Ranking Pokemon by how much I think they break physics- Part 2; 004-006 the Charmander Line
Ah, Charmander. My First Pokémon. Probably my favorite Pokémon if I allow my nostalgia to win out, & probably the most popular starter of the first generation of Pokémon .
Unfortunately it is the first Pokemon in this series that also breaks physics.
Fortunately it doesn't break physics in a terrible horrible world shattering way. It does so only in the, this Pokémon should either be constantly starving to death or consuming literally everything it can possible get it's adorable three toed claws on.
See Charmander as an orange little Salamander could exist, orange little salamanders do exist after-all. The problem, is of course, the tail.
See, as the first fire type Pokémon that you're going to come across in Kanto, Gamefreak and Nintendo decided in the design to make it very clear that this was the fire type Pokémon, by having it be y'know... on fire. As a consequence they gave it it's now iconic tail.
Which is why it breaks physics, if not at least evolutionary biology to exist.
it's fine, it definitely won't kill us all by violating the laws of thermodynamics... probably
Later generations are similar, but in essence. If Charmanders tail isn't burning brightly, it is in poor health.
Evolutionarily speaking it just takes too much energy to sustain that kind of chemical reaction for as a permanent basis to give any kind of advantage, and from the pokedex entries we know it *has* to be a constant chemical reaction.
So the only way that would make any sense to happen evolutionarily is as selection bias as some kind of mating display/preference.
Way back when on this blog I did an estimate of how many calories this creature would need to survive, and if it converted the food it ate to methane gas perfectly, it would have to eat 100 lbs of material every day, just to keep that tail burning. Which, in the Pokemon universe isn't a terrible amount, because a Caterpie weighs like 6 pounds subsisting on presumably nothing but leaves, but in our universe there just isn't a way to convert energy that efficiently.
Secondarily, and this is where it breaks physics is: how does this creature cool itself? It is constantly heating its backside with a nearby fire constantly radiating heat onto itself. (You'd think it'd be convection, but no because the heated air goes more or less straight up).
I apparently will have to rant about this almost as much as I rant about it in spaceship designs: YOU HAVE TO COOL THINGS DOWN. Things need to move heat away otherwise they die or melt, that's just how thermodynamics works. Salamanders cool themselves by moving to cool areas, like water or by going underground where it is cold and wet and DAMP.
But if Charmander can't go into cold, wet, or damp places preferring hot ones, it's going to bloody die of heat stroke. At least in later generations they changed it from if the tail went out the 'mon dies to the tail being just a sign of how well off the pokemon is doing.
Of course Charmeleon & Charizard also have these problems, and would absolutely die of heat stroke from being unable to cool themselves from their own tails being literal fires they have to carry around, but let's see what other problems they might have from their dex entries.
Well, it's not a new problem, it's the same problem but, it's just actually worse. It notes that when it fights it dramatically heats up the air around it. Which means, now it cannot even rely on convection to maybe [but not actually] cool it down. So it gets to die of heat exhaustion even faster because it moves around more, ignites its tail hotter, and fights more.
I've heard of burning the candle at both ends but this is ridiculous [insert laugh track].
Alright, both Charmander and Charmeleon are dead because of heat exhaustion and physics. Is there any chance that Charizard can bring this back around?
No, absolutely not. It... It... got so much worse.
In fact, the Emerald description and the Stadium description are a terrifying concept. 10,000 tons is... that's too much to melt quickly. Let's say quickly is within 15 minutes, that is a fairly decent amount of time, but I would still say that could be described as "quickly". I'm going to assume this is a short ton to give the least amount of material that Charizard could be melting here so that's 2000 lbs. for 1 short ton. So 2,000*10,000 =20,000,000 lbs or 9071847.4 kg of ice.
As before I'm assuming this is occurring over the course of 15 minutes. That's 15*60= 900 seconds.
I can calculate the amount of energy input into the ice (with a rough estimate at least) using: Q=mCδT. We know the mass, I'm going to assume this occurs from 0 celcius to just 1 celcius, for the absolute minimum amount of energy that Charizard is imputting into this system since Charizard technically doesn't have to heat the water to anything that is 'not above freezing', & C is just the specific heat for ice, which is 2090 Kj/kg*k
That is 9071847.4(2090)(1) = 18,960,161,066 kJ delivered in 900 seconds, & if we assume an even rate of distribution of that energy that would be ~21,066,845.62 Kj/s
That is the equivalent of 10 pounds (~4.5 kg) of TNT.
That is too much for a living creature to just be able to expel at anytime, and again, it has to get reflected back at itself and absorb some of that heat because heat doesn't go in a linear direction.
And the implication of Emerald saying it can melt any material is that it can achieve absolute hot, a concept meaning that no temperature can exceed that point, because physics actually stops working as we understand it at that point. Like, that's big bang levels of energy right there.
So in summary: 9/10 Should be dead from Heat Exhaustion, and is a walking sack of explosive energy, and if emerald is to believed 10/10 can accidentally makes big bangs
