alpha? Both are older-model nuclear powered Jaegers capable of collapsing the rift when detonate d, but instead Pentecost decides to strap a nuke to his most successful Kaiju ki lling machine and drop that into the hole instead while the "walking nuclear rea ctors" 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 again you don't sacrifice a whole, functional giant killer robot if you can avoid it. Also, Striker is not only the most successful Jaeger, but it's specifically noted as the fastest it has a better chance of getting in, dropping the bomb, and getting out than the older, slower models. Really, the failure of Mako and Raleigh's first drift is the catalyst for the wh ole plan degenerating and falling apart if it had gone well, Gipsy would've joined Cherno and Typhoon to intercept Leatherback and Otachi, and a 3-on-2 fight in t he Jaegers' favor would've ended a lot differently. This would've led to them be ing able to launch the final assault with double the strength, and sooner (less lengthy 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 b efore 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). St riker actually would have jumped into the hole if Newt hadn't shown up in time t o stop it. It was definitely a one way trip for the Jaeger in question, so why v oluntarily 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 desperation it was two Jaegers vs. two Cat 4 Ka iju, on the Kaiju's turf and in an environment where the Kaiju hold the advantag e. 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 Ka iju killed them. If they'd been there sooner, with the other two Jaeger, actuall y killing the Kaiju and having the extra time to set up the bomb would've been f easible. And it's not about outrunning your escorts it's about getting there with the escor ts, then rushing to the portal while the escorts keep the Kaiju busy. A running back is a faster sprinter than a lineman. The linemen only have to create an ope ning and tie up the defense, not keep up with the running back down the length o f 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 ri ft while Gipsy held back. Look who ended up creating an opening for who? Effecti vely, 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 h ave anything near the level of agility possessed by athletes, the end zone is al so where the bad guys are coming from and defending from, and the play was to ha ve 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 carry ing and deploying the bomb? A much more tactically sound strategy would be to ha ve your best Jaegers to keep the defenses busy and leave the path free for the w eakest 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 fai led, that bomb still had to get to the rift, and your best chance of that happen ing is to give it to your best man. Not to belabor the analogy, but in football, you don't give the ball to the wors t athlete on the team, you give it to the best, the fastest. The runner might we ll 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 kil ling kaiju, as it was originally designed for and most successful at, not only w ould the plan have a much smaller chance of failing, they'd have saved themselve s a nuke as well. Seems to me that it was just a plot excuse to give Striker nuc lear 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 hav e. 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 pla n. What happened at the end was a desperate rush to get the bomb to the rift bef ore the Kaiju killed both Jaegers. The original plan where it would've been 3 Jaeg er 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 m uch 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 of failure. Even the best tactician can only work with what he has, and what Pentecost has i s 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 Jaeg er 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 bett er at killing Kaiju doesn't seem to be the best choice, given that they were bot h at the hole and ready to jump. Of course, Pentecost was piloting Striker at th e time; maybe he had a death wish? As it is, Striker ended up escorting Gipsy, which was the most effective plan, a nd 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 pla ns first in light of new circumstances. Prior to the Hong Kong attack, their plan seemed to have factored in the possibi

lity of facing three Cat4 Kaijus at the point of the drop. It's likely that they might have considered none of the Jaegers would make it back alive, given that Cat4s have regularly trounced them. Pentecoste even told Striker to hold back ag ainst Otachi, despite having the support of Crimson and Cherno, which meant that they knew about the relative power level of Cat4s against the older models. Whe n all four Jaegers have a risk to be blown up completely, it's best to give the payload to the fastest one and hope that it makes it into the rift before it's c aught. It's pretty obvious Stacker doesn't like this plan either, but as he said ; he doesn't have much to work with. The whole revelation that the Kaijus were t actically aware of their plan now just made everything a whole lot worse, which is why Stacker ordered the attack as soon as possible. What was he saying? What was Yancy saying to Raleigh right before he died? His sentence is "Raleigh, listen to me! You have to..." and then he dies. First, why was he talking at al l, considering