What if the Twin Towers survived 9/11?

I wonder about that. Afghanistan almost certainly still happens, but without a successful hit on the White House or Capitol I have my doubts that Iraq can still be justified in the way it was. It would certainly be easy to write a TL in which the reduced visual impact and death toll is enough to make Bush's (very similar to OTL) attempts to push war in Iraq a major defeat for the administration, and quite possibly a major issue in the 2004 election.




Assuming Saddam still tries to stop weapons inspectors like OTL I'm assuming there will still be some sort of conflict with Iraq but a ground war is very unlikely without OTL 9/11. My money is Bush would have run Desert Fox 2.0.
 

pnyckqx

Banned
How many skyscrapers built off similar blueprints and without adequate horizontal insulation belts exist today? How actually can you isolate a steel frame that way?
Mechanical engineering is not my subject. However, asbestos was removed from buildings as much as possible because of its cancer causing effects. i know that some materials in buildings, such as floors still contain asbestos. i've run into that in situations where components have to be anchored to floors. It's a real pain to drill with the regulation required. Building owners simply did not want to deal with the litigation so they got the product out of their buildings.

The World Trade Tower frame was actually pretty damned strong. Had 9/11 just been a situation where the airplanes crashed into the buildings, it would have probably held.

The problem was that the designers didn't account for jet fuel heating up the support structure to a temperature where the steel it was constructed from lost about 50% of it's load-bearing capacity. Who the hell could have known?
 

b12ox

Banned
Mechanical engineering is not my subject. However, asbestos was removed from buildings as much as possible because of its cancer causing effects. i know that some materials in buildings, such as floors still contain asbestos. i've run into that in situations where components have to be anchored to floors. It's a real pain to drill with the regulation required. Building owners simply did not want to deal with the litigation so they got the product out of their buildings.

The World Trade Tower frame was actually pretty damned strong. Had 9/11 just been a situation where the airplanes crashed into the buildings, it would have probably held.

The problem was that the designers didn't account for jet fuel heating up the support structure to a temperature where the steel it was constructed from lost about 50% of it's load-bearing capacity. Who the hell could have known?
if you have a very high frame of steel and you know that steel can be stressed by heat to the point the frame becomes vulnerable to its weight you want to isolate it every few levels or so, horizontally. I mean to cut termal flow in vertical direction.
 
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