Is there a characteristic way you feel movies get military engineering wrong, or is it just the usual handwave of convenient science is convenient, now (if the movie is intelligent) move on to the worldbuilding?
Movies will almost never explain why conventional tech won't work, making the super ridiculous tech necessary. To some extent, this is because in real life some elements of the military also don't care that conventional tech will do the job just fine (see also Air Force Research Labs projects colloquially referred to as the "shit cannon," "rods from god," and "voices of god" just to start with. I wish I knew the actual honest to god codenames for these). But none of those projects ever make it past vaporware.
So the Jaegers? 260 feet tall, according to the pacific rim wikia, made of titanium or iron core, depending on model year. Let's skip the bit where "all titanium, no alloys" is utterly ridiculous because titanium is always alloyed with something because that improves its tensile strength. Anyway, the wiki claims it's 1,980 tons, but assuming pure titanium, which weighs in at 4.5g/cm^-3 (and keep in mind, an alloy would be heavier) and let's say the thing is about a fifth as wide as it is tall, and a fifth as deep, I'm totally making up the second two dimensions here and assuming there's only 20% empty space inside the kaiju, and also being really lazy and assuming the kaiju is roughly cubic rather than cylindrical, and ignoring things like the weight of the "50 diesel engines per muscle fiber" (which is its own bit of staggeringly unlikely engineering) because I want to be able to do the math in my head and not go looking for my calculator, but these numbers are at least vaguely in the right ballpark. Anyway, that's actually 72 billion kilograms. Or about 80,000 tons. Or 1,100 M1 Abrams tanks, which get less than half a mile to the gallon fuel efficiency to move their bulk! Only 9,000 M1 Abrams have ever been produced, over the entire history of the US military industrial complex.
But anyway, let's accept the quoted number of 1,980 tons, which the footnotes on the wiki tell me were taken from the officially licensed art book for the film, even though it's a factor of 50 too small, or budgeting for my fantastically lazy handwavy math above, at least a factor of 20 too small. Whatever. Very small.
I can't find numbers online for the top speed of any of the Jaegers, and I'm too lazy to get film clips and measure how fast they move, but let's be conservative and say they have a maximum ground speed of 50 mph, based on how Gipsy Danger got to Knifehead, seven miles off the coast of Alaska, in the span of a few moments of jocular banter. I'm sure it wasn't seven full minutes in film-watching time, but as I said, I'm being conservative. Anyway, that's something like 17 trillion Joules to move the thing, or 4.5 million kilowatt-hours, or 4,500 megawatt-hours. It's actually not completely unreasonable to move the thing if it has a nuclear reactor in its chest: according to the US Energy Information Administration, the smallest nuclear power plant in the US produces 478 MW, and the largest about 4,000 MW. So you'd just need a core the size of the facility in Palo Verde, Arizona, which resides on 4,000 acres of land. For comparison, that's the area of 2,500 Somervilles.
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Movies will almost never explain why conventional tech won't work, making the super ridiculous tech necessary. To some extent, this is because in real life some elements of the military also don't care that conventional tech will do the job just fine (see also Air Force Research Labs projects colloquially referred to as the "shit cannon," "rods from god," and "voices of god" just to start with. I wish I knew the actual honest to god codenames for these). But none of those projects ever make it past vaporware.
So the Jaegers? 260 feet tall, according to the pacific rim wikia, made of titanium or iron core, depending on model year. Let's skip the bit where "all titanium, no alloys" is utterly ridiculous because titanium is always alloyed with something because that improves its tensile strength. Anyway, the wiki claims it's 1,980 tons, but assuming pure titanium, which weighs in at 4.5g/cm^-3 (and keep in mind, an alloy would be heavier) and let's say the thing is about a fifth as wide as it is tall, and a fifth as deep, I'm totally making up the second two dimensions here and assuming there's only 20% empty space inside the kaiju, and also being really lazy and assuming the kaiju is roughly cubic rather than cylindrical, and ignoring things like the weight of the "50 diesel engines per muscle fiber" (which is its own bit of staggeringly unlikely engineering) because I want to be able to do the math in my head and not go looking for my calculator, but these numbers are at least vaguely in the right ballpark. Anyway, that's actually 72 billion kilograms. Or about 80,000 tons. Or 1,100 M1 Abrams tanks, which get less than half a mile to the gallon fuel efficiency to move their bulk! Only 9,000 M1 Abrams have ever been produced, over the entire history of the US military industrial complex.
But anyway, let's accept the quoted number of 1,980 tons, which the footnotes on the wiki tell me were taken from the officially licensed art book for the film, even though it's a factor of 50 too small, or budgeting for my fantastically lazy handwavy math above, at least a factor of 20 too small. Whatever. Very small.
I can't find numbers online for the top speed of any of the Jaegers, and I'm too lazy to get film clips and measure how fast they move, but let's be conservative and say they have a maximum ground speed of 50 mph, based on how Gipsy Danger got to Knifehead, seven miles off the coast of Alaska, in the span of a few moments of jocular banter. I'm sure it wasn't seven full minutes in film-watching time, but as I said, I'm being conservative. Anyway, that's something like 17 trillion Joules to move the thing, or 4.5 million kilowatt-hours, or 4,500 megawatt-hours. It's actually not completely unreasonable to move the thing if it has a nuclear reactor in its chest: according to the US Energy Information Administration, the smallest nuclear power plant in the US produces 478 MW, and the largest about 4,000 MW. So you'd just need a core the size of the facility in Palo Verde, Arizona, which resides on 4,000 acres of land. For comparison, that's the area of 2,500 Somervilles.
(comment exceeded LJ's maximum length)