they're in Drift together; second of all, what could Raleigh do t hat Yancy couldn't do with him, or for him? My guess is that Yancy realized Knifehead was about to get him and was trying to break free of the Drift to insulate Raleigh from the death-shock. He was probab ly trying to say "You have to let go!". Pilots talk to each other all the time when they're in Drift, so it's clear that Drift doesn't carry all of your thoughts to the other side. If you have somethi ng important to say, you say it out loud. You can't be sure that the Drift will carry that particular thought to the other pilot. Also, people just do not think in linear, easy-to-understand sentences. The Drif t, to me, seemed more about reaching a state of equilibrium where you could move in concert with one another. It may not be as effective for telepathic communic ation. No railguns Are there no railguns in this universe? If a sword could go through Kaiju skin s urely a railgun round could do the same? Maybe next film? Long-range attacks in general seem to be ineffective against Kaiju notice how none of the Jaeger use their long range attacks until they've already whacked the Ka iju a few times, or are within swinging distance anyway. Probably they don't use a lot of attacks from long-range is they can't reliably hit the agile Kaiju, at least without causing a lot of collateral damage. Real Life railguns have a nasty tendency to destroy themselves when fired. The h eat from the projectile is so immense that it melts the rails that propelled it, preventing any repeat shots. They're basically multi-million-dollar throw-away weapons at this point. Gipsy Danger has a plasma caster on its arm. Heat probably isn't an issue. Even so, a wieldable flintlock-style railgun would go well with Gipsy Danger's "gunsl inger" design. Maybe this should be a WMG entry... Poor countries with Jaegers How can countries like Chile and Peru afford Jaegers? I don't think they could. While rich industrialized countries were able to build Jaegers by themselves (there was a level of collaboration between goverments, t hough), the ones in the Lima and Panama Shatterdomes most likely were made as jo int efforts between the nations of central and south America. One of the points during the intro narration was that the Kaiju menace was so grave that pretty mu ch everybody forgot whatever grievances they may had in the past and joined toge ther into building stuff that could punch Cthulhu and tell him to be squamous el sewhere. Also, you'd be surprised what a country on full war footing can put out when it needs to. Jagears became really popular before cat4 appeared, so building one would be a v ery effective way to bring tourists to your country, not to mention a politician could in theory earn a lot of popularity by having something to protect the cou ntry from a Kaiju, even if the Kaiju don't necessarily focus on those countries, so they would want to invest in one of them. Also, Chile can't afford not to have at least one; they would ideally prefer to

have several, considering that as a country they consist almost entirely of paci fic coastal real estate and stuff within a few hours of pacific coastal real est ate. 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 f unding and whichever country hosts the construction and provides the pilots is c hosen before production by The Omniscient Council of Vagueness. Otherwise every other Jaeger would be of American manufacture. (Assuming the opinion of the US G overnment 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 composed of a nation that's pooled their resources and manpower. There's no guarantee tha t 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, bu t in this movie that was the case. Multinational corporations with interests in the less-affluent Pacific Rim natio ns might have funded some of the construction projects, too. Even a Corrupt Corp orate 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 rift Related 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 the rift, but have failed since it must be closed from the other side. Air support Where were the A-10s? The only aircraft shown fighting Kaiju were fighters and h elicopters, but A-10s are perfect for the task; they're armed with ideal anti-ar mor 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, Jaeg er 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 consta nt 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 defined by Ke per unit area. Both the GAU-8 and modern Kinetic Penetrators from artiller y/tanks have far more penetration capability that even the largest Kaiju could m anage. (Kaiju attacks are based on huge mass, which can smash through defenses, but have very small penetration rating. Similar math applies to Jaeger physical attacks. 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 agains t this type of attack. That said, given the size of the kaiju, it's entirely pos sible 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 sma ll needle). Considering that the Kaiju were created by a species that has been around for qu ite 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 th eir technology is so far beyond humanity's. So, yes, magic, for a given definiti on of "magic." A-10 weapons were not penetrating, just like every other conventional weapon use d on the Kaiju. The first Kaiju tanked everything the US military threw at it fo r a week straight. The GAU-8 simply was not getting through, just like everythin g else they used. They are probably at the bottom of the ocean having been thrown against the Kaij u at the very, very, very beginning of the first incursion because they were see

