Final Post
At first, we chose the design because we wanted to stay simple while not just making a boxy-looking design. We wanted there to be a bit of a curve (although, it turned out to be more of a slant) to the truss structure. We think that choosing a somewhat-unique truss structure went reasonably well, although it definitely wasn't THE most "out there" design we could've come up with. As we moved from digital to real-life bridge building, we learned that it is NOT an exact science, at least not with the tools at our disposal. Most of the joints on our trusses did not meet up exactly how they were supposed to and we had to use many little squares in order to glue them all together at a single point. I think that this could have contributed to some of the weakness in the truss structure that we discovered existed. And that was something that I, for one, certainly noticed in most of the bridges, save a couple - that the brunt of the force was taken by the road bed, and most of the time that is where it failed - not because it was weak, but because that was the only thing really having much of an effect. Our design did not change much during the whole process aside from the aforementioned inaccuracies as a result of real-life cutting rather than computerized projection. The bridge failed, like most of the other bridges that I saw (as I mentioned), because the roadbed failed. Like I said, it seemed to me that this wasn't a result of the weakness of the roadbed, but rather that of the trusses, as they didn't seem to have much of an effect. One way to have changed our bridge would have been to make the trusses stronger. I am not sure if this would happen based on thickening them, as it didn't seem that they had much effect at all. It may have to do with how they were attached to the roadbed, and maybe an undertruss would have been more effective. Otherwise, we could have made the roadbed thicker. One other factor that could have affected our bridge's performance was pressure. because of the small openings in the truss, less of the holding block's surface area may have been on the roadbed, thus creating more pressure on that spot and a great
