I asked for cites, not your fanciful and highly unqualified “reinterpretations” of ancient text.
African or European?
Third base!
[QUOTE=cladking]
It’s simply load/ capacity per cross sectiuonal area and converted to a circular expression.
[/QUOTE]
So, in other words, you didn’t actually do the calculation at all, since this doesn’t factor in the tensile strength of the material, length of the line or load. Or really anything you’d actually need to calculate the necessary diameter of a line with the specifications you are plugging in. Good grief…you can freaking Google various vendor rope/line calculators that will do this FOR you, and you didn’t even bother to do that, just tossed up this horseshit. And you expect anyone to take you seriously? 
What was this brake and how, exactly, did it operate? Do you have any evidence for such a braking system? I mean, it would challenge much more modern civilizations to device such a braking system with the kinds of loads you are talking about using the kinds of manpower you are talking about (i.e. a guy sitting in the shade drinking water and throwing a level then kicking back to watch the action), so extraordinary claims and all that. Do you have ANYTHING but some cryptic and mystical horseshit you read from some Egyptian texts? Hell, where in your mystical horseshit texts does it talk about braking systems? That should be good for a laugh or two, to see how you can contort the text to mean brake systems for your magical machine.
You believe this…I have no doubt about that…but your evidence is all circular. Yeah, there aren’t a lot of guys who were crushed by multi-ton blocks or water ‘boats’ falling on them, so this must mean your theory is true and they had pulleys and braking systems too! As well as ropes made of natural fiber that are a match for our modern synthetic rope and belaying systems!
Certainly. Their medicine was actually quite advanced, and there are lots of examples of workers who were injured, often severely, yet survived and were treated very well. There isn’t much evidence of folks crushed to death by multiple falling multi-ton stones, however. Let’s think about that for a moment. We are talking about, literally, millions of blocks that your magic machine would have to move. Let’s say they had a ridiculously small failure rate…let’s say 1%. No way was it that small, but what the hell. That would mean that there would have been 10’s of thousands of such accidents. And, in all that, we have zero examples of a worker pulverized by falling stones or water boats? The Egyptians were not only magical, but they were fleet of non-stinky foot as well.
Are you claiming that the vertical lines are the marks of falling stones in accidents??? Seriously??
Re: the swallow stuff, the relevant portion can be found here, and it reads:
1128a. To say: It is certainly not N. who asks to see thee
1128b. in the form which has become thine;
1128c. Osiris asks to see thee in the form which has become thine;
1129a. it is thy son who asks to see thee in the form which has become thine;
1129b. it is Horus who asks to see thee in the form which has become thine.
1130a. When thou sayest, “statues”, in respect to these stones,
1130b. which are like fledglings of swallows under the river-bank;
1130c. when thou sayest, “his beloved son is coming,” in the form which had become that of “his beloved son”
1131a. they (the “statues”) transport Horus; they row Horus over,
1131b. as Horus ascends (lit. in. the ascent of Horus) in the Mḥt-wr.t-cow.
When cladking says the PT describes "stones flying like the “fledglings of swallows”, he is incorrect. It instead says that stone statues, which are “like” fledgling swallows, transport Horus via rowing. Note that “like fledging swallows” could refer to any number of attributes: dwelling in caves and cliff faces, for instance. It referring to flight seems most unlikely, as the method of locomotion for these statues is explicitly given as rowing.
This is all of a pattern: snipping a few fragments of the Pyramid Texts, and presenting distortions of them, sans context, as evidence for one cockeyed theory or another. If you read the passages in context, his assertions are quite absurd. For example, he claims that “Osiris” isn’t a god, but rather the natural phenomenon of geysers. Oddly, however, the geyser requests to see the dead king in his post-mortal form:
1128a. To say: It is certainly not N. who asks to see thee
1128b. in the form which has become thine;
1128c. Osiris asks to see thee in the form which has become thine;
1129a. it is thy son who asks to see thee in the form which has become thine;
1129b. it is Horus who asks to see thee in the form which has become thine.
I’m at a decided disadvantage here. When an Egyptologists says they mustta used ramps that’s irrefutable evidence and sufficient logic but when I quote a builder saying he needed a boat that flies up and alights that’s just hokus pocus mumbo jumbo.
Well, you are. You are flying in the face of conventional wisdom. You are also flying in the face of the fact that people have tested ramps (and pulling large loads across sand) using real world tests…they actually bothered to get a big stone, get some ropes and some folks with stinky foot and, you know, pull the rope and see what happened. They have bothered to build ramps and see if they could pull loads up them. They have bothered to see if they could erect obelisks and how it could be done. In short, you are trying to combat, with words (often mystical bullshit words) a body of archeological and scientific data that goes back decades, if not centuries. So, yeah…you are at a decided disadvantage. You are also at a decided disadvantage because you insist on trotting out the same, tired old strawman about ‘Egyptologists’, and no one is buying your straw since it’s so transparent.
