What is designed weight capacity for bridges?
Always wonder how much weight limit of bridge really matters. It's not like bridge would immediately collapse once you run a overweighted tank over it. Consider many truck driver would carry cargo that weighs sometimes double of the weight limit and those bridge seems fine. I would say the weight limit thing only restrict defender cause they need to operate their tanks on these bridge for the long term during peace time.
Raw data:
A serious, 'mainline' roadway bridge: N-30/NK-80/NG-60
The secondary roadway bridges: N-18/NK-80/NG-60
Tertiary bridges: N-13, N-10 or N-8/NG-30 or NG-60; depending on the bridge.
Explanation:
N, NK, NG — classes of the standard loads, such as a tank, a column of trucks, a mob of people; measured in metric tonnes(number, e.g. N-30 means 30-tonne class bridge);
N — baseline load, or a full mass of a single vehicle crossing the bridge as part of the column(!). Put simply, your bridge is 4-lane N-18? That means four lanes worth of trucks, the mass of individual truck should not exceed the limit of 18 tonnes.
NG — tracked load, a limit of mass of a single tracked vehicle crossing the bridge at a time.
NK — wheeled load; the same as NG, only for wheeled vehicles.
It should be noted that it might be perfectly possible to cross a particular e.g. N-10 bridge even for the overweight mutants like Abrams or Leo-2 in a given case. However, if the bridge is not certified to support such loads, in practice that will instantly generate additional demand for engineering support(the bridge must be checked by specialists, lest it might get damaged, partially collapse or even fold under the tracks) and inevitably hinder the manouever, because crossing would be slower than usual, up to and including the possible necessity of having to cross it under the 'one bridge, one tank at one time' crippling limitations. You sure as hell do NOT want any of that, provided you're not criminally suicidal.
P.S. The written above is valid for all ex-Soviet republics.
