Kinophile
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Posts posted by Kinophile
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https://www.kyivpost.com/world/two-top-russian-officials-defect-seek-asylum-in-france.html
I've no idea how reliable the KP is.
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8 hours ago, chrisl said:
It's not a wasted attack with a one-off truck bomb. It still will slow down transport across the bridge by both rail and truck since they have to crank up inspections. And it's not like they're going to be efficient about inspections - they haven't shown any efficiency in logistics since Feb. And if they don't crank up inspections they'll get bombed again.
The rail bridge may also have some pretty severe hidden damage. At least one discussion of it I saw claimed that it's ballast in a steel pan, rather than reinforced concrete. If it's true, it probably heated up the steel much faster than it would heat through concrete, and the segment that had the extended fire would be very weakened and susceptible to deformation and eventual failure if they run heavy trains across it. Unfortunately the bridge construction doc that was linked a few days ago only has detail on the road bridge, not the rail bridge, so I haven't seen if it's true about the ballast-in-a-pan thing.
Ref steel pan, my posted pictures earlier corroborate that:
The poured concrete must have rebar in it otherwise it would rapidly (ie just months) crumble apart under the pressure, expansion contraction and vibrations (the photos so far do indicate its in fine condition other that the struck areas).
Im not saying its a wasted attack as such, it obviously had a great effect and the political timing was just *MWAH!*.
I just want to see more than a one off strike.
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On 10/13/2022 at 4:30 AM, The_Capt said:
Dismounted Infantry are like sandflies, they get into everything and drive you nuts.
Lmao
So true.
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1 hour ago, pavel.k said:
I hope main UKR forces regrouped for attack from another direction (Snihurivka?) and left just blocking force there.
The second UKR is often the actual boot that does the real a$$-kicking.
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2 hours ago, Haiduk said:
Aftermath of shooting on firing range in Belgorod oblast. Reportedly during PKM firing practice two tajicks turned around and opened fire to the line of soldiers, awaiting own turn. Officially 11 dead, 15 wounded, unofficially 22 dead, 16 wounded
One of shooers - tajik Amizonda Tojiddin, was mobilized to 138th MRB
And some also about relations inside Russian army. Here is fresh video, how Russian citizens, natives of Kazakhstan punish Russian for his words "I will slaughter kazakhs" (probably because Kazakhstan rejected to support Russia)
Nothing most worst for usual Russian Vanya conscript exists when he turned out to the unit with Caucasians old-servicemen (on Russian slang "ded" - eng. "grandpa"). Caucasians, especially Chechens, Ingushs and Dagestanians humilitate, bully and beat up Russian conscript and even contractor soldiers. In less grade this also true for Syberian and Far East minorities like Yakutians, Buriats and Tuvians, which also bully Russian conscripts.
On the photo - favorite type of funny photos of Caucasians - to write on heads or backs of Russians slogans like "Dagi / Chechens / Ingushs are power"
Ah yes, more quality NCO action, shutting down the hazing and building a strong, cohesive team spirit built on mutual respect and professional leadership.
Oh wait.
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See, this is yet another reason I'm conflicted on a truck bomb, or possibly that if UKR did the attack with a VBIED that it was one time, opportunistic attack and not a beginning of a campaign (like we saw with Saki). I want it to be a missile because that would signal the start of a campaign but there's been no follow up and no missile debris found (that we know of).
The railway is a tougher construction, but if you can take out some pillars it's a hugely complicated task to repair. The best place to hit is definitely the actual bridge span itself, as that's enormously hard to fix.
UKR would absolutely have known that any damage to the main road/rail sections is repairable. Even the crazy bottle necks now will eventually clear.
If you're going to hit the Kerch it's gonna take a campaign - hit the bridge span, then hit the specialised repair equipment and personnel (sorry Russian Engies not sorry) then hit the approach spans, hit the repair crews and gear for that.
Basically, make the biggest initial mess you can then hit the clean up crews. And keep doing it, for weeks.
