It’s entirely possible that Avalugg is just an iceberg Pokémon and nothing else, and that the “aircraft carrier made of ice” thing is just a really dumb simile, of course, but personally I think this is much more interesting.Īnyway… so what? There’s a reference in the Pokédex to a cool story about a wacky military experiment, which I like, but where does that leave us? Avalugg, this reference seems to be telling us, is based on what is, essentially, a huge block of ice. It’s a cool little bit of military history. Eventually though, the Allies started to win the war without it, and thought it was better just to keep doing what they were doing rather than rely on this bizarre experimental material, so the idea’s never really been properly tested (people like the Mythbusters have tried small pykrete ships, which just don’t have the thermal mass to survive above the freezing point of water for long you need to think big with this stuff). Several promising tests were conducted and enthusiasm for the idea was high for a while. For obvious reasons, pykrete ships would have been most useful at fairly extreme latitudes, and a low surface area-to-volume ratio is also important (so the ship needs to be very large, preferably with an enclosed design). The material is – naturally – far, far cheaper than steel, as well as being naturally buoyant. The binding effect of the cellulose fibres in the wood makes the ice dramatically less brittle, comparable in strength to concrete, and because wood is a poor conductor of heat it also insulates the ice from temperature changes and makes it melt far more slowly than normal ice. Known as pykrete, from the name of the man who first suggested the idea, Geoffrey Pyke, it was a tough, relatively lightweight and extremely cheap construction material made by freezing water mixed with sawdust or wood pulp.

Well, to be more precise, due to the difficulties involved with working in ice it would have been more of a great big floating mass than a ‘ship’ in the traditional sense, and it wasn’t exactly ice, either they tried to develop a new composite material for the purpose. The Pokédex describes Avalugg, with a group of Bergmite huddled on its back, as resembling “an aircraft carrier made of ice.” This would strike me as a rather uninteresting and honestly pretty silly comparison (which, let’s be honest, would not be atypical for the Pokédex), if not for the fact that there was in fact a time during World War II when the Allied Powers actually tried to build an aircraft carrier made of ice. Bergmite and Avalugg… well, there’s something there… let’s take a look. For some reason Game Freak’s designers seem to have trouble getting past “this Pokémon has ice powers” as the central feature of what these Ice-types are and do.

Black and White produced three of them, and I condemned all three (for different reasons, of course) later on, Glaceon was partially responsible for my coming to the conclusion that we should just be done with Eeveelutions and move on to something else. Single-typed Ice Pokémon do not have a terribly good record on this blog.

Avalance iceberg pokemon