Quoted from bbulkley:I'm really not sure why people are so worried about the post under the spinning target. It's clearly much thicker than a a typical playfield post, and those take direct hits from balls all the time. Sure the target post is longer, but the strength goes up with the square of the diameter, so if it's twice as thick as a typical post it will be 4 times as strong. There are plenty of much thinner screws and posts in games that never have issues.
Playfield posts hold up by being extremely secure w/o play. Normally a 1/4" post secured by almost 1/2" of tight contact in the PF hole. Screwed in posts are known to fail because they don't have enough support. People aren't worried about a steel rod itself breaking.. but worried about how it's supported. It's about something long and skinny taking ball hits and what that does to where it's attached. Look at the disc in the video
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That base and it's mech is where all the lateral abuse is going to happen. You can see they have a plastic shape there to help direct the ball downward into the hole.. which also prevents the mech from just taking head on ball slams. At the end of the day, it's a long rod attached to a base that is going to get smashed at the end of the rod. It's going to take abuse. Simple physics. But it's not like it isn't something they wouldn't have planned for either... so we should just assume the engineer isn't incompetent until they give us a reason to believe otherwise