the upgraded regions in the wtc had like 2.5-3.5 inches of blazeshield. its almost like spray on concrete.
No, it isn't anything like concrete in structural strength, only in superficial appearance. It's well known that blazeshield is quite fragile and can be knocked off by relatively minor impacts; in the Light and Sound Theatre fire, the fire protection had been removed over large areas by impacts from stage flats, which are very light constructions of wood and canvas.
im not sure what ya mean by blazeshield carring the weight. the steel is carrying the weight. the blazeshield is just applied to the steel.
As soon as the thermite ignites, it loses any structural strength it might have. It is then effectively a liquid, contained in a cylindrical vessel, of which the inner wall is formed by the steel and the outer purely of blazeshield. The blazeshield therefore has to hold the weight of the thermite to keep it in contact with the steel.
thats right, it probably will melt!! and thats the point of this observation:
"Dr. Astaneh-Asl said that in some places, the fireproofing melted into a glassy residue."
So if that had been due to thermite, we would know that (a) even more thermite was needed, because some of its heat was wasted on melting blazeshield, and (b) as soon as the blazeshield was melted, the thermite flowed away from the beam, doing no more damage.
one might not have to melt the whole column. take for instance:
One piece Dr. Astaneh-Asl saw was a charred horizontal I-beam from 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story skyscraper that collapsed from fire eight hours after the attacks. The beam, so named because its cross-section looks like a capital I, had clearly endured searing temperatures. Parts of the flat top of the I, once five-eighths of an inch thick, had vaporized.
This is, by rather a convoluted route, a circular argument. You're assuming that the eroded beams are caused by thermite, and based on that assumption you're concluding that thermite could have caused the erosion. (You're also deliberately ignoring the wishes of Dr. Astaneh-Asl, but we don't expect truthers to show basic human decency.) But you're also contradicting the basic premise of the WTC7 wing of the truth movement. Truthers argue that WTC7 must have been deliberately demolished because the symmetry of the collapse indicated that columns were severed with a level of precision only achievable with explosives. It's bad enough that this is then mutated into an unfounded claim that thermite could achieve the same level of precision; you're now arguing that a process that only partly melted structural members by corrosive attack, necessarily over long times - remember, however much truthers like to twist semantics, this beam was not melted, but corroded slowly, as is painfully obvious from its final form - was at the same time capable of the split-second precision required to make part of the building fall at freefall acceleration. As usual, you're taking a number of contradictory elements, trying to gloss over the fact that they contradict one another, and calling the resulting dog's breakfast a hypothesis. None of it makes sense.
Anyway, here's a claim for you to falsify:
It is impossible to produce this effect using thermite. Prove me wrong. Prove that it's possible, using thermite, to erode a steel beam to a fraction of its original thickness, actually breaking through the plates in places, but in such a way that the remaining material is unmelted and identifiable as an I-beam.
When you've done that, maybe someone will take you seriously. Not before.
Dave
