Hmm, well, I was trying to figure out how to approach the problem (or a bigger problem this attempts to isolate a tricky part of) without necessarily being concerned with the exact units/formulas involved in the real physics until I get to actually resolving it... but I suppose how these factors interact may depend on which ones we're talking about...
...Speaking of which, and in answer to your last point, I am (or was) in part concerned with figuring out how much strain the tape has to endure, with the idea of loosely approximating the physics for finding out whether they hold together or not -- something like, "does the amount of force transferred exceed an arbitrary strength/stickiness constant for the tape," or better yet, "how much is the stickiness of the tape worn down by the pulling/pushing on it, given an arbitrary ratio of push/pull to wear and a constant, also arbitrary point at which the wear exceeds the total stickiness and thereby breaks the hold of the tape." Of course, to complicate things, the "tape" analogy is a substitute for these parts being stuck together in some other manner, and I figured -- and my initial description focused more on -- the loss of force on the assumption that if some of the force went into pulling the sticky off the tape (to follow that particular analogy) then that force would not be transferred to the other objects. My main problem in figuring out how to deal with all this is that, the way I am (or was) thinking about it, the amount of force lost transferring between A and B involves the amount of force experienced by A and B, which itself depends how much force A and B transferred to each other, which itself depends how much force is lost between A and B... then obviously we have a problem that involves itself in its answer, creating a scenario of infinite recursion; which can't be right, so I must be approaching the whole matter wrong...
...Though to be honest, I think I thought of a way to simplify the scenario to begin with so I don't need such detail -- something like, only consider it in the first place where a single piece of tape alone connects two sections of the system, and then first figure out the forces on each section besides that connection, and then consider it similarly to how you'd consider a collision between those two sections.
It's all a mess that comes from me not having taken physics in a while (nor taken it particularly far when I did) but wanting to at least loosely simulate a situation for which the actual real-world physics would involve some of the most advanced/complicated stuff around, as I believe SewingPin pointed out. I'd like objects made of solid, non-deformable parts that can be ripped apart from each other but tend to stay together until they're hit too hard; I'm probably overthinking the whole matter, though, and my attempts to simplify the problem and to describe where I'm getting stuck obviously haven't been much less messy than the original problem. I might have to start over with that situation I'd like to loosely simulate and look more at "how could I fudge a simulation of this so the right general effect is achieved without getting into physics between the parts?" (And I should probably update the original post... In any case it's clear I explain even worse than I do physics...)