People who go take the time and effort to get a proper education about a subject, then use that education to go out into the field to further their knowledge have higher cred than hack armchair “know-it-alls” with nothing but vivid imaginations to back them up.
Imagine that.
It is a simple fact that almost all rope breaking is caused by a combination of improper usage and improper inspection.
If you have any evidence that this isn’t true then you should present it.
Ropes almost never break when properly used and inspected. They do what they are designed to do. They give weeks of warning before they break which is why they are inspected monthly.
design the rope using the available material (and capability) that the Egyptian’s had at the time that would have done this work.
Then build the rope - and test it.
What you are describing, IMHO, would be “improper usage” of a rope that the egyptians could have built at the time - keep in mind that you are claiming they would have dragged this rope up and down a buch of rocks carying an incredibly large amount of weight on both sides of it.
If it were strong enough to carry the load - it likely would have cut grooves in the rocks to do so,
No two Egyptologists agree on the meaning of these lines or any lines. Indeed, modern translations aren’t even recognizable as the same lines.
I’m simply suggesting that they mean exactly what they say. And the words always had the same meaning.
Didn’t the ancient Egyptians have oxen? Maybe they didn’t have great yokes, but oxen should still outperform men in pulling huge stones across wet sand.
In fact an ancient picture that was linked awhile ago does show that very same thing.
cladking keeps on failing the acid test too. 
It is not only Egyptologists but also modellers, people that know a bit of chemistry, real generalists and people from many other fields that can find faults galore with his idea. That is the reason why he is at a disadvantage.
The failure rate was far under 1% and no one would ever be under a falling load. This might surprise you but even today people don’t work underneath suspended loads. It is against safety rules and common sense. It is not necessary.
Systems went down for planned maintenance and sometimes unplanned maintenance but they very rarely just “broke”. This isn’t the way things work. If a modern crane had a failure rate of even .01% the company couldn’t stay in business and all signs suggest the ancients were far more competent than modern business. They simply didn’t need to drop loads.
Of course since a geyser with acidic soda was used the funicular just fizzled away, so there would be no maintenance to do as it is clear that that was not the way they did it.
By who-The International Rope Authority? The Rope Police? Rope Gnomes?
What in the Wide Wide World Of Sports are you talking about??
[QUOTE=cladking]
It is a simple fact that almost all rope breaking is caused by a combination of improper usage and improper inspection.
[/QUOTE]
It’s your assertion…why should I prove a negative?? Especially when it’s a strawman argument that I didn’t claim. 
Ropes fail for a variety of reasons. Wear and tear as well as abrasion would be my WAG as to the majority of the failures on your theoretical machine, as well as ropes simply degrading over time in the conditions on the Giza plateau coupled with the conditions you describe during operations (like, oh, say all that water stuff in the environment soaking the ropes, for instance). You are talking about serious loads on these ropes…on these natural fiber ropes made up of small length fibers spliced together. And you are talking about moving literally millions of rocks via these ropes. It would be incredible in the extreme if they only failed a few times as you claim (with no evidence to back up your assertion). I think a 1% failure rate of such a system is wildly optimistic…but even if we stick with that we are talking about 10’s of thousands of failures. And there is no evidence of even one.
sigh And you base this on what, exactly? What historical data are you using to derive this information from??
No pulley provides mechanical advantage.
They had a “metal shop” they did not have a “ramp builders shop” or a “roller makers shop” or any of the nonsense made up by Egyptologists.
Of course you’ll now ignore this, too.
[QUOTE=cladking]
The failure rate was far under 1% and no one would ever be under a falling load.
[/QUOTE]
I’m just going to create a macro for ‘and you base this on what, exactly’, since you seem bound and determined to simply assert stuff out of your ass with zero backing of your assertion.
This might surprise you, but back in the day when they were building this stuff, lots of workers were killed in accidents building these things. Since we have nothing but your unsubstantiated assertions for, well, everything including how these things were belayed, how they were used etc, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the workers using this theoretical machine might not have had much of a choice as to the risks. I seriously doubt they would have cleared the work site of everyone while they moved stones up, then allowed folks back on the work site after the evolution was completed. They were moving and setting millions of stones and wouldn’t have had the time to clear the site every time they wanted to move some more stones up to the top. It’s totally ridiculous for you to assert otherwise since, if they did clear the site every time they moved a stone it would have taken them centuries to build these things, not a decade or so.
Modern systems have redundant safety built into them…and they STILL fail occasionally. Are you claiming the Egyptians had multiple redundant safety systems built into your magic machine as well? :dubious:
Not really, if you want to include copper and iron you only show ignorance as those materials also suffer from corrosion or rust under a constant stream of soda water.