Thank you Astrorob,
I do believe you have either entirely solved this or I won't know if I have any future questions until I have thoroughly absorbed the implications of your proposal - something which will keep me busy for quite a while.
Being the quintessential newbie to physics it took me...
You are correct. Treating the discs as one body would not yield very good approximations.
I did not make that very clear. When referring to treating the 10 discs "as though their heights were the same" I'm pointing to the fact that each consecutively descending disc is designed to support a...
An object weighing 34.518379357 kg, free-falling at 4.2(?) m/s, travels 0.889m, before it begins decelerating when it makes contact directly on the top of a person's head.
Within what I would guess would be perhaps maybe 2(?) milliseconds after deceleration commences, the first intervertebral...