Chapter Text
Hello. Please state your name and occupation for the record.
Hey. I'm Drew Watkins.
And I am Takashi Kinomoto. Drew and I were the technology and design leads for the Mark Three Jaeger project.
They recruited me from MIT at the age of 19. I'd just done my master's thesis on refinements to the Pons System.
Tokyo University. Materials Science.
Tell me a little bit about the Mark Three Jaeger Project.
What's there to tell? They asked us to improve on the Mark Twos. We did our best. End of story.
But there was more to it than that, wasn't there? Especially considering the eventual role that a Mark Three Jaeger had in the culmination of the Kaiju War.
Ah. You want to talk about Gipsy Danger, huh? You want to know if there was something special about her? Something that made her different than the others, some special reason why the Mark Threes succeeded where the Mark Fives didn't?
Well. . .
Look, I'll be blunt. You won't find one talking to me. Truth be told, nothing we did made the Mark Threes anything special. Sure, Mark Three was where we switched from one-off prototypes to mass production. . . such as it is when it comes to Jaegers, where a "production run" generally consists of five to ten units. But nothing we did with them made them better than any of the other generations of Jaegers. IF you want to talk about why it was Gipsy Danger that blew up the breach for us? Talk to Mori and Beckett. Talk to Choi and Harrisburg. Talk to the members of the refit team. It was their work, not ours, that was responsible for victory.
That's a bit disingenuous, isn't it? I mean, it was your decision to use analog control systems that. . .
No such thing.
Excuse me?
No such thing. There's no such thing as an "analog control system." Not when they're computer driven, and every computer that exists in the world. . . that has existed since ENIAC. . . is purely digital.
But. . .
You've been seeing that movie again, haven't you? The one where they've got that handsome blond actor guy spouting that line about how Gipsy Danger survived "Leatherback's" EMP because the Mark Threes used analog controls? Bullshit. No such thing. But I can tell you how that rumor got started. Is that interesting enough for you to write about?"
Please continue.
I'll take that as a yes. All right, here's the thing you have to understand. The entire Mark Three project was hugely politicized. When it came to the Mark One and Mark Twos? The science and engineering teams got full control of their projects. Mostly because they were the long shot, and none of the bean counters wanted to screw with the guys who had the fate of the world in their hands. But by the time they got to the Mark Threes? We had the Kaiju under control. We'd proven that we could fight them and win. . . not just win, curb-stomp them. Ever since Brawler Yukon punched "Karloff's" head into the ground, we were winning. Every time Jaegers fought Kaiju, the Kaiju lost hard. Of course, back then, they were all Cat Ones. The first Cat Twos had just started emerging through the breach, and even they got their asses kicked by the Mark Two Jaegers. So by the time the Mark Three project began, the bean counters and politicians came out of the woodwork. And what they saw was dollar signs.
Creating the PPDC Jaeger Fleet was going to be one of the biggest public works projects in human history. Each Jaeger costs as much as a battleship or destroyer. We're talking billions of dollars involved in every single one. And every corporation wanted in on the effort. . . and they had politician and military friends who were willing to toss them some work.
I'm still not sure how the fuck we actually managed to get our work done. Every day we had another company rep coming in and trying to shoehorn their company's tech into our new designs. Some of them we were able to accomodate. . . some of those corps actually had some good tech that we were happy to have. But a lot of them? More interested in lining their own pockets than in trying to make a better product.
And that's how the misapprehension that the Mark Threes had analog controls got started?
No, but it's a perfect example of the kind of environment we were working in. Actually, the corporate types weren't the big problems. Most of them actually knew their stuff, even if they wanted to get their fingers into the pie in the process. Our real problem came from the military and the politicians. Not the ones directly involved in the Jaeger project. The ones high up that had no idea what was going on and were still trying to get their own in.
Tak has this story. . . hey, Tak, tell him about the whole "alloys" thing.
Ah yes. It happened in the middle of the prototype phase for the Mark Threes. As it turns out, the pilots for the first Mark Three Jaeger that was supposed to come out were the sons of a U.S. Senator. . . do you remember his name, Andrew?
James Callahan. Douchebag. His kids were Aaron and Stephanie Callahan. Good pilots, actually. I think they ended up with six kills piloting Blitz Arbalest before they bought it defending Seattle.
Ah, yes. Senator James Callahan. Well, given that his children would be the ones that would be piloting the first of the Mark Threes, he was, of course, interested in seeing what their vehicle would look like. It was a huge media event. He came through to take a look at what was going on, and at one point, we showed him a section of the armor plating. He asked what it was made of. . . and I told him that it was a titanium-based alloy made up of such-and-such percent titanium, such and such percent aluminum, such and such this and that. . . and the Senator threw a fit. "We're spending this much money and you're only using partial titanium? What's your problem? Why don't you use pure titanium?"
I tried to explain to him that pure titanium isn't much good except as jewelry: can't take as much heat as alloys. I even tried to tell him that the alloys had better tensile strength than pure titanium. . . he didn't buy it. "Damn it, I don't want you wasting taxpayer money on cheap materials," he shouted at me. "If my kids are going to be riding that thing: no alloys. Or you don't get your money."
