Nov 2000 Thread: "If A 707 Hit The World Trade Center?... "

reply to post by psikeyhackr


I'm not sure how you could find that out for sure. They wobble a hell of a lot more from wind. I'd expect a plane could have done worse. Not sure how it all works out with point loads and surface area loads, but all the same, 15 inches is significant, but the impact itself probably was not as relevant to their collapse as the heat and location of the fires.

Originally posted by Gorman91

Simple. The fire itself was enough to generate thermite from the materials in the wall, fire retardant, and desk supplies.

So you are saying a building designed to withstand fire and heat damage would incorporate building materials that produced thermite reactions?, insurance purposes would forbid furniture and fittings made from inflammable materials.

It would only take a little bit of this reaction at the right location to weaken the joints of the building, not even the solid bars themselves.

It would take a whole heap more to have weakened these structures to a point where they gave no resistance whatsoever, so would you be more elaborate here and explain in detail what and where these Achilles heel points were located and how they managed to go unnoticed when the towers were designed.

Originally posted by Gorman91
reply to post by Seventh

 

Simple. The fire itself was enough to generate thermite from the materials in the wall, fire retardant, and desk supplies. It would only take a little bit of this reaction at the right location to weaken the joints of the building, not even the solid bars themselves.

So your saying somehow thermite manifested itself from the materials available in the building?

Hands down the most idiotic thing ive ever heard...

Interesting, thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Reading through all the replies, it appears that most people concur that the building wouldn't be able to survive an impact.

However, most of them think that the Towers would topple, not fall at free fall speed, disintegrating into dust. They also summise that most deaths would be caused by the falling splintered glass, but we know that wasn't what happened.

reply to post by Seventh

So you are saying a building designed to withstand fire and heat damage would incorporate building materials that produced thermite reactions?, insurance purposes would forbid furniture and fittings made from inflammable materials.

Dude, that's like saying that Walmart should ban chlorine and ammonia because people got into a fight and made muster gas by accident.

www.baltimoresun.com...

You cannot stop chemistry. Practically everything in an office building creates thermite in the right heat range. You've got the zinc and copper in the walls and steel galvanization, you've got the silicon and calcium, as well as oxygen to fuel the fire, in the gypsum of the walls, and you've got tons of usable in materials like computers and furniture.

This is chemistry. If you banned these materials, you'd be living in a mud hut.

How can you prepare a building to resist the very materials they are made out of? Do you rip off your skin when you cut yourself and get an infection? Because that's what you're saying right now.

It would take a whole heap more to have weakened these structures to a point where they gave no resistance whatsoever, so would you be more elaborate here and explain in detail what and where these Achilles heel points were located and how they managed to go unnoticed when the towers were designed.

Plenty have, but you say it is false. Minimalist design is, itself, a weakness. There is no redundant structure to act if one member falls. It's a Miesian "truth" design style. You don't decorate nor add things that the building doesn't need. You reveal the absolute truth of the buildings structure for all to see. And hey, that makes it a hell of an easy target.

Once a couple of floors have a hole in the support, the lateral load goes through the already weakened by fire joints and structure on the opposite sides. Bam, comes down.

reply to post by Gibonz


If you don't believe it, say why! Read my last post. Every thing thermite is chemically made of is readily available in the heat of a jet fuel fire inside a modern office building.

If you don't like chemical fact, then don't go to a website that shuns ignorance.You can turn off your computer whenever you feel like.

Originally posted by Gorman91
reply to post by psikeyhackr

 

I'm not sure how you could find that out for sure. They wobble a hell of a lot more from wind. I'd expect a plane could have done worse. Not sure how it all works out with point loads and surface area loads, but all the same, 15 inches is significant, but the impact itself probably was not as relevant to their collapse as the heat and location of the fires.

It has been repeated many times that the building were designed to withstand 150 mph winds and were designed to sway 3 feet at the top under those wind conditions. And of course the wind is not a one time event that is over in a matter of seconds. The wind can blow for hours.

The south tower brought the mass of the plane to a stop in TWO SECONDS. After that the building underwent damped oscillation for FOUR MINUTES.

I saw one site that said the buildings withstood 100 mph winds on 6 occasions during their lifespans. I have not seen an OFFICIAL SOURCE that says when they occurred and how long they lasted.

It is 150 ton airliner versus 400,000 ton building and we are supposed to believe the planes took the buildings out in less than two hours and yet OFFICIAL SOURCES can't tell us the tons of steel and tons of concrete on each and every level of the towers. I think this is a case of most people preferring to believe the ridiculous.

The Laws of Physics do not care about patriotism, or religion, or conspiracies. How are we supposed to actually analyze this without accurate data? How many tons of steel were on the 81st level of the south tower to supposedly weaken in less than ONE HOUR?

psik

reply to post by psikeyhackr


What something is designed for and its actual performance are two very different things. Perhaps a good example that I know of is Frank Lloyd Wright's Lilly pad column, Look it up.

Thing is, I cannot know for sure without real concrete measurements and observations. Of course they can withstand lots of wind, but when you say 100 mph, well that's...

F = A x P x Cd

284544 x 25.6 x 2

That's a factor of 14,568,652.8


Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds like a lot.


Pure mass alone is not really the right way to look at it, because a huge amount of that load is bellow it, and a huge amount above it acts as a load bearer


Once again, because it is minimalist designed, you must take the specific slice of the building that took the hit, analyze what it was designed to take, and than look at the subtraction of its ability to take load from the mass above it.

If those floors were only made to take, let's randomly say, 3600 tons, and the structure supporting that 3600 ton floor was only meant to take however many tons above it, once that plane damages the floor, maybe now the floor can only take 2700 tons. Well now your 150 ton plane with burning fuel is significantly altering the load. The fire reduces that ever more to actual load bearing of maybe 1500 tons safely, but some of those floors are taking 1500 tons of floor load from above, so that floor collapses. Now the main bearings that supported that floor and the structure above is weaker, because the floor keeps them in place, so they're dangling. Pretty soon, another floor goes, and another, and now the main bearings are suffering. lots of twisting and bending forces. So now the main bearings are weaker, and the fire and possible thermite being made in that fire from the materials in the building are weakening it ever more. Pretty soon that min support joint snaps. It doesn't matter if it isn't the total 400,000 tons of the building. Because it's minimalist design, if it fails to carry just that 3600 tons, and that spreads across a few floors, that failure is not going to stop until everything comes down. This exponentially grows until suddenly it all comes down, and the 100,000 tons of structure above the hole acts like a guillotine or hammer, slicing straight through.

This is why, once the structure did fail this way, the outer structure stood up for a while after the internal structure was down. Because they disconnected, and that vastly lighter load was able to stand freely until its supports cut out from the mass pummeling bellow. Explosions do not allow that. In a demo, it all comes down.

You can see this fact in slight moments before the main collapse in a few videos. here.

Around 7:20, you can see the entire structure still intact as the part falling goes through it. But once that falling part hits the foundation and cuts it off, the part that remains collapses onto it. Demolitions don't do that. Demolitions would leave no internal structure intact.

www.youtube.com...

You see it again here.

www.youtube.com...

And again here.

www.youtube.com...


Demolitions preserve no structure. Implosions leave some things intact.

This is why minimalism is not always a good idea. Because once enough parts fail, it just starts destroying itself.


I made something like this in school freshman year of architecture major. I called it the time bomb because it literally was a timed explosive architecture. If you didn't handle it with respect or care, you set off a chain reaction that made it essentially shoot pellets at you and explode like a grenade. Sort of looks like the substructure of some of the wtc:



I designed this based of the fact that it was the Achilles heel of the wtc dude. If the wtc didn't come down because of this weakness, why did my project explode on my professor? I don't know about you, but I can see that tensile strength ready to go off if not treated correctly.

Originally posted by Gorman91
reply to post by psikeyhackr

 

Once again, because it is minimalist designed, you must take the specific slice of the building that took the hit, analyze what it was designed to take, and than look at the subtraction of its ability to take load from the mass above it.

If those floors were only made to take, let's randomly say, 3600 tons, and the structure supporting that 3600 ton floor was only meant to take however many tons above it, once that plane damages the floor, maybe now the floor can only take 2700 tons. Well now your 150 ton plane with burning fuel is significantly altering the load. The fire reduces that ever more to actual load bearing of maybe 1500 tons safely, but some of those floors are taking 1500 tons of floor load from above, so that floor collapses. Now the main bearings that supported that floor and the structure above is weaker, because the floor keeps them in place, so they're dangling. Pretty soon, another floor goes, and another, and now the main bearings are suffering. lots of twisting and bending forces.

Where did you get this MINIMALIST crap?

FEMA said the perimeter columns were at only 20% of their load capacity.

The people who have decided they prefer to BELIEVE the airliners could destroy the towers are selective about how they look at the information and don't strive to get EXACT DATA. The exact data is not out there. Now why isn't it out there after TEN YEARS and why isn't everyone demanding it?

You keep talking about FLOORS. What about the core columns and the horizontal beams connecting those columns?

My pledge father was an architect. Your picture looks like something I wold expect from an architect. The standard joke at IIT was "architects take funny physics and funny math". I cannot tell what is happening in that photograph. They look like a lot of rectangular blocks under a table. It looks like it is about aesthetics not physics. IF a fall occurred did individual components get damaged so they could not be used again. Because if they did not then they did not absorb any energy from the collapsing structure.

psik

reply to post by psikeyhackr


You ignored my evidence, and just kept talking about what you believe. Why bother talking?

Originally posted by Gorman91
reply to post by psikeyhackr

 

You ignored my evidence, and just kept talking about what you believe. Why bother talking?

You call that photograph evidence and don't even explain what is happening in it.

Were individual components damaged or not? Because if they were not then it is crap.

You can see the motion in my video. The paper loops are crushed and therefore absorbed energy.

www.youtube.com...

psik

reply to post by psikeyhackr


Your video is not only at the wrong scale, but I barely even see its relevance.

I showed you videos clearly showing internal structure remaining up well into the collapse. You said nothing of it.

You claim I did not explain myself. I did, you ignored it.

You don't even speak of the videos at all.

You don't understand the reasoning behind the design nor how it can be a weak point.

You don't understand how a column at 20% its capacity can quickly become 120% over capacity based off what I said.

You don't understand structure, you don't understand architecture, you don't understand design.


So really, there's no point to speak to someone who will only hear what he wants to hear. Enjoy ignorance.

Originally posted by Gorman91
reply to post by psikeyhackr

 

Your video is not only at the wrong scale, but I barely even see its relevance.

I showed you videos clearly showing internal structure remaining up well into the collapse. You said nothing of it.

You claim I did not explain myself. I did, you ignored it.

You don't even speak of the videos at all.

You don't understand the reasoning behind the design nor how it can be a weak point.

You don't understand how a column at 20% its capacity can quickly become 120% over capacity based off what I said.

You don't understand structure, you don't understand architecture, you don't understand design.

So really, there's no point to speak to someone who will only hear what he wants to hear. Enjoy ignorance.

My model was never intended to be about SCALE. It is not about looks it is a demonstration of how THE PHYSICS WORKS.

I have seen those videos before, I do not know how many times. I know about the remains of the core after most of the building came down. It is referred to as "The Spire". They extend the supposed collapse time to about 25 seconds. So since you did not say anything specific about them I have no way of knowing what you think those videos prove about what you're saying.

From that photograph I cannot tell the original positions of the components. I do not know what they are made of. I do not know what they weigh. But you want to call it EVIDENCE. My video includes a description underneath with dimensions and weights and crush energy of the paper loops.

And if my memory serves the building with Frank Lloyd Wright's "Lily Pads" had a leaky roof.

www.smithsonianmag.com...

Wright made stuff that looked GREAT but did not WORK RIGHT.

psik

reply to post by psikeyhackr


sigh.

The leaky roof is irrelevant for things being designed conceptually and how they actually work in real life. Please do not pull a strawman to try and further a case that you've already failed.

Furthermore, your video is pretty much irrelevant, You have wights falling on paper rings. Well congratulations, you proved that a force on a structure that is not built to withstand it fails. Did you know that the parts of the WTC that failed were not designed to take the full load, but only part? That's why the parts to take the load stayed up a full half a minute after the parts not designed to do so collapsed. Those parts that collapsed stabilized the lateral load(as they took the vertical load). Without the lateral stabilizers, they simply fell over.

The fact that a core remained as the other parts fell is what happens when you design things in a miesian style. The structure is present. That's how you know where they were before the collapse. You can see them. It was in contrast to earlier designs, like the Empire state building, with covered the structure with ornament.

It could not have been explosives, because explosives do not do this to buildings. Isolated structural failure does.

I explained why it was that way. Please reread to understand. Or better still, get a job, take some structure, engineering, and architecture classes, and learn from someone wiser than I.

Originally posted by Gorman91
reply to post by psikeyhackr

 

sigh.

The leaky roof is irrelevant for things being designed conceptually and how they actually work in real life. Please do not pull a strawman to try and further a case that you've already failed.

ROFLMAO

You brought up the Lily Pad columns not me.

What something is designed for and its actual performance are two very different things. Perhaps a good example that I know of is Frank Lloyd Wright's Lilly pad column, Look it up.

Like what did that have to do with the design or supposed collapse of the WTC?

My model is of a gravitational collapse and you want to bring up the "strawman" of scale. If we don't know the tons of steel and tons of concrete that were on every level then how can anyone scale the physics? I have come to the conclusion in these arguments that the first person to use the word "starwman" usually has a crappy argument and needs to switch to psychological and rhetorical bullsh#.

You have not shown the initial state of whatever is in that photograph. You do not show the ending state. Architects and ID students (Institute of Design) were constantly into appearances and not dealing with the practicality of the substance.

If we had distribution of steel data on both the WTC and Empire State Building I bet they would be similar except for the taper of the ESB. Gravity is gravity.

psik

reply to post by psikeyhackr

ROFLMAO You brought up the Lily Pad columns not me.

Yes, but you seem to have forgotten why.

My model is of a gravitational collapse and you want to bring up the "strawman" of scale

No, actually. The strawman was about the leaky roof. Your inability to differentiate topics is troubling, but explains a lot as to why you have failed to grasp this.

If we don't know the tons of steel and tons of concrete that were on every level then how can anyone scale the physics?

We do. I assume you're 400,000 tons is correct. Simply divide appropriately for the location of the hole. See, thanks to miesian style of minimalism, we know that the building is roughly the same mass all over so that a slice on the 20th floor has about the same mass as a slice on the 75th floor. obviously there would be some differences, but for the relevance, there you go.

I have come to the conclusion in these arguments that the first person to use the word "starwman" usually has a crappy argument and needs to switch to psychological and rhetorical bullsh#.

You're conclusion is unfounded, and based off your opinion, and therefore baseless. Your need to curse to prove your point is nothing more than anger and frustration for not being able to defend your beliefs, which are unscientific.

You have not shown the initial state of whatever is in that photograph. You do not show the ending state. Architects and ID students (Institute of Design) were constantly into appearances and not dealing with the practicality of the substance.

Another assumption. The picture clearly shows a frame, roughly some 4x4 feet if you would like the scale. With modules coiled up with heavy tensile strength. Accusing and assuming all schools of design as caring only of the look of something is nothing short of disgusting on your own part, and shows your lack of knowledge on the topic at hand. There are, believe it or not, engineers who are creative and architects who think structurally.

