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This feels like a potential turning point domestically for Russia. I know there was already a lot of social tension due to the battlefield losses and mobilization but this is a massive blow to the “Russia strong” narrative. Possibly exceeds the sinking of the Moskva in terms of propaganda value.

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Just now, Auto Driller said:

This feels like a potential turning point domestically for Russia. I know there was already a lot of social tension due to the battlefield losses and mobilization but this is a massive blow to the “Russia strong” narrative. Possibly exceeds the sinking of the Moskva in terms of propaganda value.

It was on Putin’s 70th birthday, and was a major “see, Crimea belongs to us”.

People are panicking in Crimea

 

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1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

The Russian Ministry of Transport says train traffic will resume at 20:00 Moscow time, more updates to come later.

Almost certainly bullshit to keep people from flipping out in Crimea.

https://rg.ru/2022/10/08/mintrans-poezda-po-krymskomu-mostu-pustiat-k-20-chasam-po-moskovskomu-vremeni.html
 

 

How does one go about clearing that rail bridge?? Surely significant portions of the rail are gone. Just push it into the ocean? Even then, you're risking further damage to the bridge. How does that amount of heat impact the functionality of the concrete supports? Surely they must be replaced. I know Surly has an expert on these things somewhere

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5 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

side note: Reading around, some  folks discussing it who have been over the bridge are saying that vehicles only get checked/scanned leaving Crimea for Russia.  Would make the Russians go batshit crazy if the explosives were on a truck and came in from Russia, or hell, even coming in from Crimea (the FSB would go crazy purging anybody associated with the security on the Crimean side) - either way, they will have to pull at least a few hundred troops into additional security.

I’ll play armchair general for a moment: Kherson looks like it could be fairly close to falling soon.  The Ukrainians actually have had to slow down in some areas because their infantry/tanks advanced so far and so fast that they got outside of Ukrainian artillery/anti-air coverage and that stuff has to be moved up.  

Given that they disabled the Kerch Bridge for rail, and partly disabled the road/wheeled traffic, that’s going to do a few things

  • Freak civilians out - they will make a run on gas (which is happening), and they will fill up any available roads going up through the Melitopol area (see the way outdated map below).  Ukraine is about to have a shitload of the roads/rails between Melitopol and Mariupol under artillery range, if they don’t already, which will freak the civilians out even more, since military traffic will be prioritized over the Kerch bridge, meaning the civilians will have a hell of a time getting out of Crimea.
  • Will force a lot more military traffic through the Mariupol/Melitopol corridor, which again could open it up to Ukrainian artillery, but at the very least, could cause a lot of bottlenecks, slowing down logistics, which, again, Ukrainian artillery and even special operations might have juicy targets that are slow-going or stopped.

Ir Ukraine thinks they are close to taking Kherson, and not that far off from having a lot more Russian logistics near Melitopol under Ukrainian artillery range, this might be the best time to take the Kerch bridge down.  They can’t do a thunder run into Crimea, but they can sure as hell drive the Russians back into Crimea.

Regardless of what they are doing, they are damned close to isolating Crimea if that bridge is down for any length of time.

 

They are also "apparently" also advancing past Starlink coverage. Or is it Elon Musk being a turd.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-spacex-starlink-outages-report-2022-10

Quote

Ukrainian officials reportedly say there have been 'catastrophic' Starlink outages in recent weeks

Ukrainian soldiers have faced outages of Starlink's satellite internet service amid their attempts to free territory that had been conquered by Russian troops, Financial Times reported on Friday.

Two government officials, speaking under the condition of anonymity, told the publication that soldiers had difficulty connecting to the satellite internet service when they entered cities that had only recently been freed from Russian troops.

One government official from Ukraine said that the outages have caused a "catastrophic" loss of communication between the country's military forces. Another official said the lack of internet connection resulted in panicked calls from troops to help lines, FT reported.

Roman Sinicyn, a co-ordinator at a foundation that donates Starlink systems to the Ukrainian armed forces, told FT the issue could be caused by SpaceX representatives working to make sure Russian soldiers couldn't use the technology, as the liberation of some of the areas had not been made public yet at the time of the connectivity issues.

[snip]

But, not everything Musk has done has been viewed favorably by Ukrainian officials. Last week, the billionaire weighed in on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, suggesting the citizens of the occupied territories should vote on which country they'd rather live in. His suggestion was met with heavy criticism. Even Zelenskyy mocked Musk's attempt to solve a real-world crisis on Twitter.

 

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7 minutes ago, Superhero said:

They are also "apparently" also advancing past Starlink coverage. Or is it Elon Musk being a turd.

The intel nerds I follow say it’s the Ukrainians getting ahead of the geofencing/coverage into areas that Starlink still have marked as Russian (Russian areas can’t access Starlink coverage that the Ukrainians use).

