petit_bateau
Active Member
You'll have seen me comment before on the colouration and heterogenous composition of the explosion. My suspicion is that this photo in the video shows an explosively formed penetrator (from a large shaped charge with e.g. copper ) coming up from underneath; or it is an explosive that is directional in nature & boosted (e.g. aluminium); or both; and we are seeing it breaking through here. That is what I have thought since the first footage came out. It is possible some of its effects are visible in the photo of the under-bridge section where I put a red ring around a hole at water level, though that hole could also have been happenstance, one would need to look more closely to be sure either way. An explosion of this size - that photo is just the early stage - is likely 1,000 kg or so, i.e. a tonne of explosive or so. That is also large enough to give the blast effects that are observable. There isn't much sooting around the upstream side of such an explosion - sooting is an effect caused by low temperature combustions. That is why the sooting is on the more peripheral areas in the photos on this occasion.
You don't install 1-tonne of explosives by some humans clambering around underneath a bridge with a rucsac in 30-minutes !
There is no way this was a charge delivered by a Ukraine manned submarine imho, and in any case I don't think they have a suitable one*. And there is no need for Ukraine to risk an unmanned submarine, and in any case they don't have a suitable one*. But they do have the device which is perfect to deliver a charge like this - an unmanned remote controlled bomb-boat, aka USV. The one that was beached a month ago would be basically operating awash in a sea state that we see here, so it might as well be a submarine from the perspective of most observors and surveillance sensors. Just take a look at the sensor fit and you'll begin to understand how that was operated. You move something like that into final position slowly on an operation like this, it never makes a bow wave or a wake. The larger waves just wash over the top of it. There is no 'dash' to the final position. Instead it manoeuvres slowly and careful, but promptly, to a very precise location which it can determine (remotely-operated, i.e. human-in-the-loop) using its sensor fit even in a degraded GPS environment. It needs to be at a precise location in order for the explosive charge to do its job properly, my guesstimate would be a target box about 2m wide (laterally across the bridge) by about 5m long (along the bridge). As with any boat manoeuvring requires skill, this is not a sort of boat with lots of positional thrusters. I suspect it was about 1m off-centre laterally and the irony is that location probably was more effective than being precisely centred as it also had the effect of flipping the span slightly sideway as well as upwards.
* Other countries do, but not Ukraine. And there are - ahem - issues with using them. Because of my life experiences I know a fair amount about this stuff.
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