Imagine a vertical pipe (both ends opened) in the water. Drop several ping-pong balls into pipe and cover them with a cylinder. When you have enough balls, the cylinder will float. Now start adding weight into the top of a cylinder, and simultaneously start adding ping-pong balls via the bottom of pipe, to compensate the increasing weight.
At the some weight (and balls columng height) the topmost row of balls start crunching due the buoyancy pressure. In this question @mms answered than one ping-pong ball can withstand 3 atmosphere pressure.
The question is: how to approximate the maximum heigh of ball column (or maximum weight is possible float) for the pipe radius "R" before the topmost row of balls start crunching?
Or, maybe will start crunching not the topmost row, but somewhere else because the sum of buoyancy pressure (from the balls bellow) and water pressure will be more the 3atm. How to determine?