How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Canada Guy]

Canada announces a new arms package of what we do best, arty and anoraks, mittens to munitions. 

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6613921?espv=1

 

[Mattias]

4 hours ago, Fenris said:

Noting special, just a quick report with some nice close up vision.

Ah, thanks, first time I see the shell casing ejection port in action, from inside the tank.

 

/Mattias

[Kinophile]

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.

 

 

 

[dan/california]

42 minutes ago, chrisl said:

I agree his analysis is pretty good.  But so far it's clear that all the explody and structury people have never put a camera in a vacuum chamber with a strobe light and a water spray.  Little droplets can be very bright.

The structure of the bridge is why only that one edge is bent down on the adjacent deck.  Each deck looks like it's basically a sheet of thick steel, like the steel plates your local road department uses over trenches, laid across a bunch (looks like 10) of longitudinal box-section beams that run parallel to the road.  At the outer edge of each deck, outside the big rails that support the struts linked to the cross-beams, there are two smaller stiffening elements that look like they're just long strips of plate, probably the same thickness as the deck and not nearly as tall as the big boxes. Those will have very little lateral rigidity compared to the box beams.   The picture from underneath shows this well. 

When the pressure wave hit the adjacent deck, the asphalt has very little strength in tension as it's getting blown up like a balloon.  The shock front is moving fast enough that the air can't get out of the way fast enough to "roll" across the span and it stays a spherical shock front. The asphalt isn't very strong in tension, so it doesn't do much to keep the steel underneath from flexing, and the load is coming from an angle that the road wasn't designed for - the shock front hits it like a big ball bearing from up and to the side, so flexes the deck down and the smaller vertical "rails" more sideways, where they have no strength.  The combination of a stiffer deck and further distance from the center of the explosion makes the bending less dramatic once you get in a little ways from the edge.

And while I'm still in the truck camp, I won't totally rule out a missile (though there don't seem to be any missile parts around).  The explosion seems to have come from the left side of the truck, possibly from something that wasn't sitting on the floor of the truck (about 2m off the deck).  It could be that the explosive was stacked up, but it could also be that a missile hit the upper left side of the truck.  Given the bridge construction, I suspect people are overestimating how much HE it would take to flex it in the middle enough to pull the ends in and let gravity do a lot of the work.

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.

[Battlefront.com]

Lamp posts have been used as indicators for where the truck was at the time of the explosion.  This is an effective way to relate the various videos and pictures to each other.

On the outer edge of both directions there is a lamp post directly inline with a pier and another midway between piers.  In this section, at least, the spans are roughly the same size so the spacing is equal. 

I've ID'd the piers as P1 through P3 and lamp posts L1 through L3, with the ones inbetween expressed with the adjacent numbers separated by a slash.  Span between P1 and P2 is where the explosion happened and it broke into two pieces.  The span between P2 and P3 slipped off but is mostly intact.

Here's the very start of the side video with labels matching the above:

Here is the truck at the frame of the video just before the explosion:

And here's how it looks right after the smoke/fire cleared.  Note that Poles P2 and P2/3 are still attached to the dislodged spans, with 2/3 being below deck height so not visible here.  P1/2 is completely gone from the Crimean side, but the one on the Russian side is tipped over and makes it kinda look like it's still there when it isn't.

Here's a good picture of the way the poles wound up:

It's pretty clear that both the truck and the passenger vehicle next to it were in the same location as the explosion between Piers 1 and 2.

Steve

[Kinophile]

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.

[chrisl]

26 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

 

Typical road section.

 

 

 

That road section makes it look like there's some rebar inside the pavement, but the picture of the face of the deck where the pavement has come off just like smooth sheet steel underneath.

It also wouldn't make any sense to put rebar inside asphalt, which is what most of the road surface is.  Are there some concrete segments?

Edited October 13, 2022 by chrisl

[Battlefront.com]

48 minutes ago, Elmar Bijlsma said:

A question on the dragon's teeth we've been seeing.

If they really want to adopt that along the front, what does that look like, logistically? Where are they getting them in the first place? And then they still need to get the hefty buggers trucked around to where they are needed. That is a big task for a logistical system not exactly wow-ing anyone.

It seems an awful lot of trouble to go to to get a low rent Maginot Line that the Russians cannot adequately man and that the Ukrainian artillery can systematically dismantle the strong-points of whenever they please. And that is assuming the Ukrainians won't simply drive through the "Ardennes".

 

I think it's mostly a PR stunt.  There's no way they are going to do this in enough places to matter militarily.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

I agree his analysis is pretty good.  But so far it's clear that all the explody and structury people have never put a camera in a vacuum chamber with a strobe light and a water spray.  Little droplets can be very bright.

The structure of the bridge is why only that one edge is bent down on the adjacent deck.  Each deck looks like it's basically a sheet of thick steel, like the steel plates your local road department uses over trenches, laid across a bunch (looks like 10) of longitudinal box-section beams that run parallel to the road.  At the outer edge of each deck, outside the big rails that support the struts linked to the cross-beams, there are two smaller stiffening elements that look like they're just long strips of plate, probably the same thickness as the deck and not nearly as tall as the big boxes. Those will have very little lateral rigidity compared to the box beams.   The picture from underneath shows this well. 

