Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

lemonde.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 571 posts

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#151

Post by altairprime »

paxys wrote: post #2

Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.

It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. The data will always be at least an hour old and that’s a hundred times as long as it takes for the person to be impossibly labor-intensive to find. Carriers are easier to find once you’re on the ocean in close proximity than someone in a city is, but then so are you — and the carrier has armed warplanes whose job is to prevent you from being within observational distance of the carrier in realtime.

It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Do they drop a buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs perpendicular to the sailing path?

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#152

Post by burnished »

joe_mamba wrote: post #127
gherkinnn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is dangerous to believe a problem goes only as deep as one's understanding of it.

I am always open to corrections from specialists in the field or just any average joes with a different opinion. That's why I keep coming here.

It is absolutely one of the better benefits of this forum

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#153

Post by reactordev »

deepsun wrote: post #89
elif wrote: post #77

I seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier's presence in the Mediterranean sea. We are not talking about stealth vehicles.

Mediterranean maybe (although I'm not sure), but it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean. The empty space is just too big. Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need.

This. You can search for years for a ship and never find it.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#154

Post by matkoniecz »

vntok wrote: post #133
chias wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?

You don't even need a free account on flightradar24 to track its planes, at least two launch from it and pattern circle around it almost daily.

That relies on transponders which can be switched of if decision is taken to do so.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#155

Post by malfist »

SteveNuts wrote: post #118
matkoniecz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This capability is available only to few countries on planet. Not all of them.

I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what makes it so hard to track an object as large as an aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such as a naval port?

Clouds occasionally happen

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#156

Post by matkoniecz »

rtkwe wrote: post #137
chias wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?

Break out the pocket book and pay Planet Labs to do it. You could do it with much less frequent visits than this probably the search area for it every 2 hours isn't very large and image recognition systems are pretty good. The big threat is cloud cover. https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/

What if US government bans US-based companies from selling pictures within area where carrier operates?

(of all "national security" reasons these is one of more reasonable ones)

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#157

Post by rtkwe »

drnick1 wrote: post #132
tokai wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iran has their own satellites. They are also allied with Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.

> Iran has their own satellites. It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed, or spoofed since the war started.

Not destroyed at least. Anything that big would show up pretty clearly, the US and other publish the orbital tracks of anything big enough to be a meaningful spy sat and it being destroyed would show up in that data.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#158

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

rtkwe wrote: post #137
chias wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?

Break out the pocket book and pay Planet Labs to do it. You could do it with much less frequent visits than this probably the search area for it every 2 hours isn't very large and image recognition systems are pretty good. The big threat is cloud cover. https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/

Note that that article is from 2020. Nowadays the frequency is actually down to 90 minutes/1.5hr. The resolution is up as well and they can do massive image capture (~500km^2) and video (120sec stream) from their passes.

Also nowadays they provide multi-spectal capture as well which can mostly see through cloud cover even if it takes a bit more bandwidth and postprocessing.

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#159

Post by rtkwe »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #12
paxys wrote: post #2

Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.

Many countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery, much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.

Anyone with a big enough checkbook can rent 12 50 centimeter resolution overflights a day from Planet Labs. Their 1.3m resolution is maybe enough to track it in decently cooperative weather given enough compute spend.

https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/

Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

#160

Post by bell-cot »

matkoniecz wrote: post #106
charcircuit wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would only need to find it once, potentially at a port, and then you can follow it.

This capability is available only to few countries on planet. Not all of them.

Those are the few countries that France needs to worry about.

Doesn't matter whether Estonia, Honduras, Laos, and Luxembourg can track their carrier, or not.

EDIT: In confined waters (like the Mediterranean), many more countries could track the carrier if they cared to. Even back in the 1950's, the Soviets got quite adept at loading "fishing boats" with electronic equipment, then trailing behind US Navy carrier groups.

Post reply on HN