While Musk/Starlink claim credit for the Starlink coverage in Ukraine, the US government is paying the bill and providing the units, and Starlink is a part of SpaceX, and while Musk can be a real dumbass at times, he’s not going to have SpaceX piss off the US government, else contracts start going bye-bye.

edit: just to clarify, the geofencing is a part of why Starlink has worked so well for Ukraine and why the Russians have had problems trying to jam it, etc. they’ve got GPS built-in, so even if Russians capture units, unless they go into Ukrainian-controlled territory, they don’t work.

Edited by atomheartbevo
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Not a structural engineer, just civil, but I think the upper portion of the rail bridge is fucked until they can replace beams.  Steel doesn’t need to melt to lose its tensile strength, and once that happens the concrete is doomed as soon as any tensile force is applied.

I think the roadway is easier to repair because it looks like the deck slid off the piers.  The big question is what if the piers are compromised?  That is a months long repair.

 Short summary, that bridge is fucked.  US army corps of engineers would be able to do something quick but they are bad ass at this kind of stuff.  Russia, what engineer doing?

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2 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

The head of the occupation authority in Crimea announced that traffic is flowing on the undamaged section of the bridge. Seems  absurd on its face and will need images and video to believe. Source is Vatnik Twitter, which I don’t link to. 

... and vatnik Twitter is just Putin fan fiction anyway.

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So in some of the videos and footage of the burning rail bridge you can clearly see a section of exposed rebar in one of the spans under the train, looks like the concrete crumbled out. I don't think they're going to be getting much use out of that bridge for some time

Edited by Captainant
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20 minutes ago, KYHorn said:

How does one go about clearing that rail bridge?? Surely significant portions of the rail are gone. Just push it into the ocean? Even then, you're risking further damage to the bridge. How does that amount of heat impact the functionality of the concrete supports? Surely they must be replaced. I know Surly has an expert on these things somewhere

That concrete is shot. There was a recent accident (in CA) where a truck ended up burning under a bridge. They had to demolish the bridge, and they haven't rebuilt it yet.

With bridges over water, they'll use post-tensioned precast concrete sections. They'll need to re-build the forms, which looks fairly complex, pour, and wait 7 days to stress the P-T.

In short, there's no way in hell they're going to re-open the bridge within 2 weeks.

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Can we talk about winter real quick?

Its about to get cold as balls there. I’ve read some stuff that due to the temps, fighting will stall. Is that accurate?

It seems to me that if you are fighting an adversary that can’t even supply wool socks to its soldiers, the best time to strike would be while they are freezing to death in the woods.

Is winter not the best time to annihilate RF forces? 

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For any WWII history nerds out there... October 8, 1943 saw the soviet Ukrainians beginning the process of sealing in the fascist invaders into the Crimea region for liquidation. I wonder if there was any intention with the timing of the bridge attack

Granted, forces are being pushed in an opposite direction this time, but it's pretty crazy that on this day 79 years ago the exact same cities and river crossings were under intense combat in a struggle for survival

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1 minute ago, Bateshorn said:

I was at NIST a few years ago and had lunch with a chemist who worked on the 9/11 investigation.  We had a long conversation about steel.  It’s a lot more fragile then you think when it’s tempering changes.

Anyone who has watched forged in fire could tell you that. 

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9 hours ago, Laxtonto said:

The direction the train was traveling is going to be something that gets overlooked in the initial shock of all of this, but if it was in fact traveling in from Russia, the propaganda machine will kick into overdrive.

If you look at the map, where else is it possible to plant explosives on the train outside of Russia itself? It can be argued that maybe it could have happened on Tuzia Island barely into Crimea, but how would that be possible because the train should be moving the entire time and those troops would be trapped afterwards...

 

I don’t think explosives were necessarily planted on the train, but on the bridges.   If just the train blew up then maybe, but look at the collapsed roadway sections.   Do you see bomb or explosion craters and damage?  No.  The roadway surface and upper areas look generally unharmed, yet large sections just collapsed into the sea as if their support columns were destroyed and they then collapsed.    An explosion on the train would not cause this damage to the separate and lower roadway unless it was massive and destroyed the surface sections of the roadway and train line together, which does not appear to have happened.

I would bet on planted explosives on the roadway supports and if that was the case, then likely explosives placed on the railway too.

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5 minutes ago, bolverk said:

As was pointed out several pages back, if the Ukrainians can get a bridgehead to occupy Nova Kakhovka, then they can cut off the canal that provides water to Crimea too.

Do we think they'll do this?  Assuming that much of the civilian population is still pro-Ukrainian...and will soon be part of Ukraine again...I don't know if cutting off the water is the best move.

I do wish more of those rail cars were burning, btw...

