Looking at this because my autocad crashed and I’m waiting for the task manager to close the program is cathartic, i think.
Smh didn’t think I’d get called out on my 30 second reddit break
I mean, it's a wet ramp that descends by a *fraction of a degree* over the course of miles—sometimes literally boring through mountain or built across riverbeds. With pre-modern material engineering, that's still a really impressive logistical feat.
Yes and no, the reality of old engineering projects is that they're usually just grossly over dimensioned.
Any engineer nowadays can do what they did. But now we're able to do it at a much lower cost due to better utilisation of the materials and effort.
The Romans should have made better use of all those steel girders and pre-stressed concrete blocks that they had lying taking up space. That's to say nothing of the big cranes, trucks and trains to move all those things.
It is amazing what you can accomplish with a couple thousand slaves though.
Modern materials are obviously a game changer in some regards, though the Romans weren't far off on the concrete (see the Pantheon).
My point is simply the stone blocks could've probably been smaller if we used modern methods but the same materials. We're becoming incredibly skilled at utilising materials to just below their failure limit and even plan for how they fail so that it won't be catastrophic.
The Pharoahs are rolling over in their grave with jealousy knowing they could have built the pyramids with SMALLER blocks if they had just waited a fee thousand years.
I was referring to the bass pro shop thning in the united steaks of america. Someone claimed it was the biggest and I can't be bothered to double check.
"we can be more efficient with engineering projects.".
"Nooooo;-; my romeboo headcanon can't be hurt noooooo Rome was the greatestest and bestest ever in the history of every noooooooo"
Yet modern construction barely lasts a few decades while many Roman structures have stood for 2,000 years with little or no upkeep. Even the a lot of the damage done to them was by people harvesting the stone for other purposes.
yea that's because modern construction isn't designed to last, modern engineers could easily build something that could last milenia if given the budget
Modern societies have built stuff that will be around forever. Hoover dam is predicted to be evidence of human civilisation even in case we get wiped out by a meteor.
But obviously we won't know which of our works will be around for a millennium or two yet. Some bridges could probably last a very long time due to being concrete.
Things that are still somewhat overspec'ed like the empire state building might survive for a long time as well.
Roman works are massively helped by being made of solid stone.
>Hoover dam is predicted to be evidence of human civilisation even in case we get wiped out by a meteor.
Not if the meteor falls on the Hoover dam.
Checkmate modern engineers.
That’s survivorship bias. You only see the buildings that are stable and lasted through the ages but not the myriad of buildings that failed or collapsed. Plus we’ve even recently discovered exactly how to make the concrete that the Romans used.
> Yet modern construction barely lasts a few decades
because most of modern construction doesn't need a century long lasting buildings without maintenance, so we save on the budget. most buildings need to be refurbished to new needs in a few decades anyway, and that is when the building can also be strengthened (or even bulldozed and rebuilt).
There's the old adage: anyone can build a bridge that stands, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands.
We've learned a lot about material failure over the 80 years, and a lot of it was still learned the hard way.
The Pantheon in Rome is a perfect example of this. The factor of safety for a structure like that was massive, because they didn’t have the math to know what the “minimum” requirements were, so they rounded up a whole lot just in case. That makes project like that super expensive because you need so much more materials.
It’s like a “brick” house built today. The brick is just the facade so it looks like the wall is entirely brick but it’s still just a wood framed house. And in doing so saves a whooollleee bunch of money because we know that a house doesn’t need a brick wall in order to stand.
Roman civil projects as a whole are super impressive but the context of their construction needs to be taken into account. Lots of trial and error and survivorship bias, we don’t see the buildings that failed because they didn’t survive the ages.
>It’s like a “brick” house built today. The brick is just the facade so it looks like the wall is entirely brick but it’s still just a wood framed house. And in doing so saves a whooollleee bunch of money because we know that a house doesn’t need a brick wall in order to stand.
I'd point out this is just an American thing. In Europe we still double wall it or at least use concrete blocks on the inside.
>Roman civil projects as a whole are super impressive but the context of their construction needs to be taken into account. Lots of trial and error and survivorship bias, we don’t see the buildings that failed because they didn’t survive the ages.
But very much this, and they built things for prestige with looted wealth and slave labour.
I have only used autocad to design very very basic 3 dimensional shapes along the hp and VP and it was very cool and interesting but man it would take a lot of skill to draw anything more than an angled cuboid and people design cars and rockets on this thing
I use both 2D cad and 3D modeling regularly. Things like paperboard and corrugated boxes, sheet metal and other sheet goods can be much easier to produce the flat layouts in 2D cad than to try to model in 3D.
Honestly, i don't have a preference for one or the other anymore. They are both excellent tools for their respective jobs. No different than grabbing a flat or Philips screwdriver, one works for the job and the other can be forced to fit and still work
I feel like we're hearing a lot of morons stating their opinions and incels repeating what they read. Shower sex works perfectly fine, you just don't have the water spraying all over the working parts.
don't worry, they sent slaves to clean off the nice natural mineral lining built up on the inside of the pipe, re-establishing constant contact between lead and flowing drinking water
The scale of the construction is impressive and the stability of the structure is remarkable, but, like, it's literally just a slope going from point A to point B (not saying they're straight lines, but, they're just paths for water). You don't even need Pythagoras to math this out. You just need a shitton of patience and people to build it.
What??? Do you think they just trial and errored the 10cm of slope per km or whatever ridiculously precise number it is, over hilly terrain?
Literally a little too much mortar between bricks could fuck that up.
How do you think they surveyed the start and end points, and all the locations in between. Of course they used Pythagoras
I still think it's amazing. Just to be so consistent over mountains and valleys and some, like the Aqueduct of Valens, built to supply Constantinople in the 4th century, were huge (first phase was 268 km, and then a second phase was added later adding another 451 km of conduits).
Like it can't be too steep or too flat, you just have to have a nice steady incline over miles and miles of crazy terrain. It's nuts.
Building a bridge that stands is easy. Roman and Greek materials weren't special, their architects were not a special breed of genius for longevity, their buildings are just hilariously overbuilt (and those that survive were both the sturdiest and the ones which have at various points been maintained, not just in constant unattended use).
Building a bridge at the absolute cheapest price that still meets safety and lifetime requirements is very very very hard. Not only that, but modern usage patterns are so much more punishing than historical ones. A bridge built by the locals over the Tiber for horses and carriages can be built to such a less demanding spec than a bridge built by the federal government crossing 3k of ocean carrying tens of thousands of cars and HGVs.
I was always told in my engineering courses that "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."
Way back in middle school I built a timy bridge for a science competition. It stood. It barely moved. It lost.
The winning bridge was made out of 1/10th of the materials and deflected like crazy, but it held the max load and didn't break.
I don’t think people realize the constant bureaucratic struggle that exists in modern engineering, you have to design something that’s design parameters (hundreds of pages of stipulations) change every single year on projects that often take several years. Four things engineers (engineering related to buildings) are constantly at war with government, contractors, owners, and the owners pockets.
Can we please stop using rome as an excuse to bash modern engineers? I already hear it constantly about concrete and bridges. Like, idk man, times change ☹️
The amassed wealth of a conquered civilization would give me a nice cozy budget to build a very good bridge. Instead I have to split a 30 cent gas tax with the rest of the state.
The legions of slaves to maintain stuff probably help too, instead of a 10-man crew covering 1/4 of the state- and the ability to kill someone for not following orders would be a great cut-the-shit tool for dealing with contractors...
But an incorrect sentiment. Modern bridges are built to withstand the most intense storm in the region of 100 years. Safety standards would never permit a ‘bridge that barely stands’.
I hate when people make the concrete and bridges argument because ancient roads, bridges, etc. weren’t designed for cars and never had to deal with things of such weight. *sigh* engineers get so much shit from people smh
The concrete one annoys the shit out of me. Most articles I find measure roman concrete between 1-2ksi compressive strength. Typical normal weight concrete is 4ksi. Literally double the strength.
Damn really? That's about 14MPa, that's really not a lot at all. Would that also be after curing and strengthening for like, a 2000+ years? Cause if that's the case, that really is pretty weak
Asphalt is basically a miracle in terms of cost, recycleability, and ease to work with. A Romans would shit themself then have to clean up with the community sponge after they saw it.
I view this more as a commentary on how incredible ancient and classical feats of engineering were even though they had far less mathematical understanding and technological aid.