When the pressure wave hit the adjacent deck, the asphalt has very little strength in tension as it's getting blown up like a balloon.  The shock front is moving fast enough that the air can't get out of the way fast enough to "roll" across the span and it stays a spherical shock front. The asphalt isn't very strong in tension, so it doesn't do much to keep the steel underneath from flexing, and the load is coming from an angle that the road wasn't designed for - the shock front hits it like a big ball bearing from up and to the side, so flexes the deck down and the smaller vertical "rails" more sideways, where they have no strength.  The combination of a stiffer deck and further distance from the center of the explosion makes the bending less dramatic once you get in a little ways from the edge.

Thanks for that.  I was kinda picturing that in my head, hence the caveats in my post wondering about the damage.  It still seems to me that elevation of the point of detonation has something to do with it, but it probably wouldn't matter much if it was 2 or 5m off the deck.

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

And while I'm still in the truck camp, I won't totally rule out a missile (though there don't seem to be any missile parts around).  The explosion seems to have come from the left side of the truck, possibly from something that wasn't sitting on the floor of the truck (about 2m off the deck).  It could be that the explosive was stacked up, but it could also be that a missile hit the upper left side of the truck.  Given the bridge construction, I suspect people are overestimating how much HE it would take to flex it in the middle enough to pull the ends in and let gravity do a lot of the work.

 

The Dnepr bridges sure did take a beating and kept their overall structural integrity.  That's not to say that newer construction techniques aren't up to the task, but I should think they aren't going to have the robustness of a properly done older style bridge.

Steve

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, Battlefront.com said:

Thanks for that.  I was kinda picturing that in my head, hence the caveats in my post wondering about the damage.  It still seems to me that elevation of the point of detonation has something to do with it, but it probably wouldn't matter much if it was 2 or 5m off the deck.

The Dnepr bridges sure did take a beating and kept their overall structural integrity.  That's not to say that newer construction techniques aren't up to the task, but I should think they aren't going to have the robustness of a properly done older style bridge.

Steve

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.

[Letter from Prague]

Ouch

[Taranis]

Some news from the Energy front
France has started delivering gas to Germany, according to GRTgaz

Quote

 

France began Thursday to send gas directly to Germany as part of European energy solidarity to overcome the drying up of flows from Russia, announced in a press release the manager of the French gas transmission network GRTgaz.

The first deliveries of odorized gas to Germany began at 6 a.m. at 31 gigawatt hours / day, passing through the border town of Obergailbach (Moselle) at the gas network interconnection point, said the manager.

 

 

[Kinophile]

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. 

 

Edited October 13, 2022 by Kinophile

[sburke]

Kremlin Isolated as Just Four Nations Back Russia on Ukraine Annexation (msn.com)

[Mattias]

4 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

I'm still leaning towards Hrim-2, but not so much that I dismiss the possibility it was a truck.  The facts as we know them today support either, with small question marks for each possibility.  Yup, the truck theory has some inconsistencies that need to be resolved as does Hrim-2.

Steve

In the very long podcast I mentioned earlier Theiner, @noclador on twitter, tackles the ATACMS vs. Hrim-2 issue. He rules in favour of the former because, as I understood it, of the two only ATACMS (being a non ballistic missile) has the attack profile that would allow it to 1. seemingly completely ignore air defences and 2. cause the pattern of damage seen on the bridge. He hypothesis that the US might have given Ua access to the ATACMS guidance system, to mount on a Hrim-2 (3?), but ultimately discards that idea as being too improbable. 

 

 

[Mattias]

Double post

Edited October 13, 2022 by Mattias
Double post

[The_Capt]

6 hours ago, dan/california said:

So they are building this behind their current lines, creating a very limited number of places their forces can pass through to take up new positions. With the AFU having drones, Himars, and apparently mines that be delivered by HIMARS? I do hope we get video of how this brilliant plan works out.

Well the standard practice is to do a passage of lines and pull back over the obstacle in good order.  My bet is the RA will hold forward while thinning out, leaving fodder to die up front.

You can drop scat mines by a lot of indirect fire systems, UA could try to plug safe lanes but the RA would be in prepared positions behind them.  You would bag some but it is not going to solve the problem of the complex obstacles.

[The_Capt]

6 hours ago, sross112 said:

Those bottom two pictures I think are just for reference to show people what the mangled stuff in the top two pics is. At least that is how I interpret it, otherwise, yes I'm with you that there is no way those are from a blown up truck.

@The_Capt above talks about how this is the conventional way of doing a defensive belt, but I'm with you in that I don't see it being an advantage in this war. Just by looking at how things that we've noted for a couple thousand pages have been done differently and the ISR advantage the UA has this looks like a good way to get lots of RA troops killed. 

The UA used fortified hard points and bunkers for years but they weren't facing the PGM capability that the RA is. I'm still trying to work through it in my head but if you were defending against an opponent that had superior ISR and PGMs I'd think your only viable option is to very very mobile. Any soldiers in fixed positions need to be dug in really really deep and kept well dispersed. Any vehicles or exposed pillboxes will just get hammered.

