Battle Pyramid - Blog Posts

There’s a small mistake about the Battle Pyramid - it has 5 rotors instead of four. The fifth one is hidden on the down side of the main hull of the Pyramid and can be observed during the crash scene.

Also, it isn't a dex entry, but I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are on possible flight systems for the airships we've seen in the series, in particular the Hikoukyuu, Megarig, and Battle Pyramid.

I’ll be honest–I’m not all that familiar with the anime. That being said, this question is so interesting, I just have to tackle it. I did, after all, run a whole week on Pokémon Flight–it only seems fair that I cover the man-made airships too.

The Hikoukyuu

The “Flying Palace” makes its debut in the second-ever pokémovie, Pokémon 2000. I had actually seen this one before I watched them for this post, although that was probably at least 8 years ago. The Flying Palace is the airship of the evil Lawrence, who seeks out to selfishly “collect” Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres.

The only flying mechanisms it seems to have are the tiny propellers attacked to the top and bottom of the craft–roughly 40 in total. It also has about 20 propellors along the sides.

Propellers work using Bernoulli’s Principle. Basically, they are shaped in a way that air must travel farther to go over them than under them, creating a pressure difference, and thus creating an upward force.

As far as I can tell, the propellers on the sides do absolutely nothing to lift it into the air. In my opinion, they are more likely wind turbines, harvesting the air rushing past and turning it into energy, to power the engines or supply electricity for Lawrence’s unecessarily large holograph machine.

You have to understand, this thing is massive. Quoting Bulbapedia, the Flying Palace is “about the size of a small city” and likely weighs at least 100,000 tons (200,000,000 lbs). To fly, the propellers must generate at minimum that much, or about 5 million pounds of lift per propellor.

Now, without even touching the math I can tell you without it that this is already incredibly ridiculous and there’s no way this thing could fly. Even if I considered the lessened gravity of the Pokémon Universe. It must use some other mechanism to fly.

I could say that it is actually in orbit above the pokémon planet, but we see multiple shots of the ship close to the ground, and it even crashes at the end of the movie.

I could say that it has some magnetic mechanism helping it out, but a field of that magnitude would serious mess up anyone near/inside the ship (since we are mostly made of water, a polar molecule), let alone destroy his equipment.

Yeah, no idea how this thing flies.

The Megarig

The Megarig (and its smaller sister ship, the Mecha Giratina) appear in Giratina and the Sky Warrior, piloted by the antagonist Zero and auto-piloted by the program called Infi.

The Megarig doesn’t fly, but rather appears to hover–more on that in a bit, but the more prominent feature about the MegaRig is that is possesses the ability to freely hop between the distortion realm and back through portals, much like Giratina.

To dimension-travel like it does, the Megarig must use some kind of wormhole. There are technically several different, totally acceptable mathematical models of wormholes. The problem is, in the realm of physics we currently understand, there is no form of energy good enough to keep the wormhole stable for more than a few microseconds.

There are several hypotheses that there is an energy–they call it “Exotic Matter”–that we don’t know of yet that could stabilize a wormhole. The Megarig is able to harness this, and create stable wormholes to jump between dimensions freely.

And, energy is energy. Because Exotic Energy does not interact with our bodies or any form of matter we currently have (like a magnetic field would), it makes a near perfect candidate for the Megarig’s hovering.

The Battle Pyramid

The Battle Frontier is great. The Battle Frontier in the anime is possibly even better. In the anime, the Battle Pyramid is a giant, flying hunk of metal that is constantly changing location. The location is only given to those who have defeated the other six challenges, and is the Frontier equivalent of beating the E4.

It flies through giant turbines attached to the pyramid. It reminds me a lot of Marvel’s helicarrier, recently in the Avengers films. Four massive turbines, one giant hunk of metal.

I’m going to assume that the Pyramid is about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza, so about 140 meters tall and 230 meters each way along the base. The Great Pyramid (made of limestone) has a mass of around six trillion (6,000,000,000) kg, which I will also assume for the battle pyramid (made of some kind of metal).

I’m following this process, which took data from Boeing to see how big the rotors would have to be for this thing to fly. Even for Earth’s gravity (g=9.8 m/s^2), These propellers need a radius of around 6,000 meters to fly. I don’t know about you, but those propellers don’t look thirty times longer than the base of the pyramid to me.

But okay, my estimate for the weight was pretty big. A flying pyramid is probably not made out of heavy limestone blocks, but more likely some light material, closer to aluminum or carbon fiber. So, let’s work backwards here. The radius of the propellors look about ¼ the length of the whole thing. Let’s call it 60 meters. With that, the propellers can generate as much as 550,000 kg of thrust. As long as the Battle Pyramid weighs less than that, it can fly.

If it was made from Carbon Fiber, which has a density of 1600 kg/m^3, it might be able to meet this criteria. But only might.

Thanks for your question!

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