Assume the Kaiju is 200 feet tall and weighs 4,000 tonnes. The building is 180 feet tall and pretty much your average flat building. Could most buildings carry that weight on top or crawling up the side of them? Or would it simply collapse?
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$\begingroup$ Aside the kaiju this is a pure engineering question: can the roof of most building carry 4000 tonnes? $\endgroup$– L.Dutch ♦Jul 1, 2020 at 17:05
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$\begingroup$ The building is 180 feet tall, the kaiju is 200 feet tall. It doesn't crawl up the side...given that the kaiju is solid and the building is mainly air, I think we can guess what's going to happen. $\endgroup$– David HamblingJul 1, 2020 at 17:05
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4$\begingroup$ @DavidHambling I am taller and heavier than the chair I'm sitting on, and it puts mostly air between me and the ground, yet it works, so I think there's at least some precedent that the building might be able to handle the weight. $\endgroup$– workerjoeJul 1, 2020 at 17:26
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$\begingroup$ Are you able to harness whatever physics-defying effect lets you have 200-foot-tall kaiju for building buildings, or not? $\endgroup$– CadenceJul 1, 2020 at 18:06
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$\begingroup$ @WorkerJoe point taken but there's a scaling effect: the building is (say) 100 time bigger, so has 10,000 times as much supporting cross-section but has to support 1,000,000 times the weight -- it gets harder as you get bigger. $\endgroup$– David HamblingJul 2, 2020 at 10:07
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1 Answer
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The answer is no, for one simple reason: contact points. Could I build a building that could support the weight of 3000-4000 medium sized cars? Yes, probably. Parking garages exist. But if I put all the cars in a huge pile in the corner of one level, they would instantly break through the floor. As soon as the kaiyu would grab the side of the building anywhere and try to pull itself up, they would take a huge chunk out of the building instead.
Most buildings are constructed to spread out the weight as much as possible, to get the most value out of as little (cheap) material as possible. Upset that balance, and you'll have a bad time.