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11 minutes ago, ABSR said:

I don’t think explosives were necessarily planted on the train, but on the bridges.   If just the train blew up then maybe, but look at the collapsed roadway sections.   Do you see bomb or explosion craters and damage?  No.  The roadway surface and upper areas look generally unharmed, yet large sections just collapsed into the sea as if their support columns were destroyed and they then collapsed.    An explosion on the train would not cause this damage to the separate and lower roadway unless it was massive and destroyed the surface sections of the roadway and train line together, which does not appear to have happened.

I would bet on planted explosives on the roadway supports and if that was the case, then likely explosives placed on the railway too.

Some are wondering about a boat of some sort, and Ukraine was caught using unmanned underwater vehicles already.  We saw them using some pretty innovative and somewhat untested solutions to take out the Moskova.

 

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7 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

I don’t think that is going to happen. And it shouldn’t.

 

6 minutes ago, morehornsepower said:

Do we think they'll do this?  Assuming that much of the civilian population is still pro-Ukrainian...and will soon be part of Ukraine again...I don't know if cutting off the water is the best move.

I do wish more of those rail cars were burning, btw...

It had been cut off for years following Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Quote

 

For years, the 250-mile-long Northern Crimean Canal had channeled water from Ukraine’s Dnipro River to the arid peninsula of Crimea. Built by thousands of construction workers from across the Soviet Union, it was a marvel of engineering, dropping about an inch for every mile for the first half of its length to keep the water flowing.

All that changed after Russia, under President Vladimir V. Putin, annexed the peninsula in 2014.

Ukraine responded by damming the canal with bags of sand and clay to prevent the now Russian-occupied peninsula from benefiting from the valuable freshwater. Instead of flowing to Crimea, the water in the canal was used to irrigate the melon fields and peach orchards of Ukraine’s Kherson region, to Crimea’s north.

Ukrainian officials said that cutting off the water was one of the few levers at their disposal to inflict pain on Moscow after the annexation without using military force.

For the Kremlin, the blockage of the canal was a vexing and expensive challenge. Crimea’s residents began to suffer chronic water shortages and occasional shut-offs at the tap.

In early 2021, as Mr. Putin massed troops on the Ukrainian border in preparation for the invasion, some analysts speculated that restoring the flow of water in the canal might have been a major objective for Moscow.

Russian engineers blew open the dam in late February, days after Russian forces invaded Ukraine and took control of the area around Kherson.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/world/europe/crimea-water-canal-russia.html

 

 

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My layman understanding of concrete is that it has enormous compression strength but little…tensile?…strength. 
 

which is what the rebar is for.

so if the heat has altered the steel in the spans, they could buckle under load. And if the steel in the piles/columns is weakened, they could snap assuming there’s a horizontal load being presented by a heavy object moving at speed across, with a huge amount of momentum. 

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9 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

I don’t think that is going to happen. And it shouldn’t.

8 minutes ago, morehornsepower said:

Do we think they'll do this?  Assuming that much of the civilian population is still pro-Ukrainian...and will soon be part of Ukraine again...I don't know if cutting off the water is the best move.

Ukraine cut it years ago, Russians opened it back up after last February. Most civilians still there are pro-Russian at this point, as many of the pro-Ukrainians fled.  Cutting off fresh water would be a strategic military move, as it then forces the Russians to go back to the pre-February problem of bringing in water, which means they have to devote more of their ever-dwindling logistics chain to moving water (the military needs a lot of water, Pauly Shore made a documentary about it back in 1993/94).

Fuck the pro-Russian civilians living there.

airplane-let-them-crash.gif

 

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All of Crimea is basically a giant military base used to support the invasion of the rest of Ukraine. Most pro-Ukrainian civilians fled or got booted out by the Russians. Why the fuck wouldn’t you cut their water? All their water comes from Ukraine anyway. And under international rules of war, occupiers are responsible for providing for the needs of the population in territories they occupy. 

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12 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Ukraine cut it years ago, Russians opened it back up after last February. Most civilians still there are pro-Russian at this point, as many of the pro-Ukrainians fled.  Cutting off fresh water would be a strategic military move, as it then forces the Russians to go back to the pre-February problem of bringing in water, which means they have to devote more of their ever-dwindling logistics chain to moving water (the military needs a lot of water, Pauly Shore made a documentary about it back in 1993/94).

Fuck the pro-Russian civilians living there.

airplane-let-them-crash.gif

 

I was not aware of that...I assumed a large portion of the civilian population was Pro-UKR...cut the water.

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7 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

All of Crimea is basically a giant military base used to support the invasion of the rest of Ukraine. Most pro-Ukrainian civilians fled or got booted out by the Russians. Why the fuck wouldn’t you cut their water? All their water comes from Ukraine anyway. And under international rules of war, occupiers are responsible for providing for the needs of the population in territories they occupy. 

Makes sense, and I was unaware of a lot of those details (makes sense how Russia has made the other occupied territory extremely hostile for anyone that isn't pro-russia).  I bow to your (and the collective Surly) knowledge on this one.  Given all that, I'm 100% onboard with cutting the water off.  Cheers.

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