This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
Most bridges here do, and often when one needs to be demolished and rebuilt, the military blows it up just for practice.
We still have furrows with ca. 1 meter cement blocks all over the place in Switzerland. They are usually full of shrubs and valuable ecological niches. Also a great defence against Panzers.
Plenty of bridges built in Sweden during the cold war has the openings in the foundation for the same purpose.
That sounds a lot more efficient. Just hanging the explosives isn't going to direct the energy very well.
Maybe that's the point? You need to be able to blow the bridge, but you don't want some asshole to be able to make some homemade explosive to blow it just because they feel like it
Here's a nearby railroad bridge with an opening left for the explosives instead of hooks. Different bridges use different methods.
Thats the same design the bridges here in Austria/Vienna over the Danube have; cold war planning was to delay while our military retreats into the mountains, the plains were thought to be indefensible. Looking at Ukraine will have changed a lot of minds regarding defense planning.
Having been in Tyrol many times, I feel claustrophobic retreating into the mountains. It's basically a funnel. How is it more defendable in modern warfare tactics?
Isn't that a swiss thing as well?
Yeah cold war logic was paranoid. Nuclear bunkers in essentially every building built during the cold war, highway segements were built with fighter jet landing capabilities. And yeah I believe many bridges have explosive “capabilities”.
Norway as well
I have heard the same thing about semiconductor factories in Taiwan. Don't know if it's true or urban legend.
They’re 100% going scorched earth if China manages to make landfall
They’ll literally put the world to a post-apocalyptic state, we can’t get new chips for any electronics in quantity for a good half decade or more.
I wouldn't say post-apocalyptic. Yes, we won't have access to performant new chips anymore, but most critical infrastructure doesn't need performant new chips. It would be a rough period, for sure, but not apocalyptic
And if worst came to worst, the military/government could requisition consumer equipment, or less critical business equipment
Wouldn't surprise me - their chip foundries are the most robust defense they have. If they were gone, Taiwan would be "just another Island that will cause you loads of headache internationally and because of a nearly guaranteed resistance - and you expended a lot of resources for it on top"
Cold-War era strategic Autobahn segments in West Germany had covered shafts at regular intervals.
Rumors had it that they were supposed to be fitted with small tactical nukes in the case the Sowjet tanks were on the verge of crossing the border...
Edit:
Found the relevant Wikipedia article (only in German, though...):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra-Paket
There were also plans to bury nuclear landmines stuffed with chickens across Germany.
Britain: Some of you will be reduced to nuclear ash, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
I never expected to read the term "chicken powered nuclear bomb" in a serious Wikipedia article. Yet here we go!
BTW, I think we have left the mildly interesting context by now... :-)
While reading that I thought they intended to make mounds akin to the ones made by megapodes (sort of chicken-like), but now I understand why people have mistaken a declassified data for an April Fools
Could you give me a source for this?
Preferably a Finnish one. Not by language (although am Finnish so not an issue) but like a reliable source in Finland documenting that's what they're for?
I know we do have lots of infra designed "in case of Russian attack", mainly the direction of roads on the eastern border, but I'd like to read up on this blowing bridges shit.
The sapper units train how to blow up every bridge in their deployment area. Sauce: was in one
So did you do it by hanging shit off the walls or actually putting explosives into structures?
Everything I find about the defensive strategy talks about "charge pits" and "cavities", can't find a single reference to hanging or hooks.
As a dapper you'd use whatever means at your disposal, but as a defensive strategy you're doing with time, why wouldn't you actually make pits to put rhe explosives in? I'm sure as a sapper you understand how much more effective it is to have an explosive surrounded by the structure instead of just vaguely close to it, so that a majority of the explosive force actually goes into whatever you're blowing up instead of harakoille. Right?
Directional charges are a thing
Bigger bridges have … crawlspaces you can set stuff in
Yeah.. so you'd agree it would be these hooks you'd use?
I mean its also very much usable for other stuff like hanging up temporary cables and hoses and in practice its probably used for things like that more often.