11 ms·

The illustrated second story floor is a non-starter, to be certain. Could not crossbeams be manufactured in the same style? The article mentions hollow bricks w

• msandford 12y ago
  Maybe you could do that? I think you'd be much better off making "hardpoint" bricks where you can slot actual steel or concrete beams. Monolithic ones, not something that snaps/clips together. One of the reasons that beams work is that they're basically unbroken over their length. If you want to take two halves of beams and bolt that together into a single beam you're going to lose strength because the joints are often weaker than the unbroken beam. Introducing more joints reduces strength a bit further, but the first one is the killer. Ultimately you're much better off buying steel beams which are long enough (or too long and cutting them down) and placing them in whole. Or getting concrete beams pre-cast somewhere and shipped to the site. Yes they're not plug-n-play the way you'd like. But the extra materials that it would take to make the click together type of system work will substantially increase costs to the point where you can overrun the labor savings. The point of this system is that it's (theoretically) cheaper. It's kind of like saying "well we'll just index EVERYTHING on disk and that'll make all the queries fast!" Yeah that might work in some cases but at some point there are diminishing returns to further indexing and if you're in a write-heavy enough environment more indexes can actually slow things down. Engineering tradeoffs are everywhere.
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