Quote:
Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed
The current Saddledome roof is literally supported on cables. A replacement roof would be supported on huge steel trusses - much much heavier.
Also, the way the roof is supported on cables exerts on force of the Saddledome walls - essentially pulling them towards the centre. That’s why the Saddledome walls lean outward - in part to counteract this force from the roof pulling them inward. This force is quite significant in a design like the Saddledome.
Now, if you replace the roof with a more standard arched roof, that inward force on the walls is gone, and most likely, the roof actually would exert force pushing the walls outward, instead of inward (All Trusses do this, and it needs to be taken into account by the structural engineering). There is a near zero chance that the walls could support a different roof for that reason alone.
In short, it doesn’t work.
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Yeah, this is great, I should have looked it up.
The saddledome is actually not simply outward leaning walls, it is a sphere, with a lower plane cutting the bottom off for the base and a hyperbolic paraboloid for the roof.
http://www.arcaro.org/tension/album/saddledome.htm
It’s a pretty awesome design.