Facts about Lucario!
Lucario's been through a lot in its history at Nintendo, and for us, it means that there are quite a few interesting tidbits of information we can derive from Lucario's experiences. Here's some things I've found while creepily stalking Lucario's every move.
What is the power of an Aura Sphere?
Lucario's signature move is the Aura Sphere, so something important we should know is how much destruction an Aura Sphere could create if an angry Lucario were to be released into our world.
Even though there have been plenty of Aura Sphere's in the anime, there's one problem that's present in almost all of the footage- just look:
...Yeah. There's too much ownage going on to actually try to gague how fast something is flying. However, thankfully, There's a scene in Lucario and the Mystery of Mew that affords us a "generous" 4 frames of decipherable footage. Here's the footage:
Thankfully, we'll only need to use two of these.
Anyways, let's start by taking some measurements of Houndoom. Bulbapedia says that Houndoom is 4 feet, 7 inches tall. We can take this information and find out the approximate hight of his torso, which turns out to be around 15 inches.
Now, since we can see Houndoom's torso pretty clearly in the footage, we'll use this information to see how far off the ground he's crouching, which turns out to be around 9 inches. It's quite a coincidence that Houndoom's torso in this shot is exactly the same size in the drawing in pixels.
Let's advance to the next frame.
So, we can see that in the span of one frame, Houndoom flew a distance of 51.5"-9", or 42.5 inches. This number by itself might not seem very large, but let's look at the info for the movie I'm playing:
This means that in the span of 1/60th of a second, or about 17 milliseconds, Houndoom flew over 3 feet up. This gives it a upward velocity of 212.5 feet per second, or about 145 miles per hour. But Houndoom isn't going straight up- it turns out he's flying at around a 60 degree angle towards us. Using triangles, we can see that he's actually flying at 245 feet per second, or roughly 165 miles per hour. Using the nice formula that says that Energy is equal to 1/2 mass times velocity squared, this gives us an energy of 194747 Joules for the attack.
What does this all mean?
Well, to put this into comparison with our explosives, it's suprisingly not a ton. It's about 46.5 grams of TNT, or about 1/5 of a stick of dynamite. However, there's a problem with comparing this to an explosive. Whereas a lot of an explosive's energy is wasted due from a shockwave going in every single direction, an Aura Sphere delivers its energy perfectly into his opponent. An explosion also generates a lot of heat energy- We don't know how much heat is given off by an Aura Sphere, if any at all! One Aura Sphere would also be enough energy to recharge a dead smartphone battery about 12 times! If (Arceus forbid) I were to really anger a Lucario, his Aura Sphere would send me (Around 130 lbs) flying at 128 miles per hour, which would not end well for me.
I also have to say- Lucario doesn't really look like he's trying that hard. He's not straining at all, and seems to just be doing this quickly in self-defense. Hopefully there'll be better footage where I can really gague the full power of an Aura Sphere.
What I've learned? Just don't make Lucario mad at you. You'll die.
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