Weight of an Evangelion unit?

Cafe Society
1

Well, this is probably too late in the day to get a reply, but I’ve been working nights, so…

Anyway, my question is about the famed mecha from the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion: approximately 40 meter (about 12 stories) high biomechanical fighting machines.

My question is: how much does/would one of these things weigh? Was it ever mentioned in the manga or anime, or would anyone here care to help me in an educated estimate?

(Danged if I’d know what a good estimate would be, though—like, “(the weight of a 6 foot tall human with an Abiocor wearing full plate armor) * 21?”)

2

Well, I went looking through Wikipedia (to which I go to for all my useless pop culture information) and I see no mention of weight. I don’t see any mention of weight for the Jet Alone (closest comparison I could think of) either. As an Eva unit is mostly biological with lots of armor and other things to both control it and make it capable of fighting, I figure your guess is probably reasonable. Maybe you could take the weight of a Gundam mobile suit and double it and get a rough guess going between universes. But I don’t have that number either.

Edit: Found a number for the RX-78-2 Gundam. It’s 60 metric tons or 66 standard tons. At 18 meters tall, it’s roughly half the size of an Eva. So I would put the upper limit for an Eva unit to be about 140 tons if we use this comparison.

3

You’re forgetting the square-cube law, Asteron. If the Eva is double the height of a Gundam (and going by the scales used in other comparisons it’s more like five times as large as a Gundam but let’s use your figure) then the Eva’s volume would be roughly eight times as much.

Evas as depicted in the series are close to 100 meters tall, but they are spindly and, as noted, not completely metal. I think there’s even a decent argument to be made that they’re not really all there (which could handwave away the problems of them supporting their own weight).

Aha! Something occurred to me. We saw an Eva standing on a floating aircraft carrier. Therefore the Eva cannot weigh more than the displacement of an aircraft carrier! The Over The Rainbow was larger than other aircraft carriers but we’re in the right range. Nimitz class aircraft carriers have a displacement of 102,000 tons and the Eva would have to weigh enough to throw the ship off balance but not sink it so 50,000 tons seems about right.

4

Going from inertia–like when they bump into a building and what happens to the building–I’d guess that they weight about as much as a 747 or so.

5

What I want to know is how viscous the LCL needs to be for the pilots to be able to sit in the Plug Unit without being tossed around like rag dolls and yet still be able to breathe oxygen through it without stripping their lungs of mucous afterwards.

(The in-series animation of the LCL spraying suggests that it isn’t that much thicker than water, but given that the mechas have been tossed off their feet but the pilots can still remain seated without the need of any retraints, there seems to be some laws of physics violated here.)

6

Oh yeah. Cut me some slack, it was after midnight.

7

Whoa…you want to hear something weird? According to the official Toho sites, this is actually pretty close to the weight of Godzilla (20,000 tons for the 50 meter tall Godzilla, and 60,000 tons for the 100 meter tall Godzilla). :eek: