@pauldrye@spacey.space : Unbuilt crewed space projects, phantom islands, alternate history, Muppets, Atomic Age design, weird-looking galaxies, temporary moons of Earth, languages, cartography, the Ediacaran biota, old cutaway diagrams. Canadian with malice aforethought. Baggage Books on DriveThruRPG.
Yes, but it doesn’t matter enough. The square-cube law means that the mass being supported goes up faster than the area of the layer doing the supporting does. So each additional brick on the bottom still ends up carrying more weight as the pyramid gets taller.
Depends on the compressive strength of the material. Sooner or later the weight of the pyramid above the base exceeds the base’s ability to support it. Considering that a mountain is basically a stone pyramid, Everest has to be in the neighbourhood of how tall you could go – call it 10-12 kilometers high. Other materials would do better.
I’m fond of the Imperial County of Reuss, which was semi-independent in the Holy Roman Empire. The madlads named all their rulers “Heinrich”, resulting such personages as Heinrich LXXII (“Heinrich the 72nd”).
More recently there’s the Saar Protectorate, which the French encouraged to become a fully independent country after WWII. But the inhabitants wanted nothing to do with it and rejoined West Germany.
Turned into a slurry and then administered as an enema.
“Revolutionary Paris” had me thinking about this entirely the wrong way.