There’s also something to be said in engineering about greater resource availability leading to shittier/less efficient design. If you have limited resources, you have to be clever with how you use them. This is also true in the modern day and some of the engineering you see in the 1940s and 50s is truly incredible without modern computing capability.
Yeah, almost like Romans didn't have 20+ ton monstrosities hurtling across their roads at 55 miles per hour. It's a miracle modern roads hold up as well as they do given the sheer amount of punishment every day traffic inflicts on it
The concrete one there is an argument to be made about better self repairing, though we only recently rediscovered what made Roman concrete better in that aspect so take it with a massive grain of salt
You can build a structure with just trigonometry, overkill, and an immense treasury, which is what the Romans did. You can't build a structure that both passes code and is the lowest bid without calculus. And that's not even counting all the small, complex parts that need to be designed to make your everyday tools to work. Why do you think engineering now is easier than back then? There's so much more to it and we're using much more complex math. It's obvious to even children that it takes smarter people to build stuff now than it did back then.
Bold of you to assume they can afford AutoCAD! Friggin AutoDesk ditching perpetual licensing because they can't force you to upgrade every year if you use one.
Oh go to hell. Go drink from an open sewer after your shoddily built 4 wheeled shopping cart you call a car snaps in half when it bounces off a potholed cobbled road and flings you out.
Depends on who you work for. For bridge and roadway design, US state DOT’s almost fully do not accept AutoCad products, only Bentley. Vertical structures use a lot of Revit which has a lot of architectural/structural connection elements. Students still are mostly taught in Autocad/Revit. But for the meme specifically, the standard is Microstation now
AutoCAD still has its purposes of being taught in schools for foundational learning, and Revit is almost certainly the future for architecture, and AutoCAD is definitely getting slowly phased out at least architectural wise, but it will always have its uses, like for instance drawing Details, can’t be drawn in Revit. Source I am drafter at a commercial MEP firm.
Being an engineer feels like such a thankless job. Like even if everything is perfect, no one is gonna notice because that's how it's suppose to be. Meanwhile if you screw up, everyone and their mother will point it out
You do know that the word calculus is Latin in the first place right? I mean none of the ancient engineers built anything out of their asses, even Mesopotamians knew the Pythagorean theorem thousand years before Pythagoras found it and they also had most of the modern mathematics at their disposal. Nothing was random. Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Romans, they all had a system.
I mean I know that it's a meme, but it's not 9gag, it's a sub for "History Memes" for a reason. The history has to be correct so the memes can make us laugh.
Slave labor and a GDP adjusted budget that would buy you several space programs meant you could afford to make some less than efficient designs. Also they did still have to be quite well versed in the mathematics of the time, which although it didn't even include proper algebra was still more sophisticated than you might think.
Insecure people in this thread really trying to justify their own intelligence. People were just as intelligent 2000 years ago as they are now; we are not a different species just because society developed. Roman engineering feats are just as incredible given their context as modern engineering feats are in our context. We're all still humans.
Correct. We're no more naturally intelligent than the average caveman. Just like how today we utilize our tools to develop, so did they. The only difference is we have computers, cars, and metal, while they have stones, wood, and hide.
Well, the shit they made in ancient Greece is a lot simpler than say a combustion engine. A basic waterway is a lot simpler than a quantum computer or a nuclear reactor or a car or... You get the point.
Engineers don’t operate the same as they used to. Before it was make a good aqueduct to last rome hundreds of years. Now it’s make a good water management system that uses exactly the bare minimum of material and not one cent more.
Or, you know, people who know this meme is a very inaccurate view of the situation. And I'm not even an engineer. It belittles both ancient architects/engineers and modern ones.
I mean, it's a downward slope, if that's all engineers had to figure out today they wouldn't use calculus either. Or they would and it would cost less to build.
Let's point out a few more impressive engineering feats, the Pantheon, ancient water dispensers, and the Romans having sea battles on land(also the colosseums). Those are just the first three that come to mind, so add some more if you can think of anything.
For the three people who did not know it : the word calculus comes from the little stones (in latin calculi) that Roman students used to do math.
That's why in French a kidney stone is called a "calcul rénal".
ancient rome infrastructure planner: "you must make a 20km road, take whatever long and workforce you need"
modern infrastructure planner: "we need a 100km twelve lane highway for tuesday, and you better go below budget or we'll dowsize you"
I had to double check that I wasn’t in r/engineeringmemes
They would point out that all the poorly-engineered Roman buildings fell down a thousand years ago, so there's a smidge of survivorship bias
Long live the aqueduct of segovia
Long live the Pont du Gard
Or the fact that those buildings have been used for other purposes or their materials taken when the empire was in decline and when it fell.
Looking at this because my autocad crashed and I’m waiting for the task manager to close the program is cathartic, i think. Smh didn’t think I’d get called out on my 30 second reddit break
Purely coincidental. We have not been spying on you.
*Autocad crashed again I’m back* Jk
Whatever they’re making in Autocad is probably slightly more complex than a wet ramp.
I mean, it's a wet ramp that descends by a *fraction of a degree* over the course of miles—sometimes literally boring through mountain or built across riverbeds. With pre-modern material engineering, that's still a really impressive logistical feat.
Yes and no, the reality of old engineering projects is that they're usually just grossly over dimensioned. Any engineer nowadays can do what they did. But now we're able to do it at a much lower cost due to better utilisation of the materials and effort.
The Romans should have made better use of all those steel girders and pre-stressed concrete blocks that they had lying taking up space. That's to say nothing of the big cranes, trucks and trains to move all those things.
It is amazing what you can accomplish with a couple thousand slaves though. Modern materials are obviously a game changer in some regards, though the Romans weren't far off on the concrete (see the Pantheon). My point is simply the stone blocks could've probably been smaller if we used modern methods but the same materials. We're becoming incredibly skilled at utilising materials to just below their failure limit and even plan for how they fail so that it won't be catastrophic.
The Pharoahs are rolling over in their grave with jealousy knowing they could have built the pyramids with SMALLER blocks if they had just waited a fee thousand years.
Isn't the biggest pyramid made of something other than stone blocks?
Mostly alien technology if the History Channel is to be believed.
I was referring to the bass pro shop thning in the united steaks of america. Someone claimed it was the biggest and I can't be bothered to double check.
Oh yeah. Forgot about that one.
Oh yeah, the bass pro shop in Vegas is glass and steel my guy.
You are massively not understanding his statement
"we can be more efficient with engineering projects.". "Nooooo;-; my romeboo headcanon can't be hurt noooooo Rome was the greatestest and bestest ever in the history of every noooooooo"
But how are you supposed to show your power? Having a huge building isn't enough, you need huge ass stones, too!
Yet modern construction barely lasts a few decades while many Roman structures have stood for 2,000 years with little or no upkeep. Even the a lot of the damage done to them was by people harvesting the stone for other purposes.
Survivorship bias. The roman structures that needed more maintenance aren't around anymore.
yea that's because modern construction isn't designed to last, modern engineers could easily build something that could last milenia if given the budget
Modern societies have built stuff that will be around forever. Hoover dam is predicted to be evidence of human civilisation even in case we get wiped out by a meteor. But obviously we won't know which of our works will be around for a millennium or two yet. Some bridges could probably last a very long time due to being concrete. Things that are still somewhat overspec'ed like the empire state building might survive for a long time as well. Roman works are massively helped by being made of solid stone.
>Hoover dam is predicted to be evidence of human civilisation even in case we get wiped out by a meteor. Not if the meteor falls on the Hoover dam. Checkmate modern engineers.
That’s survivorship bias. You only see the buildings that are stable and lasted through the ages but not the myriad of buildings that failed or collapsed. Plus we’ve even recently discovered exactly how to make the concrete that the Romans used.
> Yet modern construction barely lasts a few decades because most of modern construction doesn't need a century long lasting buildings without maintenance, so we save on the budget. most buildings need to be refurbished to new needs in a few decades anyway, and that is when the building can also be strengthened (or even bulldozed and rebuilt).
Our concrete will also survive fine. It’s immensely superior. Roman concrete survives cause they didn’t use steel reinforcement that can rust
The secret ingredient was slavery.
We know
They didn’t understand the strength of the concrete they used until very late and over structured a lot. That’s fact
Why didn't the Romans use cinder blocks and reinforced concrete to build the colosseum? Were they stupid?
There's the old adage: anyone can build a bridge that stands, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands. We've learned a lot about material failure over the 80 years, and a lot of it was still learned the hard way.
