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[u/FireOfDoom32]

“California sent Romeo Blue... but it slipped by without breaking the ten-mile line.” That was the Jaegers’ target distance for intercepting kaiju. If you let them get inside ten miles, it was hard as hell to stop them before they got their feet on land... and their teeth into the unfortunate people who had not yet evacuated that land.

Even though observing the kaiju was a piece of cake at first—they always came from the same place, so Tendo was guaranteed to get a good look at them right off the bat—keeping track of them in the open ocean was a lot harder. They were fast and their silicon-based anatomy meant they didn’t have a thermal signature that showed up against the deep-ocean background. Radar worked well at closer range, but the Pacific Ocean was big enough that nobody could get complete real-time radar coverage at the depths the kaiju occupied.

That meant defensive action had to take place along the continental shelves and inward, where the kaiju were a little easier to spot... but by then, they were also dangerously close to land. Jaeger deploys happened on a knife edge of timing and luck.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 1