It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
aaahh, i feel as if we are reaching an equilibrium here. avada, i'm going to present a scenario, and i'd like for you to demonstrate the same scenario to see where our ideas come together, and where they do not:
as the falling top section falls on the bottom floors, it meets their resistance, though they do not arrest, or suspend the momentum of the falling section. it will continue to fall downwards with the weight of its load + gravity until its momentum is extinguished as it meets the resistance of the 60+ bottom floors. as you have correctly stated, if this were a naturally occurring collapse, the top section would at this point experience deceleration.as this process continues, and if it has occured naturally, then by the time the top section's momentum has traveled around 20 floors down, it should have either a) fallen over to one side because of asymmetrical damage or b) asymmetrically lodged itself into the remaining 30+ floors that haven't experienced fires or bent steel (as plube's thread points out - if i am understanding it correctly, the lower floors seemed to be split from one another rather than being bent and heated to the point of exhaustion). instead of a natural collapse, the steel columns were no longer visibly standing once the destruction has ended and the smoke has cleared. they have been neutralized - somehow taken apart in a symmetrical fashion. a natural collapse, dare i say, would never cause such an instance.
how does your idea of the building's demise differ or correlate with mine?
I would agree that there was not much bending of columns going on, in fact the connections holding them together were sheared meaning the columns did not need to bend to fail.
The top section of tower 1 at least did acquire angular momentum which did not stop, but as they top section did fragment the angular momentum was preserved as translational momentum. The top floor of the bottom section will offer little resistance against the far bigger top section crashing down into it, it does however slow the acceleration of the top section slightly. You have to understand that the force required to arrest the upper tower would be equal to the required change in momentum of the upper block divided by the time in which this change is made.