chrisl

Collecting them as part of Russian victory conditions.

Collecting them as part of Russian victory conditions.

but we need a washing machine flavor item for sure

The Kerch straight also has a max depth of less than 20 m (at the Black Sea entrance), and depth of 10 m at the Azov entrance, with a lot of it less than 6 m deep.  So nobody is sneaking a big sub underneath.  From the way the road is sitting it doesn't look like the water is very deep under the part that blew.  It's hard to find depth maps online in a minute or less, but there's a really old British map that shows a long shallow spit under the route where they built the bridge.  That would also partly explain why they built the bridge on the long route that they did. They have to dredge the ship channel regularly and the depth will change fast as you get outside the channel.

That looks like a newer version of SOPHIE. I was playing around with those, heck, it must have been 15 years ago now, and even then ISTR it could derive remote grids, although I assume that all the things you'd expect - power consumption, interface, reliability, accuracy - have improved.
Hmm, could that one derive remote grids? I'm second guessing myself now. It could certainly do polar missions really quickly and easily, which is great since polar is a superfast way to get rounds on target from a cold grid.
Edit: yeah, I'm sure it could do remote grids, but as I recall you had to plug it into a GPS unit, it didn't have that natively. But the remote GPS combined with SOPHIE's LRF and gyros did the business.

So maybe China thinking a peaceful, stable world is good for China?  Seems so.  

There was a huge spray of water, but it came after the bridge hit the water.
All that stuff that much of twitter is calling "burning material" raining down is almost certainly just water droplets from the splash being swept back over the bridge (and through the field of view of the camera).  You can tell from the various video before & after the explosion that there was a strong gusty breeze coming from the northeast (the road side), and there are tons of lights all over the bridge.  The water droplets will scatter a lot of light (think laser light show, or using fog to make a laser beam visible) and will also retrotrflect light (why you don't use high-beams in fog) so that the light reflected back from lamps near the camera will make them appear very bright.
The bent deck is pretty well scorched, consistent with the neighboring deck.  This pic shows it, though the segment closest to the explosion is at an angle where you can't see the surface.
 

It doesn’t have to be nearly that hot to lose strength.  Even ~200 C you have to derate it by about 10%, and about 50% by 500 C, depending on the steel.  So you can relax out the prestress at temps much lower than where it gets soft.

It doesn’t have to be nearly that hot to lose strength.  Even ~200 C you have to derate it by about 10%, and about 50% by 500 C, depending on the steel.  So you can relax out the prestress at temps much lower than where it gets soft.

And one more, this is how hot the train fire was:
https://streamable.com/0tow6w
Melting steel is 'really' hot (I'll leave it to others to google).  Steel rebar loses its strength well below melting point.  Ergo the bridge is damaged, and may not last very long.

Regarding damages suffered by the bridge here is opninn of "Civilian Girkin" ask Nesmyan. Basically, he says the bridge was built with violation of safety code due to lack of required technology in RU for supports/foundation columns. As a result, an explosion could lead to fluctuation of structure and damage we see.
 

I'd say that (maybe) the biggest news right now is not Kerch or the Kyiv attacks.  It's the attacks on infrastructure in NATO countries.  What will these countries do?  What will NATO do?  What will the majority of the public want in these countries? 
Clearly Putin is betting that his nuclear threat will allow him to make these attacks on NATO countries w/o any response, in the hopes that there will then be pressure put on UKR to make a bad deal, soon.  This could have profound affects going forward.
Hopefully people in EU will just get really angry and we'll see more pressure on RU and more support for UKR.  And the first thing to do is to kick RU off security council and call it a terrorist state, with all the implications of that.  I think leaders have resisted officially labeling Putin a terrorist because that's impossible to walk back later, but we past that now.  

Guys were in a proper place in a proper time. 
Kalibr, for example, has march speed 0,8M (and 2-2.5M at the target), so it can be intercepted with some probabbility with MANPAD. 
 

He missed the fact that there is also a train ferry and all the required facilities just next to the bridge. According to wiki article it stopped operation after the bridge was opened, but I think it's a safe bet that it can be re-commissioned again quite quickly.
Still if RU are forced to use the ferry, it will be a huge inconvenience. And the ferry itself and associated facilities would be a relatively easy targets, and rather hard to fix/ replace.

Has anybody verified that Ted Kaczynski is still actually in prison?

If you watch the video from under the rail side a few times and step back and forth through the frames it looks like the truck is on the correct span and also likely over the spot where the hole is.  It's super annoying to do, because the guy didn't hold his phone steady and you can't just put your finger over the truck on your screen and then shuttle forward - the location of the phone moves in that time.  And just to make it more annoying, Russians seem to be just as bad about inappropriate use of portrait mode as the Ukrainians. 

A truck bomb is almost as easy as blowing up a fuel train if there's a war on.  Especially if one of the belligerents is Russia.
They're shipping tons of stuff across the bridge to support the war.  It wouldn't be that hard to either identify a shipment of explosive stuff, like HE shells, and stick a GPS trigger in with it, or just fabricate some paperwork that says there's *supposed* to be a truck bomb in the back.  It wouldn't say "Truck Bomb, Qty 1" but "200 rounds of 152 mm shells" or something like that.  Russia isn't very computerized - the IDs people use are largely typed or handwritten.  Shipping docs are likely all typed and handwritten.  There's probably not some easily accessed databased to check all shipments, or some kind of protocol for calling to check if a truck is full of good bombs or bad bombs (the evil bit isn't set in the data record).  Sometimes the easiest way to hide something is in broad daylight.  When the logistics system is already broken, it's even easier.
It would certainly be easier to blow up an oil tank car.  You could even put charges with GPS triggers on a bunch of tank cars in random places east of the bridge this week and just make sure they have a couple weeks worth of battery. Some of them are likely to end up burning on the bridge. Put them all in different locations on the cars, because once one goes up they'll start searching that spot on all the cars.

And still nobody has posted a picture of the front side of the hole.
If it's a truck bomb we should see the trailer frame imprinted in the asphalt around the hole (if not embedded).
If it's a clean hole it's a missile.

Meteorite
Norse God
Baba Yaga's Hut
I'm pretty sure it was a truck bomb, but I'm willing to accept missile.  I'd like to see the top road surface to see if that big hole is in the righthand lane.  On the way home from getting groceries I came up with my own conspiracy theory: while the truck was parked for 6 hours someone could have put a homing target on it (or maybe they just shipped a homing target as freight) and once the truck was getting onto the bridge for sure, the missile could have been launched in the right direction to pick up the truck as a target at the right time. If the bridge has cell service you could do it with an iPhone and a missile that has the "Find my...[target]" app.

Has anybody verified that Ted Kaczynski is still actually in prison?

I’m in the missile camp for two reasons: 
1. Russia wouldn’t want to admit that Ukraine has a heavy long range missile. 
2. Ukraine wouldn’t want to admit it has a heavy long range missile.
Thus, every other explanation under the sun will be posited, claimed, hinted at and asserted.

I'm open to whatever truth comes out, if any, about the Kerch bomb.  RIght now mostly looks like truck bomb.  but that's not conclusive, so internet is going nuts.  What Steve said does carry some weight -- if RU says it's truck bomb, there's good chance it's not truck bomb.

Meteorite
Norse God
Baba Yaga's Hut
I'm pretty sure it was a truck bomb, but I'm willing to accept missile.  I'd like to see the top road surface to see if that big hole is in the righthand lane.  On the way home from getting groceries I came up with my own conspiracy theory: while the truck was parked for 6 hours someone could have put a homing target on it (or maybe they just shipped a homing target as freight) and once the truck was getting onto the bridge for sure, the missile could have been launched in the right direction to pick up the truck as a target at the right time. If the bridge has cell service you could do it with an iPhone and a missile that has the "Find my...[target]" app.

Apologies to Gary Larson

There is no missile guidance system that works like that I know of, and the timing necessary would be extraordinary if not impossible. 
 
Anyways, here is a whole thread on why the truck we saw explode was probably an exploding truck: