Hello, recently graduated civil engineer here so please have patience.
We are performing the connection design for a truss type steel structure here at my office. As I understand when it gets to the part of designing a plate you must work with the resultant force of all of the elements that converge in said plate, however when you have 3,4,5 or even 6 elements converging in the same plate and 1000+ load combinations there isn´t really a way of knowing wich of these combinatins will grant you the biggest resultant forces; or not manually at least, so I have heard that the solution is to assume a max force in one of the elements, find the resultant force and then proceed to do the same process with the next element on the plate, repeat that until you have performed the process with every element and then you´ll have your design forces. However even that aproach is; in my opinion, still inaccurate because there could be any number of combinations other than the one that was designed with that could produce a higher resultant force, leaving you with an element that may have been underdesigned (not sure if thats the term in English). So finally here´s my question: Can I make STAAD somehow show me wich of all the load combinations grants the highest resulting force in a given node? If it can be done then I would be designing with the most unfavorable of all the possible resultant forces. If I didn´t make myself clear or if I´m mistaken about something don´t hesitate to point it out please. Thanks in advance.