n as being the perfect tool for the job. We don't see them because in all probab ility, they didn't survive the encounter. It's right there in the movie's tagline: Go Big or Go Extinct. Anything smaller than a Jaeger would be crushed or knocked aside by a Kaiju. You need something t hat can match the Kaiju in mass and able to lock it down in physical combat to p revent it from hitting a city. Anything too small would fail at that objective. Not to mention that, up until 2020, the giant Jaegers were winning the war, so t he "build it big" design mentality was working. Square/Cube Law means that anything of that size is going to have to be so tough that nothing short of a nuclear weapon would even scratch it. It wouldn't even notice a GAU-8 being fired at it. Tiny Ocean or Fast Kajiu I don't recall the exact numbers, but I believe that during the attacks on both Anchorage and Hong Kong, the heroes had about an hour heads up after a Kajiu cam e through the Rift. While the movie doesn't provide the exact location of the Ri ft, Anchorage and Hong Kong are about 5000 miles or 8000 kilometers apart. Which means the Kajiu would have traveled at least 8000 km in about two hours. Do the y have a swimming speed of Mach 4 or what? Indeed the Kaiju are really fast in the water. The very first fight has the fish ing crew track the kaiju by radar, and see it get a mile closer every two second s. The novelization puts the Breach somewhere in the bottom of the Challenger Deep. It's Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale again. Nothing the size of a Kaiju ca n travel that fast in water - hydrodynamic drag increases geometrically with spe ed. The only thing that can travel underwater that fast is still-experimental su percavitating rocket torpedoes (which actually are missiles, underwater), and th ey depend on a specialized rocket motor and extreme streamlining to create a "bu bble" of air around the torpedo, effectively flying underwater. This kind of thi ng is categorically impossible to do with something the size of a kaiju, somethi ng with the hydrodynamics (i.e. body shape) of one, and something which doesn't use actual rocket propulsion (i.e. "swims" instead). A reasonable speed, assumin g the incredible capabilities of the kaiju, would be 100mph or in water. Nothing on Earth, via natural evolution or built by modern technology and using our current understanding of physics, anyway. Remember, we're dealing with a spe cie sthat has been around for at least sixty-five million years and is able to m ove between dimensions. The Kaiju may well have some capability to move that qui ckly underwater via a mechanism we don't understand yet. These are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, after all. Just as a note: from the Challenger Deep, it's about 3000km to Hong Hong, and 80 00km to Anchorage. Which would mean about 20 hours to Hong Kong, and 50+ hours t o Anchorage for anything coming out of the Deep. I'd like to know how you came up with those estimates, considering we have no id ea of how fast the Kaiju can swim. 3000 km divided by 20 hours equals 150 km per hour. That's 93.2057 MPH or less t han the the reasonable estimate give above. The movie doe snot match this estimate. We see right at the beginning that a Kai ju was able to cover three miles in the span of about five seconds going by the dialogue on the fishing boat. That's 36 miles per minute, and 2,160 MPH. So it w ould take a Kaiju less than four hours to reach Anchorage from the Challenger De ep. They can swim really fast. And, of course, the explanation could be that they just have bad sensors. Or the Kaiju are somehow extremely stealthy/hard to follow. As you said. Big ocean. They probably just have sensors pointed at the rift to a lert them of an incoming kaiju, assuming those weren't destroyed by said incomin g kaiju, and near each city to alert them of imminent attack. Were the Jaegers really that expensive? Let's do some math here. Start with a US Zumwalt-class destroyer. Those are alre ady pretty darn high-tech, and weigh about 14,000 tons (7x as heavy as a Jaeger) . They cost about $7 billion, counting R&D costs. Let's assume that Jaegers are 7x as expensive as a Zumwalt per weight, and therefore cost the same per unit. T

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 h ave 3 Jaegers, instead of building the entire listed fleet twice over just by it self? 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 stopp ed. It took a week to stop the first one, throwing everything short of nukes at it, which means that a lot of regular military assets had to be replaced due to being trashed, plus infrastructure and regular rebuilding (and I imagine most in surance companies would cite force majeure when asked to pay out, so up to the g overnment and private enterprise to make good), plus loss of land which was too contaminated to reuse or the costs in even trying to decontaminate it... Plus lo ts of things I probably can't even imagine in hidden costs. Then further early a ttacks all over the place before someone said "you know what, lets try plan Volt ron". 