If we had distribution of steel data on both the WTC and Empire State Building I bet they would be similar except for the taper of the ESB. Gravity is gravity.

No, actually. The empire state building does not have the same mass ratio on the top and bottom as a minimalist structure does, nor is one able to clearly see the structure flowing through the building as is with the wtc. The Empire state building. is far more pyramid-like in its construction, basing, stone work, and other forms, and designed with stone masonry over a metal core. The WTC has very little stone work, and the only stylized asset to it was the islamic-gothic pointed arc style at its base for the exterior, focusing more on interior repetition, again not seen in the ESB.

Gravity is gravity. But mass is not equally distributed in these buildings.

Originally posted by Gorman91
We do. I assume you're 400,000 tons is correct. Simply divide appropriately for the location of the hole. See, thanks to miesian style of minimalism, we know that the building is roughly the same mass all over so that a slice on the 20th floor has about the same mass as a slice on the 75th floor. obviously there would be some differences, but for the relevance, there you go.

OMG, what crap we get from ARCHITECTS.

You are trying to say the same DENSITY all over not the same MASS but it cannot possibly be the same density all of the way down.

Minimalism is for morons that can't handle the complexity of reality.

The steel columns at the top of the building were 1/4th of an inch thick. At the bottom some were up to 5 inches thick, they were also 50 inches wide not 12 like at the top. The building had to cope with the torque applied by the wind and not fall over so I bet there was lots of concrete in the basement levels and probably in the first 5 or 10 levels above ground.

So discussing this for TEN YEARS without demanding accurate data on the distributions of steel and concrete all of the way down the towers is a scientific travesty. Find one of ANOK's posts where he shows the cross section of the core columns.

psik

reply to post by Gorman91


I think you should look at this...


wtcmodel.wikidot.com...

Here is a pic of the base of a column...



52" x 22" x 5"

The mass of the core decreased significantly as it went up. The higher up the less weight the core had to hold.

Originally posted by Gorman91
reply to post by Seventh

 

Simple. The fire itself was enough to generate thermite from the materials in the wall, fire retardant, and desk supplies. It would only take a little bit of this reaction at the right location to weaken the joints of the building, not even the solid bars themselves.

Oh yes, and the temperature of my oven is enough to bake bread if I just throw the ingredient in there.

One question, how did it get hot enough to ignite this magic thermite of yours?

Thermite is not easy to ignite. Thermite has a very high activation energy required to start the reaction. The two most common ways to ignite thermite are:...

...It is important to mix the thermite ingredients thoroughly in order to create a homogeneous mixture. Unless the thermite is sufficiently mixed, it may be difficult to ignite or sustain the thermite reaction.

amazingrust.com...

Hmm? Want to re-think your claims a little?

reply to post by psikeyhackr

OMG, what crap we get from ARCHITECTS.

Cool story bro.

You are trying to say the same DENSITY all over not the same MASS but it cannot possibly be the same density all of the way down.

nope. Mass. See it's all money. You offset the cheaper vertical columns getting smaller with other structural elements. Some architects even sell in volume rather than square footage for this very reason.

Minimalism is for morons that can't handle the complexity of reality.

Not really. It's for those whom are educated enough to do more with less.

The steel columns at the top of the building were 1/4th of an inch thick. At the bottom some were up to 5 inches thick, they were also 50 inches wide not 12 like at the top. The building had to cope with the torque applied by the wind and not fall over so I bet there was lots of concrete in the basement levels and probably in the first 5 or 10 levels above ground.

Yep. But that's not a whole lot of difference when you're talking about 400,000 tons,

So discussing this for TEN YEARS without demanding accurate data on the distributions of steel and concrete all of the way down the towers is a scientific travesty. Find one of ANOK's posts where he shows the cross section of the core columns.

Hoe funny he shows up once you ask. Great.