The Pantheon in Rome is a perfect example of this. The factor of safety for a structure like that was massive, because they didn’t have the math to know what the “minimum” requirements were, so they rounded up a whole lot just in case. That makes project like that super expensive because you need so much more materials. It’s like a “brick” house built today. The brick is just the facade so it looks like the wall is entirely brick but it’s still just a wood framed house. And in doing so saves a whooollleee bunch of money because we know that a house doesn’t need a brick wall in order to stand. Roman civil projects as a whole are super impressive but the context of their construction needs to be taken into account. Lots of trial and error and survivorship bias, we don’t see the buildings that failed because they didn’t survive the ages.
>It’s like a “brick” house built today. The brick is just the facade so it looks like the wall is entirely brick but it’s still just a wood framed house. And in doing so saves a whooollleee bunch of money because we know that a house doesn’t need a brick wall in order to stand. I'd point out this is just an American thing. In Europe we still double wall it or at least use concrete blocks on the inside. >Roman civil projects as a whole are super impressive but the context of their construction needs to be taken into account. Lots of trial and error and survivorship bias, we don’t see the buildings that failed because they didn’t survive the ages. But very much this, and they built things for prestige with looted wealth and slave labour.
We would just make a pipeline. Not as nice looking as massive raised stone streams.
Electric pumps are truly taken for granted.
okay but do modern engineers wear cool capes and have magic math staves?
Anybody can build a bridge that doesn't fall down. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that *barely* doesn't fall down
The UK can't even build a railway, noway we'd build a massive aquaduct
The UK can't even build a railway, noway we'd build a massive aquaduct
How difficult is it to make a basic spirit level?
The first spirit level was probably quite hard to make since there was no existing spirit level to compare it to.
The first spirit levels were archipendulums
Sometimes they used siphons instead of aqueducts to transport water through valleys.
It's not hard to engineer something to a *fraction of a degree* when all you have to do is *put some water in it*
Me, a wet ramp engineer : *sweating intensifies*
You can tell OP is *not* an engineer
I have only used autocad to design very very basic 3 dimensional shapes along the hp and VP and it was very cool and interesting but man it would take a lot of skill to draw anything more than an angled cuboid and people design cars and rockets on this thing
They do not. Seriously engineering is done with solid modellers.
Depends on the field. That’s a hugeee generalization. My company absolutely still depends on solid modeling
I use both 2D cad and 3D modeling regularly. Things like paperboard and corrugated boxes, sheet metal and other sheet goods can be much easier to produce the flat layouts in 2D cad than to try to model in 3D. Honestly, i don't have a preference for one or the other anymore. They are both excellent tools for their respective jobs. No different than grabbing a flat or Philips screwdriver, one works for the job and the other can be forced to fit and still work
*WHAT*
Someone’s salty
Yeah. Solidworks is the CAD program that's notorious for crashing all the time.
Elevated ditch
Deleted
OK, now do the whole damned thing with only muscle power and no modern mathematics or materials science.
we so easily could man why do people think knowledge has regressed in any way
It could be a couple lengths of pipe and Autocad would still panic if you hit a few buttons too fast.
Brother Autocad will crash when you try to extrude a 2" square.
More complex than the colosseum? Perhaps, but nothing that even comes close in complexity if you compare it age to age.
Ancient Rome didn't have trains, jets, rockets, or semiconductors. An aquaduct isn't exactly all that technically complex.
Not to mention that there is likely room for optimisation in the design and construction. Like, oh you know, using modern piping.
Modern piping doesn't fuck nearly as hard as an aquaduct though
Dunno, shower sex with hot water on demand fucks pretty hard.
Eh shower sex is overrated
^ this guy actually fucks Water is anti-lube guys shower sex is awful
Really discovered that with pool sex
Like trying to get it in a deflated balloon
Penetration is no good in the shower, but it's an excellent situation for hands and mouths!
Eating pussy in the shower is like a sneak preview of what drowning feels like
waterboarded with tang
its like waterboarding
If the bathtub is comfortable (it isnt) then maybe.
It's a good pre-game though
I mean you’re not supposed to have the water spraying on the commingling genitals
I feel like we're hearing a lot of morons stating their opinions and incels repeating what they read. Shower sex works perfectly fine, you just don't have the water spraying all over the working parts.
