Firstly, to add a “soft spring”, I suggest you go to “Idealizations | Springs”, and create a “Point to Ground” spring. You will need to create a ”Point” first, attached to a surface or edge at a suitable location, and then create a “Point to Ground” spring at this location, using suitable low stiffnesses to restrain the model. If your model is in equilibrium, there should be no (or at least negligible) deflection or load at the spring.
“Global RMS Stress” is a measure of the overall stress in the model – to quote from the on-line Help file:
Global RMS Stress Index
This is an estimate of the square root of the error in the total strain energy, which is the difference between the strain energy at the current pass and the exact strain energy, divided by the exact strain energy. To estimate the exact strain energy, the engine extrapolates the total strain energies of three successive passes.
The three successive passes are referred to as pass one, pass two, and pass three, with pass three being the most recent. The index may detect a significant error if the difference between pass three and pass two is not small compared to the difference between pass two and pass one. For multiple load sets, the value is the maximum over all load sets.
I suggest you browse through the on-line Help file – it sounds like there is a lot of stuff in there that might help you to get up to speed. On my system the on-line Help file is located at:
C:\Program Files\promech2001\html\usascii\promec\Rel23help.htm
I assume your location would be similar.
Hope this helps.