Reply #162: Despite your oddly stilted language

[plaguepuppy]

(and vengeful scenarios - crawl to your own loved one Jake) you really understand much less than you think. And you completely miss the significance of what happens to the penthouses. The sequence is the exact opposite of what you describe - the "sledgehammering" begins at the top of the building with the collapse of the east mechanical penthouse a good six seconds before there is any visible movement in the rest of the building. The east penthouse is the left end of the structure on the roof in the video.(http://www.wtc7.net/docs/wtc_7_cbs.mpg)

You can see the left end drop about 5 seconds into the clip; it falls level with the rest of the roof, then nothing at all seems to happen until about 12 seconds when the west penthouse starts to fall. Before it collapses all the way the whole building begins to collapse, at the ground floor.

So to correct your analogy, someone (please don't presume to volunteer me) hits the roof once with a hammer - nothing happens. Six seconds later you hit it again, and before your hammer is all the way through its swing the whole building begins to collapse, perfectly uniformly, from the ground floor. Silly me, it all seems so intuitively obvious when you put it that way. Buildings collapse like that all the time!

BTW - If it was the top that was weakened the most and so collapsed first, isn't it odd that the collapse then immediately shifted to the ground floor, the strongest and least damaged part of the building? Or is it my "thin veneer of basic construction know how" that keeps me from understanding this simple point?