Pro/Bridges Bridge Building/Burning
 

Some people on chat have expressed interest in the West Point Bridge building contest at: http://bridgecontest.usma.edu (free download)

All you budding engineers out there can get your chance at greatness, and at least 15 minutes of fame by building the cheapest bridge that will support a fully loaded beer truck, which is on the way to restock your favorite watering hole.

well..

thats how I see it anyways.

Delusions aside, I have taken the liberty to start-up a ProCooling team.

If you would like to join, just send me a pm, or pop into chat and talk to me there.

All I ask is that you email me your submission so we can all work on tweaking the best designs together.

Our current best bridge was ranked 43rd overall at one time, so lets get tweaking/designing!

Sounds interesting!

I'd PM you, but you don't appear to have that feature enabled!

What price is concidered a "good" brigde? After filleling around with the program for about an hour, I have constructed several bridges, most of which I would think are fairly reasonable, but I have nothing to compare myself against.

Like my dad says: "Anyone can build a bridge, but only an Engineer can build a bridge that bairly stands up!"

Oops!
 

Sorry about the pm deal, try it now.

I would say if you can build a bridge that is lower than $26,000, you are in the top 50 of all bridges submitted.

It would be impossible to get the bridge under the starting cost which I think is 80,000something. The lowest cost bridge I have built is 126,000 and I am in 164th place out of 1,300 teams. Just to show how close all the bridges are torwards the top I lowered my bridge price 500 dollars and moved up 35 places.

Oops
 

add $100,000 to my figure

sorry

Heh, I got 151000, or around there somewheres, on my first try! Subsequent attempts have not been as sucessful.

Great!
 

That is a awesome bridge!

I am giving myself fits trying to get my current design down to below 126K

I finally got around to fiddling with it last night.

I started with a 500'000 bridge, and got it down quickly to 250'000. Much more tweaking to do.

If it's any help, I believe that the hollow beams are meant to be used where the load forces don't vary by much, and the solid beams are meant for wide changes in loads.

The cheapest startup cost I found is the one that's 4 meters below the maximum. No center pier, simple buttresses (not arches).

The carbon steel seems to be cheapest, but I'm still looking into that.

I see that it's possible to use very long beams (as long as the bridge itself), but I'm not sure that it's actually recorded that way.

The program will not let you build an incomplete bridge: all dotted lines must have a beam.

Given the cost of joints and beams, i don't think it'd be worthwile (or even possible) to add anything outside of a standard structure.

I was fiddling around last night, and built a few. a 138,000, a 141,000, and a 143,000. Not too bad ;)

Can someone post one of there better designs? Or at least a picture of what you have come across as working well. My lowest is ~155,000

I usualy do 20 M elivation, and use arches. every time I build a bridge other than an artch, it costs too much.

Try that!