As the UA I don't think you even really try to attack it. I think you just sit back and hammer targets. Turn it into an attritional game and capitalize on your ISR, PGM and range advantages. Let the RA feed as much into the defense as they are willing to lose. Wait until there is nothing worth wasting an arty shell on and then walk through.

I am not sure it will work either.  These defences are designed to stop a lot of armor and IFVs, we had fields of them pre-planned in Germany.  Problem is we have not really seen massed armor employed in this war, except maybe at Kharkiv but in narrow circumstances.  The UA appears to be pushing out with light infantry/SOF, finding.  Fixing with ISR (UAS very widely employed), and then finish with precision artillery, rinse and repeat. If the RA tries to use armor, maul with smart-long range ATGMs and hammer logistics in depth.

Large complex obstacles will do much less against that.  Dismounted Infantry are like sandflies, they get into everything and drive you nuts.  They will make small breaches in defensive belts and crawl between hard points.  This was quaint in the past as these raids could only do so much damage but now when they are linked to PGM, armed with UAS and carrying ATGMs that can fire and forget kill a vehicle at 3 kms with 90% accuracy, suddenly they go from nuisance to manoeuvre.

[The_Capt]

6 hours ago, JonS said:

Aye, the tone of the tweet though was "lulz, silly russians. They're just giving away 10km!"

Yes, the “Russians suck” bandwagon has become about as much groupthink as “The Russians are giants” narratives were at the beginning of this thing.  The Russians are in bad shape and are experiencing multiple systemic failures at just about every level of warfare; however, that obstacle belt looks professionally sighted and constructed for purpose to me.  Now wether it will be part of a much larger effective defensive, is another question.

I would highlight, again, the Russians are fighting by the same playbook we use. The UA is playing by a new set of rules they have had to evolve to by necessity.  A real risk of “Russians suck” is the implied “Ya but in a real war we would do the same but correctly, because we do not suck”.  This is pretty much the exact same narratives coming out of European militaries before the First World War.

[The_Capt]

4 hours ago, Elmar Bijlsma said:

A question on the dragon's teeth we've been seeing.

If they really want to adopt that along the front, what does that look like, logistically? Where are they getting them in the first place? And then they still need to get the hefty buggers trucked around to where they are needed. That is a big task for a logistical system not exactly wow-ing anyone.

It seems an awful lot of trouble to go to to get a low rent Maginot Line that the Russians cannot adequately man and that the Ukrainian artillery can systematically dismantle the strong-points of whenever they please. And that is assuming the Ukrainians won't simply drive through the "Ardennes".

 

Logistically a massive effort.  It has been awhile and my old tables are in boxes but SWAG is for 1000m of a single line of what they are doing in that picture, and they need to do 3-5 of these in depth to really make anything close to a Maginot/Siegfried line:

- roughly 2000 dragons teeth, likely coming in at a ton apiece.

- somewhere between 1500-3000 AT mines depending on density.  At the high end that is about 27000 kgs or 13 tons.

- at least a line or two of AP mines.

- barbwire and defensive stores - a lot.

- gas and supplies for engineers doing all the digging

That is for a single km and a single belt.  Multiply times 3 at least per km to make a full belt.  They are doing 10kms according to the tweet, and they will need to do 100s of kms.  So for example to do 100km of full belt = roughly 1.5 million AT mines, which is about 13,500 tons of munitions in mines alone.  And we have not factored in concrete emplacements, bunkers or anything really elaborate.

[Huba]

So it begins:

 

[A Canadian Cat]

8 hours ago, dan/california said:

Those bit and piece parts of the truck suspension are the most convincing thing I have seen as far as it being a truck bomb.

I fail to see how finding truck parts on a damaged bridge section where trucks were traveling when the explosion happened, favours the explosion being caused by a truck bomb over a missile strike.

[chuckdyke]

11 minutes ago, IanL said:

I fail to see how finding truck parts on a damaged bridge section where trucks were traveling when the explosion happened, favours the explosion being caused by a truck bomb over a missile strike.

Truth is the first casualty and a Russian investigation is a foregone conclusion. Have you pick Ukraine trained by Seals or SAS will be the outcome, whether it is true or not.

[Taranis]

"Ukrainian soldiers move their position, on a front line near Toretsk, on October 12, 2022. YASUYOSHI CHIBA / AFP"
* For the first guy with two boxes : bulletproof vest  CIRAS ? MSA parcalete RMV ? Paul Boyé 'Tigre' (looks like the same we had (French '11-'12) in Afghanistan)

Edited October 13, 2022 by Taranis

[Taliessyn]

5 hours ago, Kinophile said:

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.

 

 

 

I think the reason there are no design resources is "by design" 

Red an intersting article while looking into the bridge (from a while ago - during construction):

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russia-s-crimea-bridge-could-collapse-anytime/

One of the comments from the article: "Russian construction engineer Yury Sevenard expressed identical concerns about the geology, seismic activity, and extreme weather conditions. And in December 2016, Yury Medovar from Russia’s Academy of Sciences said that the bridge is being built without a proper design, since nobody wants to take responsibility for it."