Thats exactly what UKR did and continues to do at Kherson and I'm very sceptical they would waste a chance on the Kerch with a random truck bomb.
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1 hour ago, Offshoot said:
It looks like a close in wind map, for which this colouring is common ( https://www.weatherwatch.co.nz/maps-radars/wind/current-wind ). It makes more sense animated and is exaggerated because the body of water is enclosed in land.
Oh very cool
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I'm still a Missile Boi
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6 hours ago, Haiduk said:
Meanwhile Russian PMCs likely leveled up to private army corps, due to LostArmour talks
They write PMCs enlisted about 6000 of jailed and enlisting is going on. Also "usual" enlistment is continuing and for September as if two brigades trained. In presert time Wagner as army corps has about five brigades, artillery brigade (howitzers+ heavy MLRS+Malkas), engineer-sapper brigade, aviation squadron (Su-25, but likely it will be expand soon to mixed aviation regiment with MiG-29SMT and Su-24M)
"Wagner coprs" already almost completely conducted warfare in Bakhmut itself and is taking some neighbour areas - this allowed to free one LPR "regular" brigade to move it to "Kharkiv front"
Weapons of PMC units:
This is some mistakingly opinion, that Russians don't want to make war. Wagner public in Rissian social media VKontakte has about 300 000 subscribers. Russians maybe don't want to go in regular army, but Prigozhin's propaganda and really more successfull actions of PMC in Syria, Africa, Ukraine, than Army make the hiring much more good alternative for motivated people.
Russian PMC have very tough, skilled and motivated comamnders and main core of "sergeants" and veteran-soldiers - they are either real "dogs of war", passed not one local war, or just people, who like to shoot, kill and plunder and they can keep in tough subordination other new-enlistment people. They can be w/o military experience (though in Wagner 2014-2016 were only experienced troopers) or just venturers, or money seekers, or jailed, but unlike in army they can't be "refuzenik" in PMC. They can be shot out by own commander immediately. And nobody will know about it.
Other strong side of PMCs - their commanders, like and their Azov vis-a-vis are real "battllefield soldiers", and actively absorb best experience of other troops, try some own developments and have much more flexible tactic, that regular Russian army, which deadly stuck to textbooks. So, PMC can have many "cannon fodder" with mimimal training, but actig with crack merceneries under command of "dogs of war" they can achieve results.
What more - motivation and awarding. If you good fighter, you can do fast carrier, and get more money much faster, than in the army. But as told one of Wagner fighters - PMC is a "elite club", but with only one ticket to enter. You can leave PMC only in three cases - death, heavy wound or age retirement.
So, now we can see how to establish this DerliWagner - absolutely illegal military structure for Russian law system, but much more effective, than regular army.
Jesus Christ, it's like as if the Marines were owned by Peter Thiel.
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13 minutes ago, chrisl said:
We need to take all the theories from here and elsewhere, work them into a movie script, and get it shot and released before the mundane true story gets out.
Nick Cage as Putler Stalinovich
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2 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:
Fill yer галоши, mate!
Specs (in Russian) are at front, drawings at the back.
(I'm not a research genius -- well actually I am not bad, I just hit my event horizon of caring about the Bridge whodunnit a while ago. Anyhoo, it was embedded in some tweet or other)
Amazing!
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1 hour ago, chrisl said:
Antonovsky Bridge is reinforced concrete. They still build structures like that around here, but it's taking about 3 years for the construction (not including surveys, design, engineering and prep) of a 2.35 mile elevated people mover at LAX. I think all the columns were poured in place and the deck is all pre-fab. And it's all tied to bedrock, and they've kept the airport open the whole time and managed to speed things up because of the reduced traffic during the apocalypse.
Exactly, thats why HIMARs could smash holes in it but it was like a pen punching holes through corrugated cardboard. Plus, Antonovsky Bridge built mid-80s I believe, when reinforced concrete was very much the primary construction method, esp in USSR. It was built to last, possibly even to weather a nuclear strike to some degree (we know that the south Ukraine coast was a NATO target area).
Ref the Kerch, I noticed that also, the heavy rebar sections down lower. The all metal construction of the parts we've seen ripped away are possibly to reduce weight on tall piers that are already sitting on unreliable ground. The support columns get taller as the road ramps up to the bridge - so more concrete, so more weight on the top and if the foundations are not 100% ideal then using a metal construction for the road surface would reduce weight at the very top of the piers, relieving oppositional lateral force at the the very base of the entire pier/column construction.
This suggests that the UKR attack deliberately hit a section of the bridge that was specifically designed to be lighter, and hence less resistant to a blast from a shockwave. A better constructed bridge would have absorbed the blast wave and immediately transferred it down the piers; but the pier construction is suspect. Re-bar doesnt just strengthen a construction, they also act as lines of force transference with a structure, like highways for energy to pass along. Its possible the pier's design and construction failed to properly transfer the blastwave's energy down to the sea bed and instead actually bounced it back up into the spans, popping them off their meagre pinnings, as @chrisl noted previously.
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12 minutes ago, dan/california said:
It is just an unbelievably crude brute force structure. I strongly suspect it is the most compromised major construction project in quite some time . An all metal structure over windy saltwater seems a little odd. I suspect they chose poorly on the fast, cheap, well triangle. Chose poorly for the linchpin of the biggest war in Europe in 80 years, anyway.
Its not all-metal, its reinforced concrete beams with steel trussing spanning the gap and steel decking to tie the cross section together. There's plenty of all-steel littoral bridges in existence,it just requires extra maintenance, better construction and very good weather protection, e.g using the structure itself to shield vulnerable points, multiple layers of varied types of surface protection. The maintenance aspect is the real make or break; as you note, water environments (esp. saline bodies of water) are super corrosive and abrasive. Skimp on maintenance and structural damage/failure is absolutely inevitable.
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I've been looking for AutoCAD dwgs of the bridge for days, to no avail. Usually with a large infrastructure project like this you'll find studies and sometimes even the actual construction drawings. Engineering or Architectural journals will do an article on the thing, with some stripped down cross sections, plans, etc, maybe an interview with the Engineer/Architect.
With the Kerch - nothing. Nada.
Not a good sign at all when engineers attached to a project either 1) don't want to talk about it or 2) are not allowed to.
Still, there are enough photos from the construction that can give a good idea of how it was slapped together, e.g.:
Thats the railway span on the right.
Better over-head view of the railbed construction.
The above image gives a good sense of just how far apart the road & railway sections are. I assume the lower roadway in the above pic is just a construction access road, removed after completion.
Above gives your basic concrete &steel beam/platform construction.
Typical road section.
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2 minutes ago, chrisl said:
Ice is a mineral if you live in a cold place. Water is molten ice.
I know, I was playing along
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57 minutes ago, chrisl said:
And it’s molten pieces of ice from the bridge hitting the water and splashing all that molten ice from under the bridge into the air.
Molten ice..... You jest, sir.
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11 minutes ago, Artkin said:
The wind is pushing those little fragments? No way. The cars would be flying off the bridge first.
Those fragments have little to no surface area if theyre solid. What else could they be? Thermite chunks? I'd believe it then.
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Yes wind. Stiff littoral breeze. Termite chunks would rapidly descend. It's wind pushing water droplets/spray from both the blast and the road segments hitting the water surface.
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4 hours ago, akd said:
Part of the truck lodged on the bridge structure:
No (or too little) rebar in a primary load bearing structure, built on unreliable and quake prone ground conditions.
That aggregate looks off too.
TiR.
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22 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
So whoever put the labels on is a little off. What they label as “First Trench” is an AT ditch, they even have left the berm up. The “Second Line” is the fighting position.
It is a textbook complex obstacle, assuming mines all along those dragons teeth and ditch. That monster, when sighted and covered would make for an entire breaching op to assault. Of course one needs more than 10km of it on this terrain, unless there is a swamp somewhere to tie it into.
What is interesting is that the UA did not appear to go this way on the defence. Likely because they did not have the resources, however, they were still able to stop the RA advances cold. Another oddity in this war.
There must be more to it. They had 8 years in front of Donetsk.
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3 hours ago, Artkin said:
Something interesting to note in this video is how everything in that explosion is directed toward the left of the frame. Look at all the molten pieces of whatever flying to the left. Nothing is flying to the right.
That's just the wind direction.,no? Standard stuff wind in a coastal strait type.
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3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
It gets tiring to compare Russia to Nazi Germany, but as the saying goes "if the shoe fits, wear it!"
The Waffen SS started out having to source its own equipment from outside of standard military supplies. Anything that was standard kit was done through negotiations. This is why early units were armed with a wide array of foreign contract and, later, captured kit.
This was changed a couple of years into the war where the WSS drew down from standard Whermacht stocks. Initially they weren't shown great favoritism, but as the war dragged on this changed as the political value increased. After the July bomb plot WSS gained even more clout. As the pool of volunteers shrank they were even afforded preferential selection of conscripts.
As the war wound down, Himmler was in nominal command of a large segment of Germany's better armed and mobile forces. At the very end, Himmler was put in command of non-WSS forces on a massive scale.
In fact, let's remember that Hitler allowed for three conflicting ground forces; Heer, Waffen SS, and Luftwaffe. In Russia's case it is PMCs, LPR, DPR, Volunteer battalions (under Army control, but still not pure Army), and the regular Army. I exclude Marines as they are a fairly standard deviation from unified commands.
Historians point to this and say "wow, that was really a bad idea" and yet Putin is doing exactly the same thing. I think it's pretty clear that the results are also similar.
Steve
Not quite the same - Himmler had nothing like the military intent or acumen of Prigozhin. He was a technocrat, stuffed in an over-tight uniform. I don't believe the average Waffen SS would have died for Himmler himself, personally; where as we have recorded conversations of Wagnerites declaring specifically for Prigozhin over Putin. For an autocrat to have one of his more effective military forces developing a loyalty complex away from the Supreme Leader strikes me as very dangerous (for the SL).
WSS had a clear ideology, very distinctly found, formed and tied to Hitler personally. He was its emotional and ideological center of gravity. Himmler had operational control, but Hitler had trumps when it came to loyalty.
Its this difference that I'm highlighting - that Hitler created competing factions and armed forces (as all autocrats do), but all within a deep ideological framework that Hitler himself conceived, developed, controlled and directly lead. Putin doesnt have that, his state "ideology" is more a vague blend of general nationalism and inferiority complex overcompensation, which itslef seems to be in the process of being co-opted by more extreme elements in RUS society; by contrast Hitler was the extreme of the extremists - there was no one further "out there" than him, which meant he could not be ideologically out-maneuvered.
But Putin seems to be chasing the approval of certain power centers and ideological strands in Russian society, rather than creating and defining the framework for everyone else to stay within. He's great at creating legal and beauracratic trickery to keep everyone in place, but at somepoint the ideological fanatics just wont care for that stuff. He's a spy, an inside man, a "system of systems" guy. Hitler was an outsider, highly emotional and extremely imaginative, with a very charged personality that motivated others around him and fundamentally infused his ideology. Putin does not have that charisma or energy - and I'm at the point where I think Putin is extremely vulnerable to a charismatic, ideologically "pure" (and younger!) rival emerging from this disastrous war of his own creation.
I could easily see Wagner mercs fighting off any attempt by the FSB to arrest or mess with Prigozhin. The WSS would never, ever have gone against Hitler in favour of Himmler.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Those shahedsate increasing the burn rate of UKR SAM stocks. Not much yet, but not hard for them to increase. And we know there's more on the way.
If course, this tactic is a double edged sword...