Which Starter Pokémon Is the Most Powerful?

The debate among Pokemon fans choosing between Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur has been a long one, but with their evolved forms, does science have a definitive answer? Kyle has the poke-battle on this week's Because Science!

Because Science every Thursday.

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[becausescience]

Hey trainers, thanks for watching! *For everyone complaining about the use of the Pokédex, go ahead and check the Gen 1 entries* and you’ll see why I did what I did. I'll see you in Footnotes if you have more questions! -- kH

[PushoverMediaCritic]

The Pokedex also says that Blastoise can shoot water that can "pierce concrete walls", "punch through thick steel", and has "more force than a fire hose". It also says that Mega Blastoise's big water cannon is "as powerful as a tank gun".

[KellinKingdom]

The fact that Blastoise has rocket cannons on its shell that fire jets of water capable of PUNCHING HOLES THROUGH THICK STEEL, according to the pokedex from silver version, is absolutely terrifying. The water jet cutter we had at my engineering college was about 600 MPa, which is an insane amount of pressure. I think you may be underestimating Blastoise's power...

[owendavies]

that burn when he said

“MCU Vs ...I forget the other one.”

[CruaverVoidDrake]

Minor problem: "The rocket cannons on its shell fire jets of water capable of punching holes through thick steel."
However we also need to account for this: "It deliberately makes itself heavy so it can withstand the recoil of the water jets it fires."
Having had the original pokemon book I was also aware of this lore: "They can pump out enough water to fill 3 Olympic swimming pools within one minute"
Thus in lore Blastoise can fire out 7, 500, 000 liters of water in 1 minute.
125, 000 liters per second though a 0.16 meter hole would be moving at 6.217 km per second.
Now let's multiply that by the mass of 7, 500, 000 kg of water
That puts us at 144, 938, 993, 344, 907 Joules of energy.
That would put the PSI at around 1, 051, 080, 911, 753.
For reference water pressure in a water jet used for cutting steel is 20k-55k PSI.

So here we have a problem, Blastoise is both shooting out far more water than it should have, and with enough force that it should likely fly off into space at its mass. Once again this shows that the pokedex entries were made up without really doing the math behind their boosts.

[roachdoggjr]

*makes pokemon video*

"This video is sponsored by Fallout 76"

[Zerum]

Forget about starters
Alakazam has an IQ of 5000, if you get a full team of them they can probably create a stable antimatter cannon if you need raw jules to blow up stuff

[rebeccabasta]

Kyle:MCU verse... forgot the other one.
Me: oh i see what u did there. Clever

[darksskull]

Fallout supporting a pokemon video. Lel

[CDKing_]

4:20 Anybody else hear "All of the water *shat* out"?

[dcoffron]

I gotta represent my fellow venusaur lovers out there. While Solar Beam is often considered to be the quintessential move for a venusaur because of the anime, venusaurs also learn a powerful physical attack called Petal Blizzard. This moves stirs up petals to absurd speeds to deal damage to opponents. So to find out energy we need to know just how fast the petals are moving.

There is much less to go on with this move as we dont know exactly what it is capable of damaging, but we can get a rough estimate based on its Base Power of 90, which is equivalent to the move Thunderbolt. While the Thunderbolt attack is not literally as powerful as lightning (the power depends on the pokemon that uses it), but it does give us an interesting quality. Thunder Bolt can temporarily paralyze foes. One such real world case involved a man with a severe injury resulting from around 11, 000 volts from a high-tension cable. This was enough to result in bulbar palsy, which in some cases includes paralysis (so there is that 10% probability).

So, we can assume that a Thunderbolt move carries a minimum of 11, 000 V. To convert that to energy, we need to know the electrical charge (Q). The cables discussed in the case study mentioned earlier can carry up to 2, 000 amps (a good estimate), and electrical charge is measured in amps x time. If we assume an attack time of around one-tenth of a second (we've seen pokemon who can discharge a Thunder Bolt for much longer), we get the base energy level of Thunderbolt as:

J = V x C = V x A x t = 11, 000 x 2, 000 x 0.1 = 2.2 million joules

But that's just the energy of the attack (and by comparison the energy of the Petal Blizzard). Now, the Petal Blizzard is spread out among multiple petals, so we have to know how many petals a venusaur is working with. The flower on venusaur's back has 5 petals and closely resembles the Rafflesia flower (this will be important later). So we divide the 2, 200, 000 Joules by 5 and get 440, 000 Joules. That isn't anywhere close to the energy of Charizard's boulder-melting flamethrower, but that is just the energy of the petals. Venusaur has to get those petals up to that velocity and keep them there which takes a lot more work. So how fast are the petals moving?

Well, kinetic energy is calculated as the mass of a moving object times its velocity squared. The petals of the Rafflesia arnoldii (the largest of the genus) weigh-in at about 1 kg with a length of around one-third of a meter. A venusaur's petals are even longer at about one-third of a venusaur's height or 0.66 meters. With a petal twice the size, the mass is 4 times due to the square-cube law, making 4 kg. Plug that into our Energy equation and we get:

J = (1/2) x m x v^2 -> v = sqrt(2J / m) = sqrt(4.4 million / 4) = sqrt(1.1 million) = 1, 050 meters per second.

That is around Mach 3, or 3-times the speed of sound. Accelerating something to that speed is very difficult, especially when it is something like a petal with a lot of surface area per unit of mass. Have you ever tried throwing a leaf only to find that it almost immediately comes to a halt? Air resistance would try to do the same thing to the petals in the Petal Blizzard but a venusaur is able to overcome that. Fluid dynamics (especially air resistance, or drag, calculations) become very complicated, so let's work through it step by step.