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, mainten ance costs, repair costs (which is not the same as maintenance costs), weapons r efueling, 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 econ omy to spend it on because half the population is living in shanty towns and eve rything 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 we can get the economy going again. It'll pay for itself within 30 years", and it p robably seemed like a good idea at the time because it has turned into a war of attrition and those things really kill economies. The bottleneck seemed to be with obtaining the materials necessary to construct Jaegers, with each one being pretty much filled to the brim with machinery, alon g with other requirements. That said, Jaegers did seem much more viable than bui lding a solid wall around the coastline. The problem with those calulations is that we have absolutely no idea how much t he Jaegers cost. You say "7x as expensive as a Zumwalt per weight" but in realit y 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, t o the point that the norm is that people work for food. They are probably a LOT more expensive than you think. Supplimentary material states that Striker Eureka cost approximately $100 billio n, or as much as the International Space Station). Countries generally have no p roblem racking up and maintaining debt; China and Japan, for example, have been in 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 wi th extinction on the line. It might be possible sure... but even with the Zumwalt, the US only plans on bui lding 3. THREE! Iowa-class battleships? 4 were made. Just because a country CAN doesn't mean it will or even should - dumping everything into the Jaegar might v ery 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 power plant, a delicate on-board neural interface, and experimental technologies such as plasma cannons. That's not accounting for the hundreds of crews in it's maint enance bay, the cost of maintaining specialized Shatterdome launch bays for each one's deployment, frequent replacement parts, and the amount of spotter helicop ters for it. As advanced as the Zumwalt might seem to us, it's little more than a floating brick with a fancy gun welded to it compared to the technological mes s 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 does n'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 Nu clear reactor and "analog" it's immune to Electromagnetic Pulses? Did the writer s not do research? EM Pulses wreck ANY electronics. Also, the fact the EMP knock ed out Hong Kong's power grid and disabled a Jaeger would mean that the electron ics in the Jaeger would have been permanently fried. That little bit just irked me. And shouldn't have the EMP done something to the pilots as well? I know the human body is more chemically-controlled than electronically-controlled, but sti ll. 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 made 1st 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 fel t like you think it would. People get exposed to pretty powerful sources of elec tromagnetic radiation every day due to medical MRI scans, and as far as I know t here is no evidence that magnetic fields produce any sort of damage to biologica l tissue. The EMP did electrocute the pilots as it occurred, or maybe that's was just stra in 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 e ntirely possible that it wasn't actually a typical EMP, but rather something mor e 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 Shatterdo me. It is possible that the burst only affected Striker Eureka and the Shatterdo me's own power/electrical systems, so it possible that the weapon that was used was specifically tailored to target Mark IV Jaegers and the Shatterdome's C&C sy stems. 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 o f the breach. The PPDC cutting funding to the Jaeger Program citing "losing Jaeg ers faster than they can be built" is entirely wrong, since they weren't buildin g Jaegers at all. Knifehead only emerges in 2020, a full year after Striker Eure ka's completion. Isn't the halting of Jaeger construction the ultimate sign of c omplacency? 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 t o 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 wh ere they were disabled, with no new ones replacing them. They could very well have reached a point where they simply couldn't maintain an y more Jaegers, especially when the Jaegers were winning the war. After Knifehea d'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 in to the Wall. Mako and the Right Plasma Cannon During 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? Other scenes in the cockpit show the pilot only controls their respective arm, and use s their other arm to handle the control panel. Other scenes in the cockpit also show that the Jaegers mimic the exact actions o f the pilot(s), e.g. walking, swinging a club, etc. Mako using her right arm to do what happened to be the activation gesture for the right plasma cannon would activate the right plasma cannon, her trauma-induced increased brain activity ne gating and overriding Raleigh's inputs to the system. During the fight in Hong Kong, Raleigh offers to remain in position to hold Otac hi'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 tempo rarily override their partner's control of the other half