Jaegers of Pacific Rim: What do we know about them?
There's actually a fair amount of lore about Pacific Rim's jaegers, though most of it isn't actually in the movie itself. A lot of it has been scattered in places like Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters, Tales From Year Zero, Travis Beacham's blog, and the Pacific Rim novelization.
Note that I will not be including information from either Pacific Rim: Uprising or Pacific Rim: The Black. Uprising didn't really add anything, and The Black's take on jaegers can easily be summed up as "simplified the concept to make a cartoon for children."
So what is there to know about jaegers, besides the fact that they're piloted by two people with their brains connected via computer?
Here's a fun fact: underneath the hull (which may or may not be pure iron), jaegers have "muscle strands" and liquid data transfer technology. Tendo Choi refers to them in the film when describing Lady Danger's repairs and upgrades:
Solid iron hull, no alloys. Forty engine blocks per muscle strand. Hyper-torque driver for every limb and a new fluid synapse system.
The novelization by Alex Irvine makes frequent references to this liquid data transfer tech. For example:
The Jaeger’s joints squealed and began to freeze up from loss of lubricant through the holes Knifehead had torn in it. Its liquid-circuit neural architecture was misfiring like crazy. (Page 29.)
He had enough fiber-optic and fluid-core cabling to get the bandwidth he needed. (Page 94.)
Newt soldered together a series of leads using the copper contact pins and short fluid-core cables. (Page 96.)
Unfortunately I haven't found anything more about the "muscle strands" and what they might be made of, but I do find it interesting that jaegers apparently have some sort of artificial muscle system going on, especially considering Newt's personnel dossier in the novel mentioned him pioneering research in artificial tissue replication at MIT.
The novelization also mentions that the pilots' drivesuits have a kind of recording device for their experiences while drifting:
This armored outer layer included a Drift recorder that automatically preserved sensory impressions. (Page 16.)
It was connected through a silver half-torus that looked like a travel pillow but was in fact a four-dimensional quantum recorder that would provide a full record of the Drift. (Page 96.)
This is certainly... quite the concept. Perhaps the PPDC has legitimate reasons for looking through the memories and feelings of their pilots, but let's not pretend this doesn't enable horrific levels of privacy invasion.
I must note, though, I haven't seen mention of a recording system anywhere outside of the novel. Travis Beacham doesn't mention it on his blog, and it never comes up in either Tales From Year Zero or Tales From The Drift, both written by him. Whether there just wasn't any occasion to mention it or whether this piece of worldbuilding fell by the wayside in Beacham's mind is currently impossible to determine.
Speaking of the drivesuits, let's talk about those more. The novelization includes a few paragraphs outlining how the pilots' drivesuits work. It's a two-layer deal:
The first layer, the circuity suit, was like a wetsuit threaded with a mesh of synaptic processors. The pattern of processor relays looked like circuitry on the outside of the suit, gleaming gold against its smooth black polymer material. These artificial synapses transmitted commands to the Jaeger’s motor systems as fast as the pilot’s brain could generate them, with lag times close to zero. The synaptic processor array also transmitted pain signals to the pilots when their Jaeger was damaged.
The second layer was a sealed polycarbonate shell with full life support and magnetic interfaces at spine, feet, and all major limb joints. It relayed neural signals both incoming and outgoing. This armored outer layer included a Drift recorder that automatically preserved sensory impressions.
The outer armored layer of the drivesuit also kept pilots locked into the Conn-Pod’s Pilot Motion Rig, a command platform with geared locks for the Rangers’ boots, cabled extensors that attached to each suit gauntlet, and a full-spectrum neural transference plate, called the feedback cradle, that locked from the Motion Rig to the spine of each Ranger’s suit. At the front of the motion rig stood a command console, but most of a Ranger’s commands were issued either by voice or through interaction with the holographic heads-up display projected into the space in front of the pilots’ faces. (Page 16.)
Now let's talk about the pons system. According to the novelization:
The basics of the Pons were simple. You needed an interface on each end, so neuro signals from the two brains could reach the central bridge. You needed a processor capable of organizing and merging the two sets of signals. You needed an output so the data generated by the Drift could be recorded, monitored, and analyzed. That was it. (Page 96.)
This is pretty consistent with other depictions of the drift, recording device aside. (Again, the 4D quantum recorder never comes up anywhere outside of the novel.)
The development of the pons system as we know it is depicted in Tales From Year Zero, which goes into further detail on what happened after Trespasser's attack on San Francisco. In this comic, a jaeger can be difficult to move if improbably calibrated. Stacker Pentecost testing out a single arm describes the experience as feeling like his hand is stuck in wet concrete; Doctor Caitlin Lightcap explains that it's resistance from the datastream because the interface isn't calibrated to Pentecost's neural profile. (I'm guessing that this is the kind of calibration the film refers to when Tendo Choi calls out Lady Danger's left and right hemispheres being calibrated.)