Drag = drag coefficient (Cd) x 0.5 x air density (ρ) x velocity squared (v^2) x surface area (A)

The drag coefficient is all but impossible to calculate except experimentally. Petals likely lie around the same range as a frisbee with a moderately high angle of attack so I'll use a Cd of 0.8. Air density at sea level is 1.225 kg/m^3. The surface area of one of a venusaur's triangular petals is...

(1/2) x base x height = (1/2) x 0.33 m x 0.66 m = 0.11 m^2

...times 2 since it has two faces. Plugging all these numbers in we get:

Drag = 0.8 x 0.5 x 1.225 x (1, 050)^2 x 0.22 = 118, 849 N

The amount of force acting on the petals at these speeds is absurdly high. They are somewhere in the ballpark of the stopping forces of a colliding car hitting a stationary barrier at at highway speeds. This type of force must all be EXCEEDED by the venusaur to accelerate the petals to these speeds and keep them there. There are some simple equations to convert force to work and then work to power.

Work = Force x Displacement x Cosine(theta)

The displacement in this case is the circular motion of the Petal Blizzard. Let's call it one revolution at around 1 body height away (some very conservative estimates judgng by some of the potential shown in the anime). This means that over the course of the move, the Work a venusaur exerts is (work in this case is along the displacement trajectory, so theta is 0 degrees):

Work = 118, 849 N x 2 x pi x 2 meters x cos(0) = 1.5 million Joules.

Now Work is simply the change in Kinetic Energy according to smart boy Isaac Newton's Second Law of Motion.
So we know that during Petal Blizzard, a venusaur can change the energy of each of 5 petals by (actually more since it has to bring them up to those speeds, not just keep them there) 1.5 million Joules or....

(TL;DR) 7.5 million Joules all together for a venusaur's Petal Blizzard. Not quite as high as a charizard's flamethrower (using your assumptions), but much better than the meager Solar Beam (and definitely beats out Blastoise). Physical venusaurs for the win!

References

[andrewpitzen]

So you can't look at just one of the pokemon's pokedex entries without looking at all of them. Blastoise can allegedly punch holes through 'thick' steel. Quick research shows that punching a one inch hole, much smaller than the diameter we assumed for the pumps, through a sheet of steel just an inch thick is around 65 TONS of pressure. This number simply goes up as the thickness of the steel and the diameter of the hole increase, however I didn't do too much research on larger numbers. Using 65 tons as a nice baseline, if we convert to joules, we get 25, 380, 912, which is MUCH higher than you calculated.
I will do a bit more research and update this comment.

Edit:
I found a rough calculator for the pressure required to much a hole into steel. The calculator I found has a simple formula of Pi x Diameter of the hole x Steel Thickness x 25, all lengths being in inches. Plugging our numbers of about a 6 inch diameter, calculated from the 0.16m cannon diameter, and a guestimate of 2 inches for the thickness of the steel, we get 1319.47 tons of pressure. Converting this to joules gets us about 577, 279, 082 joules. This number is still quite a large amount lower than Charizard's energy output, but at least he puts up a fighting chance.

Edit2:
This also doesn't even factor in the length of time of the attack, as punching through steel like that takes a VERY short amount of time.

Edit3:
Also two cannons... 1, 154, 558, 164 joules in that short amount of time.

[lorddenithal]

"Mcu vs... the other one i can't remember" hahaha shots fired!!!

[CodeWookiee]

My son is going to love this episode! Thanks for doing a Pokemon-based episode. But you left me with a couple of questions on this one:

(1) On Blastoise, you mentioned using the full volume of Blastoise as the maximum amount of water that could be pumped out. And then at the end, you "doubled" the energy because there were two cannons. Did you halve the amount of water as well? He couldn't pump out the full volume for both cannons.

(2) While I'm not disappointed that Charizard got the win, I was a little confused that you didn't consider any sort of time component when calculating his attack, even though it played a large part in the calculation for the other Pokemon's attacks. While the pokedex does say that he can melt a boulder, it doesn't say how long it would take. Taking into account general physics, it wouldn't be feasible to melt the boulder instantly, due to thermal gradients, so it would take some amount of time, and most likely a long time. I don't think it would be amiss to suggest that it would take something as high as a minute to fully melt a 1.7 meter boulder as a minimum. Using the same 5 seconds attack time as Blastoise, you could easily calculate the attack as being 1/12th of the 9 Billion Joules, which works out to 750 million (which is still dominating the contest).

[ProtoMario]

I dunno man, it probably take Charizard a HOT minute to melt a Golem while being hit with rock slide....

[calculovo]

6:40 OBJECTION! Everyone knows that the pokédex entries are ridiculous

[ssrobs]

I don't thinks thats very fair. Pokedex entries are known to be unreliable and or exaggerations...
For example Blastoise entries state:
"They can shoot bullets of water with enough accuracy to strike empty cans from a distance of over 160 feet."
"It has spouts extending from its shell at the top. They spray water like cannons, hard enough to pierce concrete walls."
"The rocket cannons on its shell fire jets of water capable of punching holes through thick steel."
It may result in similar answers but it doenst seem right to give Charazard a different metric for how you determine that energy. All Dex entires should be accounted for or none.

[JudoP_slinging]

Alakazam canonically has an IQ of 5000. No other pokemon would stand a chance. Change my mind.

[RedmoonStudiosYT]

My problem is that you use a Pokédex entry for charizard but not blastoise or venasaur. Further, how about the fact that blastoise literally creates water, I’m assuming by an internal conversion process from energy to mass. Or when we see that charizards flames are not hot enough to burn away all of blastoise water. Plus if charizard burned that hot then wouldn’t venusaur just literally be ignited by the ambient heat.

[AndyJP]

I would also choose the dragon over a turtle and salad frog in the illegal animal fighting tournament