Game Theory: The Deadly Physics of the Falcon Punch! (Super Smash Bros Captain Falcon)

your word is falcon punch falcon punch f-a-l-c-o-n-p-u-n-c-h falcon punch oh i'm sorry that's incorrect contestant number two same word falcon punch f-a-l-c-o-n space p-u-n-c-h falcon punch sorry that's still not right contestant number three your turn can you use it in a sentence please he was at 140 with three stock lives until i falcon punched his noob butt off the stage falcon punch f a l c o n p a a a a a w n c h falcon punch that is correct yes [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello internet welcome to game theory where i'm exercising three times a week to get rid of a little punch of my own today we're talking about nintendo's overlooked bounty hunter captain falcon you know come to think of it for a family-friendly brand a lot of nintendo's heroes quote-unquote are employed in the business of viciously hunting down other people for profit captain falcon and yeah i'm looking at you too samus for those of you who might not be aware captain falcon was originally intended to be the mascot of the super famicom but for whatever reason didn't make an appearance until the original f-zero as one of four playable racers even though it's not explicitly stated that he is the main character of the franchise putting him on the front of the box art and giving him his own eight-page comic in the manual wasn't exactly subtle he also has one of if not the best theme song i've ever heard for a video game character listen to this we don't deserve him we really don't but seriously how many of you have sat there watching around the smash brothers and asked yourselves how fast would i have to punch to create an explosive flaming falcon around my fist well if that person is you this episode is for all one of you if it's not well you should really pay more attention to what you click on youtube seriously the thumbnail in the title was all about like whoa look at captain falcon punching with fire what did you expect the episode to be about so anyway with our flaming fist of a question in mind i demand only one thing out of you theorists show me your moves and buckle up safety is never a joke let's go so first question what exactly is happening when he's punching where is that fire coming from well it's not exactly the air that's catching fire but the object in motion while oxygen is indeed part of the combustion triangle we see that we need two more things heat and fuel in the captain's case heat and fuel are actually one in the same his gloves so how do we catch something on fire using leather speed and oxygen sounds like a really lame band name can actually be explained pretty easily air is a fluid so when you move your hand through the air the molecules that make up the air will move around your hand but if you take something with a wide surface area say a fan you flap you'll notice that it requires a bit more work because now you have more drag or friction created by the wind resistance in most cases the wind will cause things to cool down that's why you can stick your head out the window of a moving car without fear of setting your face on fire but when you're going really fast then i mean really really fast there comes a point when the air just creates so much friction that the object in question begins to heat up take a shuttle coming back in from space upon re-entry we're always shown this red-hot fiery glow on the bottom of the spacecraft in this case the ship is moving so fast that the molecules don't have time to get out of the way and they start to compress thereby creating heat now there are a number of things different between captain falcon's fist and a shuttle upon re-entry but the principle stays the same he needs to move his fist so fast that the air in front of his fist becomes compressed and creates friction against his leather gloves when the friction creates enough heat to catch fire we have ourselves the iconic flaming fist so how fast is his fist moving in the smash games looks like we'll need the captain to quite literally show us his moves captain falcon is one of the eight original fighters in smash and he's been in every single game since with the switch being the most powerful system it's probably closest to how nintendo imagines the attack to be therefore the most accurate rendition to date but for the sake of crossing all the eyes and dotting all the t's let me explain why we're not incorporating the older games into our math on the n64 the flame actually pops out before the punch is executed we see the same thing happening in melee and in brawl on smash for the wii u impact delay is added and there's one additional captain falcon fist length added to the end and by the way can we just start using falcon fist lengths as our new standard unit of measurement screw metric and imperial we are all about the falcon system now even sounds cool anyways long story short in order to keep the frame rate at 60fps animations had to take shortcuts and since everything's happening so fast anyway we're given the illusion that the punch is causing the flaming falcon when in actuality it's popping up before he has his arm fully extended but then my friends we got smash ultimate theorists i kid you not i nearly cried from the sheer amount of joy that overwhelmed me when i looked at how unbelievably easy nintendo made it to gather data for this theory some theories require insane levels of creativity like when we had to use in-game compasses and trigonometry to measure the distance of a moon but with this everything is laid out just so perfectly training mode has a feature that allows you to break down actions frame by frame against a graph paper grid as the game itself perceives them this means no slowing down a video capture no interpretations this is in engine frame rate giving us 100 accuracy about how fast his fist is actually moving in frames per second we'll mark the frame in which his fist is fully cocked as frame one since we need to have a starting point frame two we see the fist across the body and by frame three we have the full extension giving us three frames of animation using simple division three frames out of 60 frames in a second gives us .05 seconds so now that we have ourselves the time the only thing we have to do is figure out how far his fist is actually traveling everything that i've come across online agrees that he has a massive 2.03 meters tall six foot eight inches using the grid in the background and this taunt we can see that he just about perfectly lines up with two large squares this lets us know that one large square is going to be equal to one meter so now let's jump back to the frame by frame breakdown of the punch from frame one to frame three we see that his fist is traveling three large squares and given one large square is equal to one meter we know that his fist is traveling 3 meters in the span of 0.05 seconds all that's left to do now is to throw it in the equation for speed and we get speed equals 3 meters over 0.05 seconds just do a bit of basic division here and we get 60 meters a second or 134.22 miles per hour that is a pretty impressive speed but to bring the air around his fist to body temperature 98.6 degrees fahrenheit in case you forgot he'd need to punch at least 408 miles an hour roughly 63 the speed of sound so what gives his fist isn't traveling fast enough to ignite a fire so where then is the fire coming from well when i was researching his punch i couldn't ignore the other attacks that ignite his enemies that just be bad practice your initial thought might be that all of his flame moves require some sort of fast motion which makes it seem like his speed is the thing creating the fire but here's the thing not all of them require motion to activate in fact there's one attack where he doesn't move at all his aerial special has him grabbing an opponent holding them close and then flipping off of them after an explosion no fast movement whatsoever but how at no point in f-zero does it show him having key powers or the ability to channel his energy into his limbs and in the anime because yes i watched the anime for this theory the only time a falcon punch is used is in a scene at the end when he defeats a black shadow so where then is all of this power coming from well shockingly the answer is from his belt no joke if you're like me and didn't know well just about anything about captain falcon prior to doing two weeks worth of research about his games in origin it may come as a surprise to you to learn that his championship racing belt actually houses the creators of the universe within it in the game f0gx captain falcon races his nemesis death born in h double hockey sticks wins and he goes to fuse his light belt with deathborne's dark belt to create the champion belt which apparently holds the creators of the universe for reasons these two universal forces are condensed in each of our belts didn't you know as such the belt houses enough energy to quote turn this whole galaxy into a pile of ashes in an instant turning things into ashes aka fire anyway this was my reaction to learning captain falcon's lore who knew that thanos level crises were involved in a high speed racing game also who knew cutscenes could come as cringey as this come off it you think you can beat me no way so suffice it to say it's probably not a big deal for captain falcon to make a few explosions here and there when he could destroy galaxies just by thinking about him so does that wrap us up because it leaves me in a strange position yes the champion's belt gives him incredible power and absolutely solves where the fire could be coming from the problem is he's not wearing the belt in the smash games which means that he's back to just making fire by needing to move super fast so let's look at the problem a different way how fast does he need to go in order to make his punches lit af well theorists according to information extrapolated from the journal of australian fire investigators leather has an ignition point of 212 celsius so all we have to do is get his fist to a speed that generates 212 degrees celsius or 413 degrees fahrenheit of friction created from compressed air should be easy enough right so let's set the stage gorgeous day not a cloud in the sky wario picks up a mr saturn and chucks it at an unsuspecting captain falcon because why wouldn't he use another living creature to attack another living creature normally captain falcon would ignore this kind of thing but wario has a bounty on his head before he can get away captain falcon his fist back gathers all of his energy into one explosive motion so here we go in order for this to work in .05 seconds captain falcon's fist would have to travel 615 meters per second or 1375 miles an hour to cover that distance of three meters in other words he's punching at a speed 2.8 times the speed of sound using the formula for kinetic energy we find out that this would produce 18 million 146 535 joules of energy which translates to four kilograms of tnt enough to blow up a car but that's not even the most impressive part anyone within 67 meters of that punch will be able to feel the force of it going through the ground standing three meters in front of his fist would kill you and if he's within one meter of a small structure he would demolish the building beyond repair you are so dead in so many ways that you don't even process the fact that there also happen to be flames around it yes it's a good thing they don't abide by actual physics here cause i'm pretty sure they'd nerf that faster than any futuristic sci-fi raving bounty hunter but hey speaking of things that hit different that's right map head is hip and cool and jiggy with it is that is that a phrase that kids use nowadays i've been listening to a lot of new music recently thanks in large part to our sponsor for today's episode raycon wireless earbuds now a problem that i always seem to have 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Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,783,488

