> - seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect.- seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect.

I recommend building physical models. It's hard to convey how strong and light these structures can be. Very "against intuition". :)

> - could be nice from a packaging point of view. Collapsible objects, the wiki link mentions the nasa ball robot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoberman_sphere

https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/origami-style-solar-power-2014...

Yes. :)

> - maybe it could shift Bill-of-Materials costs through smaller amounts of expensive extremely high compression/tensile capable materials to be offset by savings on larger amounts of cheaper other capable sections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization

Bucky again.

(Kevlar tendons and carbon fiber struts...)

> - I am not convinced it would allow the superstructures much sci-fi requires as the basics of tensile strength, compression strength are still in play.

I'm not an engineer, but we can already build some impressive structure w/o advanced materials. Cf. "bamboo scaffolding" (DDG image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=%22bamboo+scaffolding%22&at... )

I'm imagining swarm cellular kite robots that can self-organize to create whatever size lifting body is needed. I'm thinking about things like how to move millions of people at a time (which we might want to do due to climate change, etc.)

Have you read Vinge's "Rainbows End" (sic)? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End ) There are buildings in the story that are too flimsy to stand up without active control and feedback, something like that could work with these kite-bots.

> - As mentioned in the tensairity article, if humanity could make a pressure withstanding, airtight object, say a sphere, around a vacuum with less mass than the air it displaces, we could have architectural "anti-gravity".

We don't have to go that far (although it would be neat if we could, diamond vacuum bubbles?) Did you read about "Cloud Nine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(tensegrity_sphere)

I've thought about this a lot but not yet gotten my act together enough to do it. I wrote up some of it here: https://lists.sr.ht/~sforman/heliotrope.pajamas/%3C202012290... ("heliotrope.pajamas" is my mailing list if you want to reach me in re: this stuff)

Well met!