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The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

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Re: The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

#51

I love the concept of massive buildings / structures in areas without such but I don’t think the city people would enjoy such buildings in actuality. The massive circular mine in Russia comes to mind (no pun intended).

Are you thinking of something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostankino_Tower ?

Reminiscent of the fernsehturm in berlin. [0]

It's kind of nice. You can usually keep track of where you are in Berlin, by triangulating around the tower, which is visible from a great distance and in one of the "centers" of Berlin [1].

If you're ever lost, you can just walk towards it, and eventually you'll end up in the one of metro's nexus at Alexanderplatz.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernsehturm_Berlin#/media/File...

[1]: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Re: The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

#52
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crashing into stuff is great fun and probably the first impulse of anyone booting up a flight simulation program (especially kids) -- so much so that flight simulation software was the target of a moral panic in 2001 after the September 11 attacks were conducted by crashing real jets into buildings. Some people began to think of flight sims as "terrorist training tools" and call for them to be banned. That's probably…

That's because a few of the terrorists actually used flight sim games to "train" prior to the hijackings. It wasn't completely unfounded hysteria.

Here's one of the news stories about it, mentioning a British government report into the intelligence they had around September 11 and usage of MS Flight Simulator. (Apologies for a Daily Mail link, it's the only one I could find with some quick Googling, but it was commonly reported at the time.)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-357006/The-flight-s...

Re: The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

#53
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ultimately failing to achieve anything other than even more instability in the middle east Hate to break it to you but this was the exact desired outcome.

>> ultimately failing to achieve anything other than even more instability in the middle east > Hate to break it to you but this was the exact desired outcome. That's not actually true. It doesn't seem like it was deeply cynical and nefarious like that; it was more of an overly-simplistic moral crusade: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/books/review/to-start-a-w... : > In “Plan of Attack,” Bob Woodward described Bus…

Oh sorry, I didn't realize Bush was under oath in his inaugural address.

Re: The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

#54
post #40
post #13

The article says it's impossibly narrow but is it really? It's only about 2.5 times taller than 432 Park Avenue in New York, but it also looks a little bit wider. A building like this would probably sway a bit more than usual at the top due to being so tall and having no other wind breakers around it, but I imagine it could be possible to build and live in safely.

It's taller (assuming just 10 feet per floor) than the Burg Khalifa. Super tall structures require a far larger base to support against winds, as you go up winds get faster and their leverage against the base increases.

[deleted]

Re: The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

#55
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 57th St Tower (still being built I think) is slightly taller and even skinnier - and just as ugly. Really I think it detracts from the beauty of Central Park.

The skyscrapers are what makes Central Park unique. There are millions of acres of parkland around the world. There is only one place where a park is surrounded by the most iconic skyline in the world. That contrast between the urban and the "natural" (there's little to no true wilderness in Central Park) is what makes it beautiful to me.

There's a new cluster of super-tall buildings going up around Central Park, though, that are changing the situation a bit. Housing for handfuls of billionaires shading the public park used by millions.

https://www.npr.org/2014/04/23/305643904/nyc-s-tall-skyscrap...

Re: The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

#56
post #45
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's taller (assuming just 10 feet per floor) than the Burg Khalifa. Super tall structures require a far larger base to support against winds, as you go up winds get faster and their leverage against the base increases.

10ft per floor would make it 2120ft or 646m tall. The Burj Khalifa is 829m tall.

I was looking at the top floor height by accident, the last 200 feet or so are a tower. It's a common cheat in the fight to be the world's tallest building, build pretty tall then slap a bunch of floors or a tower on top that people can't get into.

https://qz.com/122356/44-out-of-72-of-the-worlds-tallest-bui...

Re: The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

#57
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crashing into stuff is great fun and probably the first impulse of anyone booting up a flight simulation program (especially kids) -- so much so that flight simulation software was the target of a moral panic in 2001 after the September 11 attacks were conducted by crashing real jets into buildings. Some people began to think of flight sims as "terrorist training tools" and call for them to be banned. That's probably…

That's because a few of the terrorists actually used flight sim games to "train" prior to the hijackings. It wasn't completely unfounded hysteria.

True, but at the time, anyone who wanted to fly a plane (for recreation, commercially, etc.) would be likely to use a flight sim as an inexpensive starting point for training or practice, and that's not even counting the people who might never step into a cockpit, but enjoy flight sims regardless. Terrorism was a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the use cases for flight simulators.

And when this happened, the dust had just settled on a big nontroversy over the role of first-person shooters in real-life shootings -- arguably, a stronger case can be built for restrictions on those (for example, not allowing them to be sold to small children) than for restrictions on civilian flight sims.

Re: The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

#58
post #5

Is it morbid of me to wonder what happens if you fly a plane into such a building in Flight Simulator? It just… sticks out so much that crashing into it seems the obvious thing to try. (Judging by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhrGEdO88kE where someone eventually succeeds in landing on this building, it looks like if you fail the screen just goes black at the point of impact, so no interesting physics simulation.)

Crashing into stuff is great fun and probably the first impulse of anyone booting up a flight simulation program (especially kids) -- so much so that flight simulation software was the target of a moral panic in 2001 after the September 11 attacks were conducted by crashing real jets into buildings. Some people began to think of flight sims as "terrorist training tools" and call for them to be banned. That's probably…

It's also not that easy to do- you at least need a few hours playing a proper sim before you can reliably hit a building. Before 2006 (IIRC) there were was not much else to do but just fly around before they started doing tutorials and challenges and such. As a kid I would just do loops around airports until I learned to land semi reliably, fly into buildings, fly under bridges, try to fly and find recognizable things.

Flying under the BK bridge, and into the sears and twin towers was probably the biggest "activity" I did on flight sims.

Re: The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's gone quite that big, but this one's similarly tall and skinny, and ~100 stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue

The 57th St Tower (still being built I think) is slightly taller and even skinnier - and just as ugly. Really I think it detracts from the beauty of Central Park.

According to Wikipedia, "When completed, [111 West 57th Street] will be one of the tallest buildings in the United States, as well as the thinnest skyscraper in the world with a width-to-height ratio of about 1:23 or 1:24".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_West_57th_Street

I was in NYC in February and while both were quite impressive, I don't aesthetically like them either. But to me the favorites are the likes of the Woolworth, Flatiron, Chrysler... so I guess I'm a lost cause to contemporary architecture.

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