for brief periods with out 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 Thundercloud Formation is engaged. Of course it could be something specific to the Chinese Ja eger, but it could be that the Jaeger's co-pilot (which IIRC is a term used in t he movie for both Mako and Herc Hansen) normally operates all the weapons system s. It's not that each pilot controls one side of the Jaegar exclusively, it's that each 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 cerebral hemispheres linked at the same time causes too much brain damage; linking just h alf the cerebrum allows the unaffected side to take up the slack when the Drifti ng 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 t he right arm than her partner has, because the human cerebrum is contralateral: your left hemisphere controls your right side and vice versa. Definitely Just Animals Before Newt's first drift, had it not been considered before that the Kaiju are created? Each one looks different from the rest, which suggests an artistry invo lved and would have hinted to the commissioners of the Wall that the beasts simp ly 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 creat ionists. Scientists as a whole tend to believe in biodiversity and evolution as general 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 tha t he realizes that all Kaiju have the same DNA, and immediately considers the po ssibility that they're manufactured. But Earth's animals look different because they're different species, and it's o bservable that their individuals look alike. But the kaiju are one species and y et are always different, and many of their structures veer more towards Rule of Cool 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 s trongest kaiju should be getting through. But that none of that was happening sh ould have been a hint. Sorry if all the Kaiju looked the same to you, even though the director explicit ly went out of his way to pick different designs for each one. There were only 4 6 confirmed Kaiju attacks by the end of the film, so it's not exactly a large sa mple size to base judgement on. There are definitely more than 46 species of ani mal (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 hammerh ead 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 individual ly built. Assuming you didn't know that to begin with, and didn't know that Kaij u were genetically identical, seeing a different type of Kaiju each time isn't v ery 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 fr om that they all look different. And with a bit of observation, one can easily g

uess what those animal functions are for. A hammerhead's wide head gives it a wi der range of vision. A triceratops' frill and horns are for defense. Swordfish's sword is a weapon. Giraffe's long neck gives it a good view and keeps its head from being targeted by predators. But the kaiju have structures that don't have much of a practical purpose, like the mohawk and Tron Lines and thus suggest at an artistic reason for including them. You said it yourself. The triceratops' frill and horns are weapons for defense. The swordfish's sword is a weapon. Trespasser's 'mohawk', as you say, or 'axe' , as most people would call it, is a weapon. Trespassers take their axe heads and ram them into their targets to injure or disable them (see how Knifehead uses h is knifehead to assist in chopping off Gipsy Danger's arm). The axe heads are ke y to eliminating other competing Trespassers and finding a good mate as the size of the axe is an important criteria to females. Is that so hard to wrap your he ad around that giant creatures can have bodily weapons and odd-looking features as well? If you can accept that animals have evolution-granted weapons, then you should be able to accept that if you assumed that Kaiju were naturally occurrin g animals, them having bodily weapons isn't an oddity at all. As for the 'Tron Lines', take your pick of bio-luminescent animal. Firefly? Lant ern fish? Other deep sea animal that not only gives light , but can also flash d ifferent patterns and colors? Are those designed? (seriously though, look up tho se deep sea animals, some really freaky things going on with them) When scientists see new species that aren't like the rest, the first step they u sually take is to classify them into the hierarchy of living creatures. They usu ally don't stop to consider that maybe they were created by some higher being. S o to answer your question, no, nobody considered that Kaiju were created by some higher being from the observations 'no two Kaiju out of 46 look the same', and 'Kaiju have 'weird' body features (by your standards)'. Actually, upon further thought, to answer your question, yes, before Newt's firs t drift, it was considered that Kaiju were created. See that Kaiju cult in Hong Kong? Those are the guys you're looking for. I must say, it is a bit odd that it took so much time for someone to consider th at the Kaiju weren't just animals and were operating under somebody's commands. I mean, the Kaiju basically A) burst out the Breach, and then B) proceed to swim straight to a heavily populated city and begin to trash it. After a handful of attacks it would be pretty evident that a very specific and unnatural pattern of behavior was going on with the creatures. And that they're developing abilities to combat Jaegers. It can't be just mere e