If a kaiju really emerged

[Janx]

Assume that it is stomping around in Japan, and conventional weapons haven't made a dent (as is usual for kaiju), and the thing started stomping toward China... I am not at all convinced that China would not, in the name of saving their own people, try to turn it into a crater *before* it reached Chinese soil - and that'd probably mean getting it while it was sill on land in Japan.

One should also consider actual political environment. China and Japan don't quite get along. I doubt China is secretly counting the days until it can nuke Japan, but on the other hand, I doubt they'll be too heartbroken over needing to "Nuke Japan before the monster gets to China"

 

[tomBitonti]

Given a week or two, how feasible would it be to launch a few spikes of depleted uranium into orbit, then de-orbit them as kinetic missiles? There is an aiming and guidance problem, but that would scale up the kinetic energy by a bit. Or, a battleship mounted railgun (which I though was within our current technical ability).

Of course, the battleship becomes a target itself pretty quick ...

Thx!

TomB

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

While a ship mounted Railgun is technically possible, it may not pack enough punch to penetrate the dermis of something that size. A 100 ton whale has several feet of skin and blubber covering its body...a kaiju's skin must be several yards thick.

And with the square/cube law in place, that stuff has to be damn tough to contain the mass of flesh it covers...

 

[Bullgrit]

Nope. As I noted before, big as they may seem on human scale, they are still small compared to the ocean. Kaiju are not big enough, and move at only modest speeds.

For the record, I don't mean a tsunami like seen in disaster movies, but rather a noticable swell. But just now looking up the size of various war ships, (aircraft carriers and battleships), I see my visualizations of the size of kaiju is off, considerably. The Nimitz CV is over three times longer than a kaiju. I was thinking that a carrier-sized object (100,000+ tons) rising with some speed from the depths would register on the ocean sensors. But a kaiju is not as big as I was thinking. I've been on two US carriers, and now kaiju seem disappointingly small. So, yeah, OK, no ocean detection of one coming.

I am not at all convinced that China would not, in the name of saving their own people, try to turn it into a crater *before* it reached Chinese soil - and that'd probably mean getting it while it was sill on land in Japan. . . . they can work out the diplomatic niceties later . . .

That would be one hell of a job for diplomacy. There would be a lot of, "We had it contained and was working on killing it," versus, "It might have come after us very shortly and couldn't wait for you to end it." Possibly some nation would make a pre-emptive strike, but I highly doubt it would accepted by the rest of the world with a, "well, they had to do what they had to do." There'd be no end to second guessing. It's one thing for a monster to kill a million people over a few days, and something else for another nation to kill a million people in a second.

It'd be scientific consortium time.

I don't know. Would Japan let in Chinese scientists if China just nuked Japan, even to target the kaiju? Would Russia want US scientists getting their hands on kaiju bone? Would the US want blackmarketeers getting kaiju blood? I think kaiju would be considered "weapons grade" everything, and everyone would want a part of one, and would want no one else having access to one.

Bullgrit

 

[Morrus]

But the penetrative munitions, (bunker busters), would be like a bullet to a normal human.

If a Kaiju really emerged we'd have to acknowledge that the basic laws of physics don't work the way we think they do (either that, or that magic exists - though the two might be indistinguishable). There's no logical way to deduce what a bunker buster bomb will do to something that breaks the laws of physics. It's probably immune to them, just like it's immune to physics.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I see my visualizations of the size of kaiju is off, considerably.

Depends on the movie, or worse, on a given scene within a movie. Some films are very bad about keeping scale consistent.

 

[Bullgrit]

If a Kaiju really emerged we'd have to acknowledge that the basic laws of physics don't work the way we think they do (either that, or that magic exists - though the two might be indistinguishable). There's no logical way to deduce what a bunker buster bomb will do to something that breaks the laws of physics. It's probably immune to them, just like it's immune to physics.

This is a position that I have a hard time with. We build things massively bigger than kaiju all the time. Heck, look at the earlier mentioned aircraft carriers that *float on water*. We build structures many, many times bigger than kaiju, both in height and weight, that stand just fine, (even during violent natural events like earthquakes). We've discovered things at the bottom of the ocean that we thought were impossible, (I just learned about the inches-long amoebas that blew my mind). So maybe the kaiju doesn't break the laws of physics, but rather uses them in ways we haven't seen/considered yet.

Sea ships made of metal were once thought impossible. Airships heavier than air were once thought impossible. But humanity figured them out by playing within the laws of physics. I can imagine nature figuring out something like a kaiju within the laws of physics.

*Edit* Maybe the kaiju are not made of bone, muscle, and flesh.

Bullgrit

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Kaiju are made of Dork Matter.

 

[Umbran]

Heck, look at the earlier mentioned aircraft carriers that *float on water*. We build structures many, many times bigger than kaiju, both in height and weight, that stand just fine, (even during violent natural events like earthquakes).

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.

We've discovered things at the bottom of the ocean that we thought were impossible

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

So maybe the kaiju doesn't break the laws of physics, but rather uses them in ways we haven't seen/considered yet.

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.

 

[Derren]

Why the talks about nukes?
Some simple anti ship missiles would be enough to kill something like that (or torpedoes when still in the water). At worst, a cruise missile.