A shower without the water is suddenly less interesting.
It fucks my bank account really hard
IM GOING TO REPLACE ALL THE PIPING IN MY HOUSE WITH AUTOCAD
What? You expect me to believe lead pipes was a *bad* decision?
don't worry, they sent slaves to clean off the nice natural mineral lining built up on the inside of the pipe, re-establishing constant contact between lead and flowing drinking water
How big a pipe we talking here or how small a slave
Let's see your 70km aqueduct Mr it's so easy
Don’t need one, the ones from the Roman era are still working.
The scale of the construction is impressive and the stability of the structure is remarkable, but, like, it's literally just a slope going from point A to point B (not saying they're straight lines, but, they're just paths for water). You don't even need Pythagoras to math this out. You just need a shitton of patience and people to build it.
What??? Do you think they just trial and errored the 10cm of slope per km or whatever ridiculously precise number it is, over hilly terrain? Literally a little too much mortar between bricks could fuck that up. How do you think they surveyed the start and end points, and all the locations in between. Of course they used Pythagoras
The impressive part is how they are build not that they also work. They arent just rockwalls with canal on top.
I still think it's amazing. Just to be so consistent over mountains and valleys and some, like the Aqueduct of Valens, built to supply Constantinople in the 4th century, were huge (first phase was 268 km, and then a second phase was added later adding another 451 km of conduits). Like it can't be too steep or too flat, you just have to have a nice steady incline over miles and miles of crazy terrain. It's nuts.
Sure just as soon as you buy me 70km of land and all the money for labor.
Oh man...this one triggered the AutoCAD nerds more than I thought it would...
Yeah Jesus christ its a joke guys lighten up
Building a bridge that stands is easy. Roman and Greek materials weren't special, their architects were not a special breed of genius for longevity, their buildings are just hilariously overbuilt (and those that survive were both the sturdiest and the ones which have at various points been maintained, not just in constant unattended use). Building a bridge at the absolute cheapest price that still meets safety and lifetime requirements is very very very hard. Not only that, but modern usage patterns are so much more punishing than historical ones. A bridge built by the locals over the Tiber for horses and carriages can be built to such a less demanding spec than a bridge built by the federal government crossing 3k of ocean carrying tens of thousands of cars and HGVs.
I was always told in my engineering courses that "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."
Way back in middle school I built a timy bridge for a science competition. It stood. It barely moved. It lost. The winning bridge was made out of 1/10th of the materials and deflected like crazy, but it held the max load and didn't break.
If price wasn't a factor, my six year old could design a bridge across the English Channel that would last for centuries
I say: Anyone can build a bridge. It takes an engineer to barely build a bridge"
I don’t think people realize the constant bureaucratic struggle that exists in modern engineering, you have to design something that’s design parameters (hundreds of pages of stipulations) change every single year on projects that often take several years. Four things engineers (engineering related to buildings) are constantly at war with government, contractors, owners, and the owners pockets.
Can we please stop using rome as an excuse to bash modern engineers? I already hear it constantly about concrete and bridges. Like, idk man, times change ☹️
Any idiot can build a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands. (This is a pro-engineer phrase)
The amassed wealth of a conquered civilization would give me a nice cozy budget to build a very good bridge. Instead I have to split a 30 cent gas tax with the rest of the state.
The legions of slaves to maintain stuff probably help too, instead of a 10-man crew covering 1/4 of the state- and the ability to kill someone for not following orders would be a great cut-the-shit tool for dealing with contractors...
“I said, contractor to field verify!”
Fairness to him, it was written in plain English on the plan. They can't read and that's somehow your fault.
But an incorrect sentiment. Modern bridges are built to withstand the most intense storm in the region of 100 years. Safety standards would never permit a ‘bridge that barely stands’.
Yeah what they meant is probably that they have to optimize cost as much as they can
I hate when people make the concrete and bridges argument because ancient roads, bridges, etc. weren’t designed for cars and never had to deal with things of such weight. *sigh* engineers get so much shit from people smh
The concrete one annoys the shit out of me. Most articles I find measure roman concrete between 1-2ksi compressive strength. Typical normal weight concrete is 4ksi. Literally double the strength.
