It looks like a space elevator to me.
How tall can a Lego tower get?
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#22I'm a little confused. That's the weight that a single Lego brick can withstand, correct? So assuming you made a "tower" that was essentially a vertical line of 2x2 Lego bricks, it'd collapse after 3,591m. But that's not how we build towers. If you create a proper foundation with Lego bricks and distribute the weight evenly across them, and taper the tower as it goes up, am I wrong in assuming it could go a lot more…
Probably the proper translation out of geek-speak and into reality is that there is almost certainly no real structure that can be made purely out of Lego bricks that will cause the lower level to mechanically fail. (I'm hedging for safety. I really want to say there isn't one at all, but I've learned not to underestimate people's ingenuity. But let me point out by "real structure" I mean one that can be reasonably b…
A counterexample is if you build a huge non-inverted pyramid and then put an extra brick in the middle on the bottom. It wouldn't balance but you could easily imagine putting many tons of weight on that single brick sticking out on the bottom like this, thus technically causing the lowest level to mechanically fail. This is pedantic, but I think you asked for it:)
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#23Those resources could have been spent in something more useful.
Like an 80-hour workweek?
People need relaxation.
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#24Does anyone here have enough 2x2 bricks to try getting it several meters high?
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably the proper translation out of geek-speak and into reality is that there is almost certainly no real structure that can be made purely out of Lego bricks that will cause the lower level to mechanically fail. (I'm hedging for safety. I really want to say there isn't one at all, but I've learned not to underestimate people's ingenuity. But let me point out by "real structure" I mean one that can be reasonably b…
A counterexample is if you build a huge non-inverted pyramid and then put an extra brick in the middle on the bottom. It wouldn't balance but you could easily imagine putting many tons of weight on that single brick sticking out on the bottom like this, thus technically causing the lowest level to mechanically fail. This is pedantic, but I think you asked for it:)
Assuming the rest of the pyramid base doesn't end up flexing around that one brick (which would not be very tall) and distributing more of its weight on the ground...
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#26I'm a little confused. That's the weight that a single Lego brick can withstand, correct? So assuming you made a "tower" that was essentially a vertical line of 2x2 Lego bricks, it'd collapse after 3,591m. But that's not how we build towers. If you create a proper foundation with Lego bricks and distribute the weight evenly across them, and taper the tower as it goes up, am I wrong in assuming it could go a lot more…
Probably the proper translation out of geek-speak and into reality is that there is almost certainly no real structure that can be made purely out of Lego bricks that will cause the lower level to mechanically fail. (I'm hedging for safety. I really want to say there isn't one at all, but I've learned not to underestimate people's ingenuity. But let me point out by "real structure" I mean one that can be reasonably b…
Couldn't you use flying buttresses to stabilize the inverted pyramid without lifting weight off the bottom brick?
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#27I'm a little confused. That's the weight that a single Lego brick can withstand, correct? So assuming you made a "tower" that was essentially a vertical line of 2x2 Lego bricks, it'd collapse after 3,591m. But that's not how we build towers. If you create a proper foundation with Lego bricks and distribute the weight evenly across them, and taper the tower as it goes up, am I wrong in assuming it could go a lot more…
You are correct, 3.5 Km is the maximum height only when building towers with constant horizontal cross section.
It's not even that, it's the maximum height for a tower of 2x2 bricks.
The guy who did the assessment said that he felt other shaped/sized bricks would be more or less able to deal with the pressure.
All on the BBC More or Less Podcast.
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably the proper translation out of geek-speak and into reality is that there is almost certainly no real structure that can be made purely out of Lego bricks that will cause the lower level to mechanically fail. (I'm hedging for safety. I really want to say there isn't one at all, but I've learned not to underestimate people's ingenuity. But let me point out by "real structure" I mean one that can be reasonably b…
Couldn't you use flying buttresses to stabilize the inverted pyramid without lifting weight off the bottom brick?
Well, sure. You can do all sorts of things. But you're still looking at stacking rather a lot of bricks on top of one brick.
I mean, were it just a matter of "a brick can support 100 meters of brick on top of it", I'd say, sure, obviously we can do that in real life. It'll be hard, but we can probably do it. But you have to put another ~1.5 orders of magnitude of pressure on... this is going to be "decidedly nontrivial", to borrow the mathematician's phrase. I'm not ready to say it's absolutely impossible, but it's in the "I'll believe it when I see it" class. That is a lot of bricks you are trying to stack on with no other failures getting in you way, and when you're dealing with that sort of accumulation of brick, micrometer variations you'd normally never even consider worrying about start stacking up....
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#29Speaking as an ex-aerospace-stress analyst, I found the article lacking. 2x2 Lego bricks individually fail by plastic deformation. The weight of an unreasonably tall tower could cause it, but we know that such an unreasonably tall tower can't exist because of stability concerns. So: what actually limits the height of a Lego tower? Elastic buckling, or some other kind of buckling, or is it something weird because of the friction fit of Lego bumps in the bottom of the block above? That's where the really interesting stuff comes into play. The Prague tower in the picture appears to have a square cross section, but is it hollow, or solid? What special construction techniques did they use, or is it just a matter of craftsmanship and selecting exactly nominal bricks for construction?
Re: How tall can a Lego tower get?
#30Is anyone else excited by the fact that your average Lego brick can easily hold a human's weight? So if you built things out of LEGO you could, at least in theory, stand on them.
Unfortunately something else tends to go wrong first - so you can stand on a solid Lego structure fairly easily, but if you try to build a bridge it's very hard to keep it from failing when weighted in the middle because the weight tends to push the bricks apart from one another.
There's an episode of James May's Toy Stories on Lego, where he builds a house from it; it turns out to be pretty tricky to build the floor of the upper storey to support him.