A 9/11 Debunker states, "the towers were not destroyed via explosive charges from the top down."
A 9/11 Truther responds, "Okay, but if it were true, how would the collapse of each tower look different from what was actually observed?"
Watch a few videos of controlled demolitions using explosives.
I suggest you turn off the sound, if you only wish to focus on appearance.
The first thing you'll notice is that the building is gutted. This is done for a reason. I'll let you guess what that reason is (hint: it has to do with pressure waves).
Next, before the collapse, you will see a series of flashes. These will travel throughout the area to be demolished. To my understanding, they destroy secondary supports and structures that might interfere with a nice, neat implosion.
Immediately after the first flashes, you will see more flashes. Lots of flashes. These cut the main supports.
From there, gravity takes over. understand something: buildings want to fall. Gravity is a persuasive siren, eternally trying to lure all things into her crushing embrace.
Gravity is always acting on a building. The only reason most buildings do not collapes is because their structure is carefully designed to resist this inexorable force. Weaken a part of it, you weaken the sturcture. Weaken enough parts, and the structure will fail.
In a real controlled demolition, all the supports will be severed, withing a very short time frame. This prevents any one support throwing the collapse off-kilter before it gives way.
How does this differ from what you would expect to see in WTC 1 & 2?
For one thing, there are no flashes.
For another, only a few floors failed initially. The rest came tumbling down because the structure could not handle that kind of strain. As an engineering student, I apologizze on behalf of the whole profession if you don't like the idea that engineers didn't have the forsight to factor having the top part of a skyscraper fall on the bottom section into their designs.
It has been explained eloquently in other threads why the upper section would not tip or slide over the side like a tree being felled.
And I hope you can understand that the collapse can only progress in one direction: downwards, into the bosom of that temptress gravity.
However: note all the the debris being jetisoned out to the side. The main mass of the building went the only direction it could go: down.
But on it's way, it displaced some other parts, and sent large chunks of debris flying a considerable distance. Debris which caused considerable damage to, among other things, nearby buildings.
That is why real controlled demolitions use so many explosives in so many places. To cut the supports so that pieces don't fly everywhere.
If we assume that the demolition contractors were utterly amoral, and aside from dropping a building that had people in it (because you can argue that they weren't told it would be occupied, even though the fact that it wasn't gutted would be, to say the least, suspicious), then you could assume that said contractors might concievably be willing to demolish a building, in secret, in the middle of down town New York, without caring about the ejected debris and the damage that might cause.
If you can find a demolition contractor willing to place the required explosives in secret in a public office building in downtown New York, leaving no traces behind at all, on a short schedule, knowing that the demolition will injure or kill innocent people, for a never-before-tried type of demolition and making it progress silently and without visbile flashes or recorded seismic shocks, all the while pulling in the walls in the manner that was observed, then all that's left is to ensure that the plane hits the building around the same area the explosives are (because it would look suspicious if the plane hit the top 5 floors, but the collapse started a good distance below that) and the explosives and their detonators somehow survive the impact and ensuing fires.
So, if you can do all that (and probably a few more things I forgot), then you might have a controlled demolition that would resemble what was witnessed.
Assuming nothing else went wrong.
I will have you note that the situation I put forward is what you and all other "towers were controlled demolition" proponents are claimig happened. It is not a straw man.
Unless, of course, you are either a no-planer, no-claimer, space-beamer, or mini-nuker. Or any combination thereof.
In which case, get help.
