Attack on Titan's Walls: A Failure of Epic Proportions 

To be fair, I don’t think the king who made the walls accounted for a 120m rod reiss titan😂

This is a rare time where the often vague "combat engineer" is going to have more subject matter expertise than even a civil engineer. Spoilers for Season 4: If you want to tally up all the breaches, you could also count a few times the Cart titan carried people over the walls. But I want to add the ridiculous "Unknown Unknown" breach of one of the walls when Marley's military flew over it in airships and dropped paratroopers. That's kind of something somebody set in Season 1 would never have considered. The fundamental part of military engineering is, you aren't just holding back forces of nature. There's actually another opposing group of engineers out there who are just as smart as you are, and their goal is to cause your project to fail. And it's always easier to destroy something than to build it. There are in fact innumerable ways Marley can breach the walls. So you just can't have this attitude where the wall is defending you. Your defending garrison is defending you. The wall is a tool; a force multiplier for the defending garrison. If you have a wall and no defending garrison, your force multiplier is multiplying zero. Right off the bat, the biggest flaw of AoT's walls is lack of observation. They should have periodic outposts on top of the walls akin to the Great Wall of China where if one of the sentries observes a breach, they send a signal to inform the reaction force. This should be the Garrison Corps entire job: stand on top of the wall, look down on what's happening on the other side, and if you see any titan doing anything funny, call for help. If they were doing this, Season 2 would've ended early because the beast titan never would've snuck over the wall in the first place. It also would've saved them from the suicide charge in Season 3, since the Scout Corps' mission to retake Wall Maria would've been followed by a Garrison Corps' operation to garrison Wall Maria, and if that was the operations plan, the Scouts wouldn't have needed to keep their lines of retreat open because a relief force was coming. Though on the macro scale, they were so far behind in information due to being deliberately misled, their only real long term option was to keep throwing Scouts into the meat grinder until they knew who their enemy was. Considering the wall's designer deliberately wanted everyone inside to die; he just wanted them to last long enough for him as an individual to live out the rest of his life; they actually worked. The other thing that's sus from an engineering point of view is at 1:17. Look at how they get the rails over the pilasters. Really? They went with short makeshift ramps by stuffing logs underneath the tracks? So every 20m the poor draft horses have to lug the thing over that ridiculous hump? I know it's more time and materials but they really need to keep the rails level by building supports under the entire length. Also, I know it's a makeshift tarp, but they should've ran the ropes *under* the tracks rather than *over* them. Now nothing can be moved along that rail until the permanent covering is built.

"Tho the great wall never had to deal with a 40 foot Mongolian." That's the first time anyone has ever said that

But the actual "wall" wasn't breached by Bertholt's titan. He breached the brick entrance and then Reiner's titan broke through the entrance, making a hole for other titans to enter. I could be wrong but that's what I saw while watching the anime.

i love how instead of having so many flaws in the series , its still considered one of the best anime out there

Going by all four of it shifters, I think the Jaw Titan can climb the walls too. So could the Cart Titan. So 2 more "Unknown Unknowns."

I mean, in his speech, Willy could as well be exaggerating the facts to manipulate the audience

It's like saying, "There's a billion Ants in a nest. " it's clearly not true, but there's still so many that it doesn't even matter. There's always two types of dialogues in media: what the writer is telling the audience through the characters, and what the characters themselves believe due to the events or information they have from inside their world. The walls got Titans in them that are ready to destroy the rest of the world, that's the bottom line. It would be more annoying if the characters magically knew how many titans there were. Kind of like how the people of Paradis call the shifters by their actual names, Armoured, Female, Collosel, etc. But this is a trope that happens in so many fictional worlds that you just have to accept it, and that's nitpicking at best. AoT is up there with Lord of the Rings for how beautiful it is in terms of story and characters.

I was ready to defend my former fav anime but nice video 🤨

Sorry your premise is invalid at about 4 min. The Colossal Titan did not "latterly" breach the walls. He broke the gates. The gates are not load bearing. Also its said in a manga or ova that someone tried to dig under the walls, and it just kept going down several meters into the ground. Hakuna Matatah

to note, gate are technically the weakest point of a castle, and are intentionally so, usually while it may be the weakest point oin a wall, the walls should be set up oin a way that allows for the entrance of that gate to be a death trap. the big issue is not having an "airlock" or seperate set of walls and gates, for in case an opposing force does take the main gate, youll still have a defensible position, and most of the city properly in your control, or at least a more important set. they do this on a national scale with the walls, but honestly they needed to reassure the citys as proper fortresses in their own right, instead of hoping that the current wall is perfect.12

Have you ever played Final Fantasy 7? The city of Midgar is separated into an under and over world by steel plates that hold up the upper half. It collapses in game. It’s pretty complex and would be cool to see a breakdown of that!

There's a side story that mentions the foundations. A refugee tried to dig their way under it, and they went so deep that they mentally broke before they made it through... so it doesn't really tell us how deep it goes, but we could assume a depth of 1 buried colossal. If only because there was only one miner working on the tunnel with hand tools over the course of several months.

The walls were not to protect but to imprison.

The purpose of the wall is to keep normal Titans out and to keep humans in. That's it, and the wall is successful in fulfilling that purpose. It wasn't designed to prevent Titan shifters from destroying or climbing the wall as they weren't supposed to do that in the first place. The First King evacuated to the island to keep the peace and threaten to execute the Rumbling if anyone attempts to destroy that peace. Marley just went greedy in getting Paradis' resources and the Founding Titan so they decided to invade Paradis. Then if invasion is your basis of the Wall not being a successful structure, then EACH and EVERY structure in our world are FAILURES. Any nation can drop a nuclear bomb to destroy any building, bridge, roads, or even on The Great Wall of China. So based on your definition of "failure", being destroyed by an invasion means those structures are failures too?

AoT and engineering my favourite things

This video was really good.

The constructors of the wall did know about the colossal the beast and the armor titan and the rest of them

Great video, enjoyed the content

I think the walls served their defensive purpose well. If we are sticking to the dam analogy, the arrival of the smarter and stronger titans was not at all similar to a surge event. It was a literal terrorist attack. Dams will also fail, when the previously unknown enemy drops bombs on them.

I think the most unrealistic part about these walls, even if it is in a fantasy setting, is the unfathomable amount of expensive and precious building materials that would take to build such gargantuan walls, *OUT OF TITAN CORPSES.* It's not a Ba Sing Se Wall scenario (From Avatar), where a bunch of Earthbenders can whip up a wall in no-time so it'd not be that hard to build such massive walling... Plus only half a million people maintaining such gargantuans too...