Efficiencies

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smartkid222
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Re: Efficiencies

Post by smartkid222 »

They changed the scoring this year so it's [load supported]^2/[mass of tower].

You can bring the topic back up if you'd like.
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Re: Efficiencies

Post by paleonaps »

Why did they do that?
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Re: Efficiencies

Post by zyzzyva980 »

They apparently wanted it to count more for being able to hold all the weight... I don't know, I'm not big on building events.
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Re: Efficiencies

Post by smartkid222 »

to place a greater emphasis on the weight held.
so the towers are designed to hold closer to the 15kg max because in real life bridges and towers are built to not fail and they didn't want to bring back the tier 1/ tier 2 holds/breaks rule.
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Re: Efficiencies

Post by lllazar »

To put emphasis on weight held pretty much - and smartkid i suppose 15.5 was kind of an exaggeration. But yes, that does make more sense.
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Re: Efficiencies

Post by andrewwski »

smartkid222 wrote:so the towers are designed to hold closer to the 15kg max because in real life bridges and towers are built to not fail and they didn't want to bring back the tier 1/ tier 2 holds/breaks rule.
Not to rehash this, but if that was their thinking...it still makes no sense. These events have very little relation to real life...if they wanted to emphasize real world principles, there's a lot of other things they could do other than change the scoring that would be more effective.
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Re: Efficiencies

Post by old »

I think we miss the point if we try to figure out real world connections to these building events. Tower building is the name of the event but it may as well have been called building a structure out of only wood and glue, that meet certain criteria listed in the rule book, that is rated based on a formula. I personally cannot imagine a realistic scenario in which anyone would build a scaled up version of any of the towers that have been or will be built for SO. Nobody builds commercial towers out of wood anymore. I can't think of a real tower that isn't attached the the ground. I can't think of a tower that doesn't have to withstand substantial side loads (wind). None of this is meant to argue that this event isn't worthwhile because I think that the various SO structure building events are great learning tools. It's just that I believe it is a mistake to think of these events as being in any way similar to designing real world structures of the same name (tower, bridge, beam, etc.).

What this and many other SO building events do is to require the builder to go through the design process and find a way to score the highest possible with the resources available. I rate these building events not on their connection to the real world but on the objectivity and repeatability of the scoring. In other words, I would consider the event to be a good one by how consistently a particular device would score if it was tested many times. I realize that there may be no practical way to test a particular device many times, due to the destructive nature of the testing, or fatigue or other damage. But Tower building I believe is likely to have a winner who actually built the device that should have scored best, with little luck (good statistical significance) involved. Some events like the notorious balloon race, and to a somewhat lesser extent bottle rocket, or Storm the Castle or Trajectory done outdoors, have a huge amount or random chance. I believe that the competitor who won Trajectory 2 years in a row at Nationals (I think he got second last year) didn't ever win his regional SO (done outdoors in the wind).

My point here is that as a competitor you should forget about what the event is called, forget about how an engineering team would design a device of the same name in the real world, and just carefully read the rules and build a device that is likely to score as high as possible within those rules and your resources. If you do a good job you will learn a great deal about designing and building things.
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Re: Efficiencies

Post by lllazar »

old wrote:I think we miss the point if we try to figure out real world connections to these building events. Tower building is the name of the event but it may as well have been called building a structure out of only wood and glue, that meet certain criteria listed in the rule book, that is rated based on a formula. I personally cannot imagine a realistic scenario in which anyone would build a scaled up version of any of the towers that have been or will be built for SO. Nobody builds commercial towers out of wood anymore. I can't think of a real tower that isn't attached the the ground. I can't think of a tower that doesn't have to withstand substantial side loads (wind). None of this is meant to argue that this event isn't worthwhile because I think that the various SO structure building events are great learning tools. It's just that I believe it is a mistake to think of these events as being in any way similar to designing real world structures of the same name (tower, bridge, beam, etc.).

What this and many other SO building events do is to require the builder to go through the design process and find a way to score the highest possible with the resources available. I rate these building events not on their connection to the real world but on the objectivity and repeatability of the scoring. In other words, I would consider the event to be a good one by how consistently a particular device would score if it was tested many times. I realize that there may be no practical way to test a particular device many times, due to the destructive nature of the testing, or fatigue or other damage. But Tower building I believe is likely to have a winner who actually built the device that should have scored best, with little luck (good statistical significance) involved. Some events like the notorious balloon race, and to a somewhat lesser extent bottle rocket, or Storm the Castle or Trajectory done outdoors, have a huge amount or random chance. I believe that the competitor who won Trajectory 2 years in a row at Nationals (I think he got second last year) didn't ever win his regional SO (done outdoors in the wind).

My point here is that as a competitor you should forget about what the event is called, forget about how an engineering team would design a device of the same name in the real world, and just carefully read the rules and build a device that is likely to score as high as possible within those rules and your resources. If you do a good job you will learn a great deal about designing and building things.
Wow now those are some strange occurrences(the traj ones).
2011 Season Events~

Fossils (Regionals ~1st) (State ~6th)
Towers (Regionals ~1st) (State ~3rd)
Helicopter (Regionals -3rd gahhh) (State ~5th)
Wind Power (Regionals ~1st) (State ~3rd TIERED!)

Hooray for getting everything i wanted?
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Re: Efficiencies

Post by paleonaps »

Old has a point. When I was building my first bridge two years ago, a kid in my technology class (the teacher was the coach so he let me build it during class time) came up to me and said "[paleonaps], what is the point of this bridge? How would cars get up onto the roadway?" The balsa events should not be done with a real world mindset, aside from building techniques such as miters, fishplates, and trusses.
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Re: Efficiencies

Post by Aia »

AlphaTauri wrote:Just [load supported]^2/[mass of tower]. Personally, I think the scoring system is a little weird, but I do like that they're trying to put a little more emphasis on holding more weight.
Wow, this is a very new system. I just looked at the tower information for this year, and I'm very surprised.
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