Well I read in one of the astronauts books who flew on the Shuttle/Mir program (back when the shuttle was flying up to and docking with MIR pre-ISS and we were paying for our astronauts to live on Mir for months at a time, and we sent up a whole retinue of astronauts in sequence to fly on Mir... It was probably Mike Foale's book or maybe the guy who followed him I can't think of at the moment who went through the Mir fire...) Anyway, in the book they were telling how basically one day they were horsing around and one of the astronauts or cosmonauts said, "hey watch this" and he basically started shaking the module back and forth, and you could look through the tunnel and see the other modules rocking back and forth in unison, like a yardstick grabbed in the middle and whipped up and down to make both ends "flap" back and forth...
The structures can take a surprising amount of force even at the joints where they're locked to the nodes and stuff, Mir even took an impact from a misdirected Progress resupply craft that ended up puncturing one of the modules that had to be hastily sealed off and abandoned in place because all the air leaked into space and it couldn't be repressurized. The bad thing was Mir wasn't designed for easily closing off damaged modules, as they were "hard docked" to the main node and then the hatches were opened, and air circulation hoses, coolant hoses, and wiring cables were run through the open hatch to connect up the modules to the main station's power, cooling fluid, and air recirculation system. Most of the connections were NOT "quick attach" or even easy to get to, as they had to hurriedly cut cables and disconnect hoses to get the hatchways clear to seal off the damaged module before it allowed all the air in the station to vent into space... they lost about half their air IIRC before they got the hatch to the damaged module sealed IIRC. The Mir fire from the "oxygen candle" was also a near-miss, as flames were roaring out the end of the tube nearly 3 feet, coming close to impinging on the thin aluminum skin of the module itself which could have burned a hole straight through it and vented the air into space...
What was funny was the Russians DEMANDED the US astronauts train in their "safety procedures" and follow their guidelines and stuff despite the fact that most of their safety protocols were either decades behind ours or nonsensical and thus in an emergency would be ineffectual or useless. Still, we "went with the program" because we needed to keep the Soviet space program running in the post-Soviet era so the newly independent and chronically unemployed and underfunded Russian scientists wouldn't go build missiles for Iran and North Korea for a fat paycheck... which is why we paid Russia to finish the Mir 2 core module as the service module for ISS (Zarya) and finish another module for the Russian segment (Zvezda) and launch them on Proton rockets... Then we sent 40 something shuttle flights up there sticking parts on like tinker toys over 13 years to build the friggin' thing. Now its an albatross around our neck and we can't get rid of it without losing face; the Russians are tired of it and want to partner up with the Chinese or fly their own station again and ISS is USELESS and UNINHABITABLE WITHOUT the Russian service/power modules which form the core of the ISS... and we don't have ten years and a billion dollars to develop our own power/service module to replace it. ISS is frankly getting long in the tooth and it's not going to survive forever. Mir was literally falling apart by the time it was retired and abandoned, which the Russians didn't want to do but basically we were their main source of funding or at least a necessary source of funding for their space program and NASA and the US gubmint demanded they abandon Mir rather than continue to divert resources to it that could be better spent preparing and operating their part of the commitment to ISS. Remember ISS grew out of the SSF (Space Station Freedom) program instituted by Reagan way back in 1986 in the wake of Challenger to give NASA focus and a purpose... SSF was redesigned numerous times over the intervening years and NO hardware had been constructed or flown, and survived cancellation by a single vote at one point. It took the Soviet collapse in 1990 to really breathe life back into the program once it became apparent that we were going to have to fund not only the dismantlement of the massive Soviet nuclear warhead stockpile but also keep their space program funded to prevent its engineers and scientists from emigrating to find work and a paycheck in Iran, Iraq, or North Korea ("axis of evil") which is exactly what we did, using the "ISS" program as the method and reason to transfer funds to the Russian space program. SSF was morphed into ISS... the US had the basic plans and development work done for their hab and lab modules, but the HARD and EXPENSIVE work remained to be done-- the service module with the power and stability systems for the station, which was going to be a BILLION dollar development project over about five years or more. Plus development of in-space refueling capability which