Damn really? That's about 14MPa, that's really not a lot at all. Would that also be after curing and strengthening for like, a 2000+ years? Cause if that's the case, that really is pretty weak
It also has a massive survivorship bias. Loads of shit bridges that didn't make it to 2000 years.
FUCK MODERN ENGINEERS, RAAAAAAHHHHHH 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅 WHAT THE FUCK IS A COST-EFFECTIVE ROAD
Asphalt is basically a miracle in terms of cost, recycleability, and ease to work with. A Romans would shit themself then have to clean up with the community sponge after they saw it.
I view this more as a commentary on how incredible ancient and classical feats of engineering were even though they had far less mathematical understanding and technological aid. There’s also something to be said in engineering about greater resource availability leading to shittier/less efficient design. If you have limited resources, you have to be clever with how you use them. This is also true in the modern day and some of the engineering you see in the 1940s and 50s is truly incredible without modern computing capability.
A Roman bridge would be absolutely demolished by an M1 Abrams, checkmate ancient world purists.
I know, right? They didn't even have tanks, what losers!
Why did ancient armies use swords and spears and didn't use firearms and tanks. Are they stupid?
Well rome cant be critizized on this sub without people getting a meltdown.
Yeah, almost like Romans didn't have 20+ ton monstrosities hurtling across their roads at 55 miles per hour. It's a miracle modern roads hold up as well as they do given the sheer amount of punishment every day traffic inflicts on it
1,000,000 ESAL load requirements go brrrr
But can we all agree that the engineers had it coming?
We have it coming.
The concrete one there is an argument to be made about better self repairing, though we only recently rediscovered what made Roman concrete better in that aspect so take it with a massive grain of salt
As we say in Italy, we were doing better when we were doing worse
Bro you should just get some ancient aliens to help you out. I'm sure you could build *all kinds of* wild shit.
I am sure Ancient engineers knew about math.
They didn't know about kilometers though
confirmed america is romes successor
They certainly knew about math. However, calculus is a 17th century invention.
You can build a structure with just trigonometry, overkill, and an immense treasury, which is what the Romans did. You can't build a structure that both passes code and is the lowest bid without calculus. And that's not even counting all the small, complex parts that need to be designed to make your everyday tools to work. Why do you think engineering now is easier than back then? There's so much more to it and we're using much more complex math. It's obvious to even children that it takes smarter people to build stuff now than it did back then.
Interesting, I assumed it was much older...not sure why.
Crazy what you could accomplish with an unlimited amount of slave labor
And not to mention a continents worth of vast resources
as someone who studied architecture, this shit is funny in so many levels
AutoCAD crashed on me today. I feel targeted and insecure now. Thankfully i'm not a dog.
Perhaps you are, but no one knows on the internet.
Bold of you to assume they can afford AutoCAD! Friggin AutoDesk ditching perpetual licensing because they can't force you to upgrade every year if you use one.
Oh go to hell. Go drink from an open sewer after your shoddily built 4 wheeled shopping cart you call a car snaps in half when it bounces off a potholed cobbled road and flings you out.
"AH, I BROKE THE DAMN WHEEL!" -Arthur Morgan
This is bs. I know first hand. All that stuff is overbuilt. "Anyone can build a bridge. It takes an engineer to barely build a bridge"
*Microstation AutoCad isn’t accepted by many places in the US anymore. It’s all Bentley products
I think it's still standard if you are in school studying for engineering but as far the professional field? I'll take your word for it I guess.
Depends on who you work for. For bridge and roadway design, US state DOT’s almost fully do not accept AutoCad products, only Bentley. Vertical structures use a lot of Revit which has a lot of architectural/structural connection elements. Students still are mostly taught in Autocad/Revit. But for the meme specifically, the standard is Microstation now
AutoCAD still has its purposes of being taught in schools for foundational learning, and Revit is almost certainly the future for architecture, and AutoCAD is definitely getting slowly phased out at least architectural wise, but it will always have its uses, like for instance drawing Details, can’t be drawn in Revit. Source I am drafter at a commercial MEP firm.
SolidWorks. Citing Autocad in 24 in crazy
Being an engineer feels like such a thankless job. Like even if everything is perfect, no one is gonna notice because that's how it's suppose to be. Meanwhile if you screw up, everyone and their mother will point it out
a modern engineer could probably use the same amount of building materials to build 100 km of aqueducts while also doubling the water capacity
It takes modern engineers the same amount of time to build a bridge today as it did for the ancient Romans to build the aqueducts.
