  The Central Molecular Zone (CMZ; the central ~ 500 pc of the Milky Way) hosts
molecular clouds in an extreme environment of strong shear, high gas pressure
and density, and complex chemistry. G0.253+0.016, also known as `the Brick', is
the densest, most compact and quiescent of these clouds. High-resolution
observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have
revealed its complex, hierarchical structure. In this paper we compare the
properties of recent hydrodynamical simulations of the Brick to those of the
ALMA observations. To facilitate the comparison, we post-process the
simulations and create synthetic ALMA maps of molecular line emission from
eight molecules. We correlate the line emission maps to each other and to the
mass column density, and find that HNCO is the best mass tracer of the eight
emission lines within the simulations. Additionally, we characterise the
spatial structure of the observed and simulated cloud using the density
probability distribution function (PDF), spatial power spectrum, fractal
dimension, and moments of inertia. While we find good agreement between the
observed and simulated data in terms of power spectra and fractal dimensions,
there are key differences in the density PDFs and moments of inertia, which we
attribute to the omission of magnetic fields in the simulations. This
demonstrates that the presence of the Galactic potential can reproduce many
cloud properties, but additional physical processes are needed to fully explain
the gas structure.