Idiocy. He had no idea what he was talking about. But he was friends with the head of the Senate subcommittee that was one of the funding sources of the Mark Three project . . .
What did you do?
We went on using the normal alloy compositions. And we put in a standing order that if Senator Callahan ever asked about the composition of any material component of a Jaeger ever again, the only answer we would give is "Pure X. No Alloys." He never caught on.
It actually kind of became a running joke among Jaeger pilots and mechanics. Whenever you ran into a material that would take too long to describe, you'd use that as a shorthand: "Pure Iron, no alloys." It became our code phrase for, "We could tell you what it's made out of, but it would take too long to explain and you wouldn't care anyway."
(Laughter) Ironically, it got me into trouble. I nearly got called to the floor because someone overheard the joke and demanded to know why we were using tons of 24 karat gold in the circuitry of the Jaegers. . .
So yeah, something similar happened with the whole "Analog Controls" thing. One of the members of the Russian leadership used to serve on a Cold War era destroyer during his younger years. The thing about those old Soviet ships is that their fire control computer was mechanical, not electronic. It was basically this big glorified slide rule where you'd dial in the numbers, turn the crank, and get your answer that way. . . thing is, it was completely inferior to American electronic fire control computers. But Ivan couldn't admit that they were inferior at anything. . . so the rationale they'd tell people would be that the mechanical analog computers could work after EMPs, whereas electronic computers couldn't.
So here comes this old Russian guy who vaguely remembers something about analog computers from his younger years, hears something about the Jaegers using computerized control schemes, and immediately demands that we install analog computers as backup in case of electromagnetic pulse. "These machines work near nuclear explosions," was his logic, "and I do not want them to shut down due to the EMPs.
Absolutely stupid. Standard protocol was not to nuke until after the Jaegers were outside the EMP range. And even then, if you hit a Jaeger with an EMP, the worst that happens is that it shuts down and maybe falls over! The ones that really needed EMP shielded controls were the helicopters. . . lose power in one of those and you're in bigger trouble. And the real truth was, if nukes were going off anywhere near a Jaeger, it's because things had gone so badly that the pilots, and probably the Jaeger itself, were dead.
I couldn't bypass this guy the same way Tak bulshitted Senator Callahan, either, because Sergei. . . that was his name, General Sergei Antonov. . . had added EMP resistance testing to the design parameters. So I didn't have a choice but to reinforce the entire computer system and control leads to resist Electromagnetic Pulse. Absolutely stupid, I thought. Completely pointless, I thought. Stupid waste of money, I thought. Why the hell do you need to be EMP shielded when the Kaiju are dumb animals that don't have nukes. (Laughter).
So in the end. . . EMP shielding the Mark Threes turned out to be a good idea after all?
Hell no. It diverted money and energy away from shit that could have made a real difference in combat. It added weight that could have been devoted to better armor or control systems. It was a complete waste of time and energy.
But the Battle of Hong Kong proved that. . .
The Battle of Hong Kong proved nothing except that you can't predict anything. All it proves is that in the end, blind luck beats smarts every time.
What Andrew is trying to say is that EMP Shielding the Mark Threes upped their cost by 25% and provided no real benefit in combat except in one corner case. . . one out of hundreds of battles fought. That is why later generation Jaegers removed the requirement for EMP shielding. The truth of the matter is that in the one case of the Battle of Hong Kong, the fact that Gipsy Danger was EMP-shielded was a key turning point in the battle. But in many other previous engagements, the added cost of the EMP shielding meant that fewer Jaegers could be fielded.
Exactly. While we're on the subject of Gipsy Danger. Remember how she got fucked up fighting Knifehead? She shouldn't have been taking on a Cat Three that size alone. Standard doctrine was to take on Cat Threes using two-Jaeger teams. Preferably three, like they did in Manila: Lucky Seven, Gipsy Danger, and Shaolin Rogue in a three-Jaeger formation. Do you know why Gipsy went in alone? Because Anchorage Shatterdome's third Jaeger was down for repairs, and Romeo Blue was off running long range patrols. Our original plan was to have five Jaegers at each Shatterdome. . . we had three. Long story short, Gipsy has to take on Knifehead alone. . . does a damn good job too, those pilots had a lot of heart. . . and even still, she still gets fucked up and we lost one of the best young pilots of Gen Three.
That's why it pisses me off every time some smarmy bastard tries to lecture me on how I was wrong the entire time about the EMP shielding on the Mark Threes. Because there's no way that the entire Pan Pacific Jaeger fleet should have been down to four officially decomissioned units based out of Hong Kong. That happened because funding got cut. Funding got cut because the council thought that the Jaeger Program was ineffective. The Jaeger program was getting ineffective because the Jaegers were losing fights, because they didn't have sufficient backup and replacements. And we didn't have enough Jaegers. . . because they were too expensive. And a lot of that cost came from the EMP shields.
We should have lost. We should be dead. The only reason we aren't has nothing to do with me. So if you want to talk about the real story behind Gipsy Danger? Talk to the Hong Kong Shatterdome people, like I said. Talk to Mori and Beckett. Because they're the ones who managed to turn shit into gold.
They're the reasons why we're still alive.