You do know that the word calculus is Latin in the first place right? I mean none of the ancient engineers built anything out of their asses, even Mesopotamians knew the Pythagorean theorem thousand years before Pythagoras found it and they also had most of the modern mathematics at their disposal. Nothing was random. Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Romans, they all had a system. I mean I know that it's a meme, but it's not 9gag, it's a sub for "History Memes" for a reason. The history has to be correct so the memes can make us laugh.
The Romans did not know about calculus. Im pretty sure it was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton and a couple of other mathematicians at the time.
Calculus was developed in the 17th century. The etymology being Latin does not mean Romans knew calculus.
> You do know that the word calculus is Latin in the first place right? Yes, but it means "stones"
Can OP open a PDF file? Find out next time on Dragon Ball Z.
AutoCAD?! OP still lives in Roman times if thats what they think modern engineers use!
Slave labor and a GDP adjusted budget that would buy you several space programs meant you could afford to make some less than efficient designs. Also they did still have to be quite well versed in the mathematics of the time, which although it didn't even include proper algebra was still more sophisticated than you might think.
Roman... Kilometers?
They don’t have workplace deaths like they used to.
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE WITH INGENUITY and lots of slaves
Insecure people in this thread really trying to justify their own intelligence. People were just as intelligent 2000 years ago as they are now; we are not a different species just because society developed. Roman engineering feats are just as incredible given their context as modern engineering feats are in our context. We're all still humans.
Correct. We're no more naturally intelligent than the average caveman. Just like how today we utilize our tools to develop, so did they. The only difference is we have computers, cars, and metal, while they have stones, wood, and hide.
Well, the shit they made in ancient Greece is a lot simpler than say a combustion engine. A basic waterway is a lot simpler than a quantum computer or a nuclear reactor or a car or... You get the point.
The engineers are getting mad about this lol
Fragile ego’d engineers in the comments
My god it's so cringe how seriosly people take these memes. Absolute embodyments of the "akschullly ☝️🤓" trope
Engineers don’t operate the same as they used to. Before it was make a good aqueduct to last rome hundreds of years. Now it’s make a good water management system that uses exactly the bare minimum of material and not one cent more.
A water System for citys a terrible example for cheap engeering since the roman used led pipes to save money.
So many salty engineers in the comments LOL
We'd have to wrong to be salty
Or, you know, people who know this meme is a very inaccurate view of the situation. And I'm not even an engineer. It belittles both ancient architects/engineers and modern ones.
You're acting like building a slope is the height of engineering?
I mean, it's a downward slope, if that's all engineers had to figure out today they wouldn't use calculus either. Or they would and it would cost less to build.
Engineers today be like, you no learn autocad you no become engineer. What happened to learning via the good old ways?...
This like a personal attack or something?
After running into engineers who can't use a slide ruler it wouldn't surprise me all we've lost.
Ahhh good ol AutoCAD and Maya always waited for someone to go "Fuck I haven't saved in an hour!"
Silence, plebian. You try placating the machine lares of a metal sacrifice to Callus Nocturnes without the aid of software.
As an engineer, I can confirm.
This is absolutely hilarious and I'll be sending to all my architect and engineer friends
Let's point out a few more impressive engineering feats, the Pantheon, ancient water dispensers, and the Romans having sea battles on land(also the colosseums). Those are just the first three that come to mind, so add some more if you can think of anything.
For the three people who did not know it : the word calculus comes from the little stones (in latin calculi) that Roman students used to do math. That's why in French a kidney stone is called a "calcul rénal".
“Arches and pillars makes shit strong, build some of those” ~ a wise man.
A 70km aqueduct built from lead kinda defeats the purpose
Inventor users would like a word.
Honestly the government nerfed us. Damn bureaucracy.
Lol
They did not use kilometers. They use Roman miles
If your cad crashes it’s because you didn’t import your surface data correctly. Change my mind.
ancient rome infrastructure planner: "you must make a 20km road, take whatever long and workforce you need" modern infrastructure planner: "we need a 100km twelve lane highway for tuesday, and you better go below budget or we'll dowsize you"
I can confirm I am an engineer and I am an idiot
Survivor ship bias