/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11550010
In my experience eople don't seem to understand the scale of the individual structural units compared to the overall size of the building. They don't understand why a large building collapses differently from something smaller.

Imagine if you built a model of the wtc in your living room with tookpicks, it's that fragile. The reason it stands up is 100+ mph winds are light flutters at full scale. Now imagine someone throwing a toy plane into it that's also light weight but moving pretty fast.

Anyway, if the toothpicks are damaged, and the remaining (steel analogous) toothpicks are heated up until they bend and buckle, they are no longer distribution the load straight down to the next toothpick, it's going diagonal until they snap. Both the supports in the core and external supports were damage. Most of the WTC's structure is external so the giant hole made by the plane can be taken at face value. It wasn't superficial damage to the building, it was critical.

Once a single floor fails, the bottom of the falling section cannot possibly line up and catch the weight, everything hits a floor supported by shitty trusses only designed to hold up one floor of the building, not 3/4 of the entire building.