According to Travis Beacham's blog, solo piloting a jaeger for a short time is possible, though highly risky. While it won't cause lasting damage if the pilot survives the encounter, the neural overload that accumulates the longer a pilot goes on can be deadly. In this post he says:
It won't kill you right away. May take five minutes. May take twenty. No telling. But it gets more difficult the longer you try. And at some point it catches up with you. You won't last a whole fight start-to-finish. Stacker and Raleigh managed to get it done and unplug before hitting that wall.
It starts off fine, but it's a steep curve from fine to dead. Most people can last five minutes. Far fewer can last thirty. Nobody can last a whole fight.
Next, let's talk about the size and weight of jaegers. Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters lists off the sizes and weights of various jaegers. The heights of the jaegers it lists (which, to be clear, are not all of them) range from 224 feet to 280 feet. Their weights range from 1850 tons to 7890 tons. Worth noting, the heaviest jaegers (Romeo Blue and Horizon Brave) were among the Mark-1s, and it seems that these heavy builds didn't last long given that another Mark-1, Coyote Tango, weighed 2312 tons.
And on the topic of jaeger specs, each jaeger in Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters is listed with a (fictional) power core and operating system. For example, Crimson Typhoon is powered by the Midnight Orb 9 power core, and runs on the Tri-Sun Plasma Gate OS.
Where the novelization's combat asset dossiers covers the same jaegers, this information lines up - with the exception of Lady Danger. PR:MMM says that Lady Danger's OS is Blue Spark 4.1; the novelization's dossier says it's BLPK 4.1.
PR:MMM also seems to have an incomplete list of the jaegers' armaments; for example, it lists the I-22 Plasmacaster under Weaponry, and "jet kick" under Power Moves. Meanwhile, the novelization presents its armaments thus:
I-22 Plasmacaster
Twin Fist gripping claws, left arm only
Enhanced balance systems and leg-integral Thrust Kickers
Enhanced combat-strike armature on all limbs
The novel's dossiers list between 2-4 features in the jaegers' armaments sections.
Now let's move on to jaeger power cores. As many of you probably already know, Mark-1-3 jaegers were outfitted with nuclear power cores. However, this posed a risk of cancer for pilots, especially during the early days. To combat this, pilots were given the (fictional) anti-radiation drug, Metharocin. (We see Stacker Pentecost take Metharocin in the film.)
The Mark-4s and beyond were fitted with alternative fuel sources, although their exact nature isn't always clear. Striker Eureka's XIG supercell chamber implies some sort of giant cell batteries, but it's a little harder to guess what Crimson Typhoon's Midnight Orb 9 might be, aside from round.
Back on the topic of nuclear cores, though, the novelization contains a little paragraph about the inventor of Lady Danger's power core, which I found entertaining:
The old nuclear vortex turbine lifted away from the reactor housing. The reactor itself was a proprietary design, brainchild of an engineer who left Westinghouse when they wouldn’t let him use his lab to explore portable nuclear miniaturization tech. He’d landed with one of the contractors the PPDC brought in at its founding, and his small reactors powered many of the first three generations of Jaegers. (Page 182.)
Like... I have literally just met this character, and I love him. I want him to meet Newt Geiszler, you know? >:3
Apparently, escape pods were a new feature to Mark-3 jaegers. Text in the novelization says, "New to the Mark III is an automated escape-pod system capable of ejecting each Ranger individually." (Page 240.)
Finally, jaegers were always meant to be more than just machines. Their designs and movements were meant to convey personality and character. Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters says:
Del Toro insisted the Jaegers be characters in and of themselves, not simply giant versions of their pilots. Del Toro told his designers, "It should be as painful for you to see a Jaeger get injured as it is for you to see the pilot [get hurt.]" (Page 56.)
Their weathered skins are inspired by combat-worn vehicles from the Iraq War and World War II battleships and bombers. They look believable and their design echoes human anatomy, but only to a point. "At the end of the day, what you want is for them to look cool," says Francisco Ruiz Velasco. "It's a summer movie, so you want to see some eye candy." Del Toro replies, "I, however, believe in 'eye protein,' which is high-end design with a high narrative content." (Page 57.)
THE JAEGER FROM DOWN UNDER is the only Mark 5, the most modern and best all-around athlete of the Jaegers. He's also the most brutal of the Jaeger force. Del Toro calls him "sort of brawler, like a bar fighter." (Page 64.)
And that is about all the info I could scrounge up and summarize in a post. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff here - like, I feel that the liquid circuit and muscle tissue stuff gives jaegers an eerily organic quality that could be played for some pretty interesting angles. And I also find it interesting that jaegers were meant to embody their own sort of character and personality, rather than just being simple combat machines or extensions of their pilots - it's a great example of a piece of media choosing thematic correctness over technical correctness, which when you get right down to it, is sort of what Pacific Rim is really all about.
