Russia's research bases in Antarctica

So they have an extra year to get the plans in place to make it work... shit happens.

There are no upsides to this just delay and hassle

They might consider building additional ships of thing class after this, while Sevmorput seemed like a dead end 30 years ago it has proven to be very useful lately but fact remains that it was sitting in port for decades before it was recommissioned, that leaves consequences

They have blueprints and shipyard now so they might as well cranck out another one or two

The fact that they would build another few ships on its own shows a potential upside... a delay and hassle is no big deal... it is not like they are sitting on bare ice waiting for these new buildings to arrive... they can get by another year with the facilities they have in place and next year they get the big upgrade.

Tsavo... look at the image of the ship and the parts and pieces stacked high on that rather large ship... it is like a kitset house... except it is actually a kitset compound in the middle of nowhere. Delivering bits at a time, slowly, would not be the ideal way of doing it... what if bits go missing or it is delivered in the wrong order so they can't start building until the last flight delivers its load?

Makes much more sense to deliver it in one go by ship and then vehicle transport across the ice like they planned.

The simple fact is that they are not going to use aircraft to deliver the base.

It will go down next year.

So you were going to get a brand new state of the art school with all the modern features all brand new and shiny and 21st C and shiny and warm and efficient that just makes things easier to do... at first it was going to be this year but now it is going to be done in stages over three years... who cares if there is a delay?

There is no alternative.... and flying everything down on AN-124s is not an option... you would need 500 flights at least and unlike US C-5 flights they wont be from Christchurch New Zealand... they will be over much greater distances and therefore also much much more expensive...

Learn some patience for goodness sake... you are like a child... everything has to be now.

Why the delayed schedule? I get nuclear ships have nigh infinite endurance but it's not like suffer from low payload or something, or is it a limitation to need huge horsepower to go through ice?

Consider it to be like the AN-225 was going to do the job but it has a fault that will take time to fix so instead of a trip with the AN-225 they are going to make three trips with an An-124... but the journey is from Russia to Antarctica and will take a month or two for the voyage and when it gets to Antarctica they need to take it off the ship and transport it by land vehicle to the location of the new base which probably will take a week or two as well and all this depending on the weather... by the time you get everything to the build location... you then have to build it which would also be weather permitting.

Breaking it down into three jobs makes a lot of sense... will be interesting to see how they break it down in terms of loads... it is supposed to be modular so I suspect the centre module first and then the outer modules broken into two separate loads.

Their existing facilities are not terrible AFAIK... these will just be a lot better.

Here is a nice footage for the George's entrance :



But in Russian only, sorry