Pengwuino said:
Like you said, the amount of equipment to be smuggled in woudl be a huge amount and itd be impossible to hide.
Let me start off by saying that I attribute very low confidence to the probability that the collapse of the towers (or WTC 7 for that matter) was due to anything other than those factors described in the conventional, official NIST explanation.
There are, however, two elements here I'd like to discuss: (1) the amount (and type) of equipment and (2) the placement. At the risk of further fueling conspiracy theories, I would offer up for your collective consideration (before I shoot it down later in this post) the hypothesis that thermite packs, rather than high brissance explosive cutting charges, could have been used to precipitate the collapse by materially further weakening the core columns.
Some technical details regarding thermite (it burns at >2500 deg C and requires no external source of oxygen) and one theory of how it may have been used can be seen at:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/thermite.htm
The following remarks draw on NIST's intermin report Project 6 – Structural Fire Response and Collapse Analysis, dated October 19, 2004 (P6StructFireResp&Collapse3.pdf), which is available at their website (couldn't connect to it just now, but that's where I got it from a while back). (Page references below refer to pages numbers in the pdf file):
http://wtc.nist.gov/
One (of several) major problem with their scenario is that while they postulate placement of the thermite at, essentially, ground level, the collapse does seems to have had its initiating event at the upper stories. So I would amend their scenario by having the thermite packs placed on the central core columns just below the floors where the perimeter column buckling was observed shortly before initiation of the collapse (see p. 9 Inward Bowing of Perimeter Columns Some Minutes Prior to Collapse: WTC 1 South Face Minutes Prior to Collapse: WTC 1 South Face and p. 10 Inward Bowing of Perimeter Columns Some Minutes Prior to Collapse: WTC 2 East Face ).
If the idea was to "help things along" by taking additional measures to ensure a total collapse while avoiding any telltale indications of events outside the "official" plane crash -> building damage -> fuel fire -> building combustibles fire -> structural weaking past collapse threshold -> collapse scenario, then using themite could conceivably fill the bill. No evidence of unexplained explosions; smoke from the thermite reaction masked over by ongoing building combustibles fire; residual indications of molten steel (see whatreallyhappened.com article) explainable by the conversion of the considerable potential energy of the intact towers into heat during the collapse; no embarassing PETN, etc. explosive residue to explain. All observables would be consistent with the "official" scenario and would pass the smell test of knowledgeable observers, like Chief (see his previous posts above - to which I would add my observation that, "If Momma ain't happy, ain't *nobody* happy!).
Under my scenario, the "official" scenario would be "true", at least in terms of the collapse event sequence. It would exploit the relative uncertainties inherent in the the engineering analysis (e.g., estimates of damage due to aircraft impact ranging from "realistic" to "more severe" on p. 23 - Aircraft Impact Damage to WTC 1 and on p. 24 - Aircraft Impact Damage to WTC 2; and also estimates of temperatures reached during the office combusibles fire ranging from "realistic" to "more severe" pp. 45, 47, and 49) to provide cover for the effects of the thermite reaction.
So how many thermite packs would have been necessary in this scenario? If we make an estimate based on only having to melt core columns that either were not severed or did not sustain moderate or heavy damage, then, for WTC 1 (see p. 23), 34 packs (for the "realistic" aircraft induced damage estimate) or 30 packs (for the "more severe" estimate) would have been required (assuming 1 thermite pack per core column). For WTC 2 (see p. 24), the numbers would be 37 ("realistic") or 32 ("more severe").
So for both towers, using this estimation methodology, they would have "needed" between 60 and 74 packs. If they were planning it in advance, they might want to be able to take out all the columns on both towers, so they would have needed 94.
That would be to melt the columns in one place. In order to increase their confidence of effecting a total collapse, they might have decided to melt each column in 2 places (at least one floor apart), so that the total weight of the higher stories could get a good running start on things by ensuring that the initial drop was at least several 10's of feet. This would then indicate, for a high confidence attack, 2x94 or 188 packs.
My estimate, then, would be between 60 and 188 packs. They would have either (1) pre-positioned the packs somewhere below the floor level where they expected the aircraft to impact (and then actually deployed them once the aircraft had impacted) or (2) had them already in place on the columns at the floors they anticipated the aircraft impact to occur. I would rule out (2) because it really strains credibility (which has already been stretched to past homeopathic thinness at this point anyway) to claim that they would make the success of this operation contingent on the pilots being able to hit a specific floor (+/- a few). Hit a building a block wide, yes; but a particular floor? - no. The rest of the plan had kind of an elegant simplicity, which helped ensure its success, and I don't believe any operational planner (whether one of "theirs" or "ours") would risk the success of his enterprise on such a high precision manuever.
(I discount completely the possiblity of having a team large enough to carry 60-188 packs up 90 stories of stairs after the aircraft impacts.)
Using a pre-positioned stash (1) is only a little more credible. They would still have had to count on the pilots getting pretty close to the right floor, count on being able to cover their deployment operations using the confusion ensuing after the aircraft impact, and dealing with a raging fire on floors immediately above them. Oh, and committing near-certain suicide in the process - not one of the more distinguishing characteristics of your average, good-ol-American spook. That would leave having to have a fairly large team of crazed Middle-Easterners hanging around the water cooler that morning. Believe me, I notice it when that kind of thing happens at my office.
So, while the thermite scenario may answer some of the more technical difficulties of the non-mainstream scenarios, unresolved operational problems remain. There are potentially a number of "technically" plausible scenarios which could more or less fit the observed facts, but I haven't seen one yet that successfully challenges the conventional explanation when you consider all aspects of the problem.
quantumkevlar
