![]() ![]() ![]() The average person can’t punch very fast–maybe 15 to 30 miles per hour–so it’s understandable that you might put huge rockets on your robot to help KO a kaiju. But their speed is also fairly average because the robots’ motion is based on human pilots who physically move them around. Part of this is for cinematic effect–slower than normal motion gives the illusion of weight to the robots. Based on this weight and some other assumptions about how much an average human arm weighs in comparisons to full body weight– other nerdy engineers like myself have estimated the jaeger rocket arm to be about 1.5 million pounds.ĭespite their enormous mechanical power, jaegers aren’t that fast. The main robot of Pacific Rim, Gipsy Danger, is said to be 7,080 tons*–half the weight of all the trash produced in New York City in one day. And with great height comes great weight. ![]() ![]() The first thing we know is that jaegers are huge like 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty huge. All we need is the mass of the jaeger arm and the velocity of the punch. More specifically, we want the kinetic energy (measured in Joules) of the punch in order to make comparisons. Like how we describe car crashes and TNT explosions, Joules–a measure of energy–are the best units to use when calculating what an elbow rocket can deliver. Just how much power does to take to make a kaiju crumble? Keep cheering, because that particular punch was like taking a Boeing 747 to the face. It was so cool that we are required to science it. In fact, if you were like me, you might have even fist-bumped the screen when you saw a Anime-style rocket fist deliver a mountain of metal to a snarling kaiju’s face. Its story was a rather simple fanboy or girl fairy tale–giant robots fight giant monsters–and the action was kaiju-crushingly intense. Pacific Rim–a science fiction love letter to the giant monster movies of old–came out swinging two weekends ago amid the squees of geeks everywhere (though no squees were heard at the box office). What better way to “cancel the apocalypse” than to use rockets to accelerate a million and a half pounds of steel squarely into an inter-dimensional monster’s face? ![]()
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January 2023
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