Structural Stability Concerns
Discussions center on the mechanical strength, stability, and load-bearing capacity of innovative structures such as deployable bridges, towers, pyramids, and launch infrastructure, with skepticism about their ability to handle self-weight, tension, compression, earthquakes, and other stresses.
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Maybe too heavy to support its own weight?
The issue is probably the strength of the structures involved.
You have a honey-comb structure. Maybe put exactly fitting X-shaped stabilizers into them, before. For safety, and such :)
Mechanically stronger too! (it would be mostly under tension)
It feels like it would snap under its own weight well before that, though, unless it was suspended from multiple points.
Something doesn't add up to me.The structures here basically exploit moments in order to move them. But there's nothing giving them stability once they are 'static'. Surely the end piece of the bridge could just fall over if you stood on the edge of it?
Any idea why that is? I could imagine that its structure being incapable of handling the additional mass.
I'm not a real engineer, but most structures don't have the ability to flex like this tube could.
The design flaw was that they used a construction material strong in tension, but weak in compression. For a task that is almost entirely compression. On a vehicle that has no need for weight savings. Also in a couple photos looks like they have drilled and screwed a monitor mount directly into the pressure vessel, creating future failure points, rather than gluing a piece of plywood to the hull and screwing into that, which is standard procedure.
Couldn't you use flying buttresses to stabilize the inverted pyramid without lifting weight off the bottom brick?