volution at work to counter a "predator", because none of the kaiju live to prop agate their kind and thus induce natural selection. Possibly confirmation bias at play combined with institutional embarrassment. Yo u start off by saying that they are naturally evolved, and because there would b e a massive kerfuffle given how many people get het up about normal evolution, a lot of egos get pinned to the acceptance of kaiji evolution so every time a new kaiju shows up everyone looks for a way to support the kaiju natural evolution hypothesis. Then those weirdo kaiju cultists show up, and anyone who suggests th at kaiju might not be natural gets labeled as one of those. Between the two atti tudes, people just unconsciously ignore any other possibility that kaiju natural evolution because only unscientific abnormal people believe anything else. Perhaps there might be some institutional embarrassment at work, judging by Gott lieb's "That's impossible" retorts, but it still doesn't seem far-fetched for a decent scientist then to ask: "How are the kaiju evolving abilities to combat Ja egers? None of them survive to produce offspring, so there's no chance of passin g on advantageous traits or fighting experience, yet they're passing them along anyway." It may not lead them to the theory of "the kaiju are created", but it m ight put it back on the table. This section of the discussion is completely irrelevant since this is after Newt 's first drift you're talking about, when Kaiju with EMPs and acid sacks start a ppearing, after he's drifted with the Kaiju hivemind and found out that Kaiju ar

e built. The Headscratcher was specifically asking why nobody considered the pos siblity 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 abi lities. Tons of Jaegers had fallen, after all. Pentecost's contradictory orders OK, so Otachi and Leatherback are heading for Hong Kong and Crimson Typhoon, Che rno Alpha and Striker Eureka are deployed to stop them. All well and good, but P entecost's orders to Herc and Chuck are horribly contradictory. During the brief ing 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 the harbor, Pentecost tells them to "engage at their discretion." So he tells Herc a nd Chuck to engage whenever they see fit. And yet when Otachi is roughing up Che rno and Typhoon and Herc wants to engage, Pentecost tells them not to because th ey need Striker to carry the bomb. "Engage as a last resort" and "engage at your discretion" aren't actually contra dictory 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 cha rge 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 o f carrying the bomb if they had to. Pentecost compromised his own plan. If Strik er joined Cherno and Typhoon in the fight from the get-go, maybe they wouldn't h ave been destroyed and Otachi and Leatherback would've been dealt with much easi er. Then, Pentecost would've been able to run the operation as planned: with Str iker carrying the bomb and the other three Jaegers running defense. This is pretty much covered above in the folder "Why sacrifice the most successf ul Jaeger?". Long story short, they don't want to risk any chance of the Kaiju g etting a second's advantage when the Jaegers head to the Breach. The Kaiju are c oming out faster and faster, so likewise the fastest Jaeger has the best chance of 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 t hey two had a chance only because Leatherback had yet to enter the fight. Had St riker fought with them from the beginning, Leatherback might have decided to bur st 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 pe rhaps they could've taken out Leatherback before it had a chance to unleash its EMP. Or kill Otachi before being shut down by the EMP. And even then, the EMP wo uldn't have affected Cherno. If Gipsy (a Mark III) is immune to the EMP because it's a nuclear Jaeger, then surely the Mark I Cherno Alpha must be immune to it as 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 pilots actual 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 cont radiction there, just the difference between pre-battle planning and mid-battle orders. Wading into the ocean. What bothers me is that a 300-odd foot Jaeger can wade out ten miles and still b e submerged only about half-way. I also would point out Gipsy Danger rising out of 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 t o stand on, which raises the question of how a kaiju and jaeger stand and fight out 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 odd feet 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 flo tation devices, which is very useful and makes perfect sense. And then they auto matically open out into completely flat rafts with no protection from the elemen ts, which means if the sea is even a little choppy and the crew are even a littl e injured (quite likely, if they're ejecting), they're going to be swept overboa rd long before a rescue team can get there. I rewatched the ending scene, and the hatch on the escape pods very obviously do esn't blow automatically. Mako's hatch does open, but Raleigh's doesn't. Since h e 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 new edits workshops edit page random TV Tropes by TV Tropes Foundation, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attr ibution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtr opes.org. Privacy Policy 205852 42