SBU: Russians lost 50% of 120-mm mortar shell reserves after strike on Toropets arsenal last fall
SBU: Russians lost 50% of 120-mm mortar shell reserves after strike on Toropets arsenal last fall
Ukraine struck the 107th GRAU ammo depot in Russia's Toropets last September. SBU says the attack destroyed 160,000 tons of ammunition.
Beautiful
170 000 tons of shells : this blast
15 000 tons of TNT : Little Boy *
21 000 tons of TNT : Fat Man *
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man
(* nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki)That seems impressive, but isn't really useful without knowing what each shell contains in terms of TNT explosive potential. The weight of a "shell" includes the casing and the projectile, too.
I wonder what the potential really is - even at 10% explosive power, that’s still in nuclear range! Wild.
Edit: Ah, I found it here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toropets_depot_explosions
The blast wave spread up to 200 mi (320 km) and was estimated to have a TNT equivalent of either 200 to 240 tons or 1.3 to 1.8 kilotons of high-explosives.
So shy of a nuclear explosion by nearly 2 orders of magnitude.
I have no idea where to look for information about Russian artillery shells, but wikipedia has info on a few American 105 mm and 155 mm ones. They all have about 15% of the weight accounted for by explosive. 15% of 160,000 is 24,000
uhhh most of that just burned down and there were multiple blasts, biggest of which was either 1.5kt-ish or 0.2kt-ish depending who you believe with measuring. and there's a lot of metal there too, not everything is explosive
Anyone have any kind of ideas on how much they have left (+producing)?
It feels like the russian warmachine starts to crumble.
According to this, the French intelligence assumes the Russian artillery shell production to be 3,7 million per year. That translates to quite precisely 10 000 shells per day. Here's the image that shows the numbers:
Yeah they have shells, and if they don't North Korea provides. That does actually not matter (that much), because funnily they are running out of barrels for their artillery systems.
They don't have the technique to make new barrels, let that sink in.
BTW whaat is that paper looks like it comes from ANPE or La Poste :-D
Seems like putting all your eggs in two baskets isn't a whole lot better...