Advice to you, Heiwa: Listen to the people correcting your mistakes in these threads. Frankly, they're more credible than you are.
No, Heiwa is arguing that if you remove supports below the upper block, the upper block will twist, change geometry, deform and be subject to local failures inside itself, i.e. it does not remain one solid, upper block any more. Reason is that the forces transmitted by the supports are no longer transmitted to the structure below. The forces are applied to the upper block only.
And what? The upper block hangs in the air?
When the supports are removed, the upper block
falls. The gravitational potential energy then gets converted into kinetic energy, which itself gets transmitted to the lower block
when the upper block falls on it! The mass is still there
regardless of whether it's a solid block or not, and therefore the gravitational PE is still there! Nothing about what you said removes any of that!
Jesus Christ!... I'm not an engineer, and even
I understand this.
Heiwa is thus arguing that if you remove supports below the upper block, the structure below is evidently unloaded!! Reason is that the force transmitted by the support is no longer transmitted.
Heiwa is arguing that removing supports does not imply free fall. There are other supports preventing that.
And those other supports are now overloaded! And it's up to
you to prove that those remaining supports actually subtract enough energy from the falling upper section to allow the lower sections to absorb the KE that falling upper section applies when it hits. I don't see that calculation anywhere.
Again, I'm not a damn engineer, and again, I still grasp the gist of what's wrong with your argument.
Heiwa argues that if you remove a certain number of supports the upper block may be so deformed that parts of the upper block displace downwards (no free fall) and make contact with the structure below (no impact, just contact).
What?? If the upper section is moving into "contact" with the lower section, it
IS impacting. The only questions are the amount of energy delivered by the upper section in making the "contact", and how much energy the lower block can handle. So again, how much energy is subtracted by the remaining supports? Again, you do not provide any proof that there's sufficient "absorption" to even slow the collapse, let alone arrest it. And that's assuming those supports haven't themselves failed by this point to begin with; I'll let the resident experts comment towards
that detail.
Again, I am not an engineer yadda yadda ibid!
Heiwa argues that when contact takes place the stronger structure will evidently destroy the weaker structure at the contact point, e.g. if a thin floor of the upper block makes contact with a vertical column below, the vertical column below will punch a hole in the floor of the upper block.
Etc, etc. Anybody arguing that the upper block destroys the structure below when supports are removed does not know anything about failures of multi-parts steel structures. They should study, e.g. ship collisions.
And you still have to establish how much energy that consumes, and what state the vertical column below would be in after that collision. And whether that vertical column below has had it's own supports compromised by the collision or by other components of the falling block hitting elsewhere. And so on.
And for the love of God, you make the same mistake that Dictator Cheney does in his threads: You ignore the ovewhelming amount of energy in the system due to gravity! It doesn't matter whether there was "no free fall" or not, nor does it matter what the specific sequence of events are, nor does it matter whether the upper block stays intact or separates into its constituent components, what matters is whether the energy released is absorbed by the lower sections or not.
And you do not demonstrate quantitatively that it does! Not here, nor in your paper! You either try to establish that the solidity of the upper block is significant, or you try to establish that misalignments are significant, and you completely bypass the question of energy release vs. absorption in the lower block.
For the umpteenth time, I'm not even an engineer, an architect, or anyone involved in construction, and even blatantly ignorant
I can see this problem. Do you realize how bad your thesis is when
I of all people can critique it? Me, a computer professional with nothing more than a single year of undergraduate physics in college? If you want to make an impact with your argument, stop handwaving and prove to the satisfaction of Newton's Bit, R.Mackey, Apollo20, Architect, rwguinn, Mindanin, Myriad, Dave Rogers, UK Dave, and/or anyone else I've left out that you've indeed properly accounted for the gravitational PE and indeed properly calculated the ability of the lower section to absorb the energy release. Maybe
then we'll take you seriously. But not until you've done that, and not until you've stopped presenting canards about solid blocks or misalignments and stopped creating models that do not properly reflect the Twin Towers composition or collapse either.
Advice! Take a towel, make it wet, cool it in a freezer 10 minutes, wrap it around you head and read my article at
http://heiwaco.tripod.com/nist3.htm a couple of times. If your mother asks you what you are doing, tell her also to read the article.
Advice! Start proving that you've indeed modeled the towers properly and demonstrate that you've calculated the energies properly. Until then, you'll be the one in need of a headtoweling.
).
Pfffffffffffft!!!!
... or those times we upgrade... or those times we gotta apply all those damn patches... 