Rating: 4.9386616 out of 5

Keywords: super smash bros, nintendo, captain falcon, falcon punch, ssb, super smash bros announcement, super smash, smash bros, smash bros minecraft, super smash bros minecraft, smash bros trailer, super smash bros trailer, smash bros new character, smash bros 2020, super smash bros 2020, smash bros falcon, smash bros steve, mario, nintendo switch, ssb switch, game theorists, game theory, matpat, game theory smash bros, super smash bros., smash bros ultimate, super smash bros ultimate

Id: WS6STkDu9ys

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Mat, 3 divided by .05 is 60. Not 16. You have the right speed in MPH, but your figures don’t line up.

[u/MoneyBoy39]

PAAAAWNCH

[u/RXA623]

This math confuses me. Or maybe it's the editing?

For starters - at 6:11, during the frame analysis, we get 3 frames with 3 meters traveled, which is summed up as 3/60th or 0.05s for the whole action. But the first frame is technically still, so shouldn't the movement only take the time between frames 1 and 2 plus 2 and 3, making it 2/60th or 0.0(3) seconds?

At 6:58 the calculator display shows "3/0.5" instead of "3/0.05".

Then there's the already mentioned "16" instead of "60" (which should actually be about 90 m/s.

At 10:45 615 m/s (or 1375 mph) is somehow translated to 2.8 times speed of sound, which is almost 775 mph off.

At 10:53 we get a formula for kinetic energy with some weird parentheses, which would just skew the math even more if applied to the numbers (squaring the velocity is one thing, but squaring the multiplication of mass and velocity just gets whack the further away from 1 mass is).

This calculation somehow leads to 18 146 535 Joules, which (if applied to a correct kinetic energy equation) solved for mass would give us ~96 kilograms, but that's a mass of what? The whole Falcon? Isn't his fist the main (or even "only" for the sake of simpler math) thing accelerating?

Can someone tell me where do I go wrong? Or is this episode just janky?