If a kaiju really emerged

[Bullgrit]

Well., in this case, I am on the side of pro-monsters, anti-mecha, pro guns lobby.

Yeah, I just don't see mecha being a realistic concept, even assuming an unrealistic premise. We can't build a good man-size mecha right now. But projectiles and bombs, we've got now and are good at improving.

Bullgrit

 

[tomBitonti]

Ugh, a tad too much heat in the discussion.

We can do a physical model and figure out the minimum necessary strength of material to allow a Kaiju to walk around.

The movie provides good estimates of the creature's size, and we can infer the mass from the reaction to the giant robots, and from an inference of the robot's mass.

We see that they move roughly the same a person, but scaled up.

(Well, except that one flew, with relatively itty bitty wings, and carried up a robot, both up to past 50,000 feet. Hmm, lets ignore that, since it doubles down and more on the physics.)

Doesn't matter that we can't make a material with the necessary strength. We assume exotic matter that has the necessary properties. We just want a ballpark on the material properties, so to infer what is necessary to damage it.

(Hmm, there is a second physics consistency problem, which is that a guy cuts his way out of one with a hand knife. Let's ignore that too, since it implies the creatures are easy to cut through, so should be vulnerable to all manner of weapons.)

TomB

 

[Hand of Evil]

(Hmm, there is a second physics consistency problem, which is that a guy cuts his way out of one with a hand knife. Let's ignore that too, since it implies the creatures are easy to cut through, so should be vulnerable to all manner of weapons.)

TomB

That can be an answer there, gels reduce the energy from bullets, add a overcoat of ceramic body armor. This could even explain how they survive the pressures of the deep, getting fatter as they get to sea level, the gel expanding.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Re: cutting out of a kaiju

Some materials and shapes are stronger in one direction than the other, sometimes significantly so. Consider the chicken egg- strong enough to resist significant pressure from the outside, but a tiny chick can peck its way out. Similarly, if you try to break an animal's rib cage pushing in, it is much more difficult than doing the same by pulling out.*

(Still kinda BS-ey, unless the knife is also made of the same kind of stuff as the Mecha...)






* for those worried, no, not based on vivisections or anything like that.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Double post.

 

[tomBitonti]

Re: cutting out of a kaiju

Some materials and shapes are stronger in one direction than the other, sometimes significantly so. Consider the chicken egg- strong enough to resist significant pressure from the outside, but a tiny chick can peck its way out. Similarly, if you try to break an animal's rib cage pushing in, it is much more difficult than doing the same by pulling out.*

(Still kinda BS-ey, unless the knife is also made of the same kind of stuff as the Mecha...)

It was a baby, after all. (And perhaps a bit early to be born.) My best spur-of-the-moment explanations are that the young Kaiju is less tough than a fully grown one. (The small one was about the size of a whale, so normal-ish materials seem possible there.) And that they get a really tough hide when they are grown. Or maybe they do have a field that they generate that this one didn't have. Take your pick.

(This is an example of how hard it is to get stories totally consistent. I've found physics implausibilities to be no more unreal than plot or causal implausibilities, so I've learned to live with both.)

Thx!

TomB

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

We build *static* structures that are larger. The aircraft carrier floating on water means that no point of the structure has to bear much of the weight - load bearing is evenly distributed across the entire surface.. Also, it is mostly hollow (which is how it floats) so the aircraft carrier is surprisingly *light* for its size. Both of these things are build with few to no real moving parts, and a great deal of thought put into distributing the weight evenly across the entire footprint of the object. Large buildings are not built to do the Hokey Pokey. Contrast this with a typical, bipedal kaiju (say, Godzilla). It walks. It can do the samba, and moves seen only in pro wrestling. It has joints at ankle, knee, and hip. As it walks, legs alternate bearing the entire weight of the beast - so those joints have to take shifting loads generated by the entire beast, rather than distributing them around like we do with a skyscraper or ship.

Here's the science. The strength of a piece of material typically rises linearly with it's cross-sectional area. So, it rises like the square of a typical dimension of the piece. However, the weight of the object rises linearly with the volume of the object, so it rises like the *cube* of a typical dimension of the piece. So, you have material strengths going like r^2, but the loads going like r^3. This means that for any given material, there's a point of size beyond which it cannot support its own weight, and it will collapse. And this is without considering dynamic loads on parts of a moving object, which can be several times greater than the thing's weight.



Yep. But we thought they were impossible on biological grounds, not on physical ones.



Which is what I've already said, several times over - if we have kaiju, we have materials we don't know about, with properties we cannot reasonably predict. Bunker-busters are built to penetrate good old fashioned reinforced concrete and armor plate. These materials are balsa wood by comparison to what keeps a kaiju walking. Ergo, we cannot clearly say that the bunker-buster is going to do a whole heck of a lot.

Can we not reasonbly predict the properties? Just keep it basic - only give the minimum properties required to make such a thing walk and move and do back-flips and whatever it does. What kind of strength would such a material require?

Also not to forget - not all parts need to be equally tough. An eye, for example, doesn't have to carry the whole load of the creature, so it could still be a weak spot, for example.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Can we not reasonbly predict the properties? Just keep it basic - only give the minimum properties required to make such a thing walk and move and do back-flips and whatever it does. What kind of strength would such a material require?

Also not to forget - not all parts need to be equally tough. An eye, for example, doesn't have to carry the whole load of the creature, so it could still be a weak spot, for example.

and we get the...Tarrasque super sized

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

There is another defensive alternative (note that I'm on the side of "it's impossible because the physics of the creature don't work; if the creature works within known physics then it would be vulnerable to existing weapons"). The critter doesn't need to shrug off bullets -- it can absorb them. If its vital organs are very, very small compared to its overall mass, you can pump the thing full of lead, penetrating the skin repeatedly, but not have any substantial effect on its operation.

As a comparison, a 120mm gun-fired APFSDS round can penetrate meters of thick, hard material ... but by itself it still only creates a 1" diameter hole through the target. The damage to the target comes from the secondary spalling of hard material which then tears up other vital components, assuming the penetrator didn't hit something vital. Being built of hard, tough material can thus be of greater danger than being soft and squishy.

So if you can build a kaiji that can stand under its own weight, make it big and squishy, and give it a brain the size of a peanut. You can poke it full of holes and it will keep coming. Of course, it will eventually be brought down by the use of explosive projectiles that tear apart its ablative mass ...

... the only reason for mecha is: "the only think cooler than fighting giant monsters is fighting them with GIANT ROBOTS!"

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Can we not reasonbly predict the properties? Just keep it basic - only give the minimum properties required to make such a thing walk and move and do back-flips and whatever it does. What kind of strength would such a material require?

Also not to forget - not all parts need to be equally tough. An eye, for example, doesn't have to carry the whole load of the creature, so it could still be a weak spot, for example.

Even keeping it basic, a single foot or knee joint is still going to have to support several times the total mass of the creature so that it doesn't collapse when running or jumping.

And as for the eyes...remember, just like the rest of the creature, they seem impervious to damage from hypervelocity shrapnel and explosions, terminal velocity falls into buildings with tons of force behind them, etc.

That's all beyond the kind of force conventional weapons deliver.

Consider some RW terrorist attacks: the 9/11 planes were completely destroyed on impact and it took a long time to fell the towers. According to some estimates I have seen, each plane had the potential explosive force of up to 600 tons of TNT. McVeigh's bomb was equivalent to about 1000 tons of TNT. By way of comparison, a kaiju can do a face-plant into a skyscraper, bringing it down immediately and dust itself off as if it were the first punch in a bar brawl.