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Spoke tension dropping to zero is a second order effect, it can only happen if the rim moves quite a long way from its starting point relative to the hub, because the spoke is elastically strained by up to 0.3% under "no load" conditions.
Fair enough, that is a good point.
But otherwise, no, you definitely don't want to be that close to failure, and no one is, even in pro cycling. Otherwise, you'd get a LOT more incidents of parts failing in a catastrophic way, and a LOT more riders getting seriously injured, or killed. Especially things like wheels are certainly always overengineered quite a bit. And you mentioned another good point - it doesn't just have to withstand one load cycle, but many many many of them. However, how many exactly is a bit of an arbitrary decision of course, in the grand scheme of things. But especially big brands are usually extremely keen on their name not becoming indelibly connected to randomly failing hardware, so they tend to be on the generous side as far as I know. I will definitely follow them in that in stuff I make...
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SwissChap
It's certainly not how practical bicycle wheels are designed, mostly because of the problems in computational analysis which we're talking about. What actually happens is that people take some known good design and progressively shave bits off it until it fails endurance testing, then send the last version which passed endurance testing to market 🙂
Spoke tension dropping to zero is a second order effect, it can only happen if the rim moves quite a long way from its starting point relative to the hub, because the spoke is elastically strained by up to 0.3% under "no load" conditions.
Mostly you don't. In a competitive environment, you sometimes do; I'd rather win all the races I finish than finish all the races I start 🙂