the US did not have. The Soviets had developed not only in-space refueling BUT also automated rendezvous and docking (ARD) technology for their Soyuz spacecraft way back in the late 60's, and perfected it for their "Progress" space tanker/freighter resupply craft (modified unmanned Soyuz) which had been designed to resupply and reboost their Salyut series of space stations in the 1970's and early 80's before Mir was launched and built, and of course Progress and Soyuz continued to serve the same purpose not only with Mir but ISS as well. Progress could reboost Salyuts or Mir with its own propulsion system, plus haul up fuel to transfer through automated connect/disconnects to the Salyut or Mir propulsion system and its engines for station reboost when the Progress wasn't present, plus haul up pressurized supplies in an expendable modified Soyuz orbital module, and act as a "trash dumpster" on the end of the station for waste and spent experiments and materials to be placed in before it separated and deorbited and burned up, eliminating the waste problem on the station and making it long-term habitable (unlike Skylab which used the old S-IVB rocket stage hull's lower oxygen tank as a "septic tank/waste dumpster" into which all the station's waste was discarded via a "waste airlock" in the center bottom floor of the station, separating the pressurized upper hydrogen tank "orbital workshop" from the unpressurized oxygen tank "dumpster" under the common bulkhead separating the two compartments. That is why Skylab was not a "permanent" space station-- when the "dumpster" inevitably filled up the station was no longer habitable, and no serious thought to resupply was really contemplated for Skylab, not until the shuttle era anyway and with shuttle delays Skylab ended up reentering and burning up before shuttles could service and reboost it anyway. In theory shuttles could have resupplied Skylab and hauled back the trash generated by the crews aboard her. All for naught though since it burned up over Australia in '79...
The ugly truth is NASA basically can't afford to do two things at once... they couldn't do shuttle AND Apollo, so they scrapped Apollo lunar missions and greatly truncated the Apollo Applications (down to Skylab at the end) to pay for shuttle. They couldn't afford to really do SSF AND shuttle at the same time either with the funding they had, and Mars missions like Bush 1's "Space Exploration Initiative" program to the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" announced on the steps of the NASM in July of '89 on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11 (which later grew to monstrous proportions and was laughed out of Congress as "Battlestar Galactica to Mars" and cancelled a couple years later) and of course Bush 2's "Vision for Space Exploration" program for the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" suffered a similar fate under Obama... all we really ended up with was the horrifically expensive and much delayed and already pathetically outdated SLS rocket, made at great expense and effort from the most expensive reusable bits of the shuttle, used in THROWAWAY EXPENDABLE MODE to be burned up or sank in the ocean after each flight... and which survives strictly as the political football that it is, nothing more, nothing less. NASA cannot afford to do Artemis moon missions AND ISS at the same time. It only paid for SLS development AND ISS because the shuttle was cancelled and freed up the money to do so. Artemis missions are NOT going to be cheap; lander and suit hardware doesn't exist, h3ll even the Orion capsule doesn't have a "proper" service module-- just a repurposed ATV European resupply module acting as a service module, and a repurposed Delta IV upper stage acting as an "Interim Propulsion Stage". SLS is going to require all new expendable advanced boosters for the block 2 version and a new ascent propulsion stage to actually insert a real upper stage and spacecraft into orbit capable of propelling itself to the Moon, and SpaceX recently won the contract (which is now tied up being contested by Blue Origin and Dynetics despite their inferior offerings, particularly Blue Origin's pathetic lander design) and will have to build, supply, and launch the lunar lander (Lunar Starship variant) to act as the lander for the overpriced and basically unnecessary Orion capsule once it gets to the Moon in order for the crew to actually land on the Moon. NASA has NO money to develop a lander on their own, as Altair was basically one of the first things cancelled even back in the days when the VSE was still the plan du jour and Ares I and Ares V were being developed along with the Orion MPCV for both space station taxi for crew rotations AND as the deep-space capable lunar mission spacecraft.
IOW, it's all an "ad-hoc" space program, and so long as ISS is eating up $4 billion or whatever it is now of the NASA budget, Orion can't go any farther than "test flights" on SLS block 1 looping around the Moon in highly elliptical "lunar orbits" to "test" the spacecraft for "eventual" Artemis missions to the Moon's surface. IOW, it's all a joke basically.
Later! OL J R