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France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
251–260 of 571 posts
Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. Are we talking about Strava, or satellites? It's not obvious to me that exercise data is any more real time or easy to find than satellite tracking. > It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Shots across the bows are a pretty universal signal.
Oh. Duh, that’s a good point. The plane can shoot in Z-axes. Thanks.
Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
If de Gaulle is turning off AIS, it stands to reason that it's also turning off the transponders in the air wing.
Not at all, depends on the mission. In fact you can spot yesterday's location of the ship right now on flightradar. It was patrolling ~100km below Cyprus's main southern city. Move the timeline to yesterday, find a non-Boeing military plane in that zone, enable flight traces and keep trying planes until you see an ovoidal pattern circling around "nothing"... but that nothingness moves over time.m; that's the ship.
I checked - nothing but commercial air: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?replay=2026-03-19-02:31&lat=...
Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
#254Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be mildly surprised if they not using SAR for this all the time, not only during cloud cover. The Soviet Union was using radar satellites (the RORSATs) to track carriers decades ago.
Neither SAR nor high resolution optical sensing are trivial at panopticon scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTpBMPjjFc is a good overview of what's up there so far, and what's coming as they really try to scale the technology. Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on planes than satell…
> Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on planes than satellites for this.
I'm not sure why you assume this, this is factually incorrect. Satellite based SAR has been successfully used for civilian ship detection applications (traffic management, illegal fishing, smuggling detection, etc) for over three decades. I am sure its military use goes back much further.
> SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for that.
No? SAR satellites take thousands of SAR images of stationary scenes every day. It's true that object motion in the scene introduces artifacts, specifically displacement from true position - this is often called the "train off track" phenomenon, as a train moving at speed when viewed with SAR from the right angle will look like it's driving through the adjacent field rather than on the track. However, this isn't a significant problem, and can actually be useful in some situations (eg: looking at how far a ship is deflected from its wake to estimate its speed).
Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
A commercial jet is both way smaller and faster moving than an aircraft carrier. I suspect this is like saying: why can’t you see the fly in the photo, the turtle is right there!
It can also go over any part of the globe. The aircraft carrier is limited to non-shallow water.
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Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
#257This is a repeating phenomenon, and probably worse on land. Fitness and run tracking apps also reveal troop locations and concentrations on land (location clusters reported by apps targeted at non-local-language audiences stick out like a sore thumb).
Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
We couldn’t find a commercial jet (MH370). Both, while it was still flying in the air and after it was presumably lost in the ocean. They couldn’t track it in the air nor can they still find its remains after looking for it for so long. This problem is not trivial.
The Indian Ocean is both larger and has significantly less traffic than the Mediterranean. And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier.
> And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier.
Surely that's missing a 0 or are carriers really that fast?
Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
#259Seems we need a new digital category for Darwin Awards. This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location. The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs. Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone. Ye…
> This is the modern way to die of stupidity
With how bad the human experiment generally is, I rejoice in the fact that our own stupidity will be our undoing. Imagine if we did things correctly.
Re: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
#260Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
> Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine. At one time I guessed that too, but I've heard navy people explain that it's actually pretty effective. Imagine saying 'pretty hard to hide in North America from a satellite' - it's actually not hard because the area is so large; there aren't live images of the entire area and someone needs to examine them. Oceans are an order of magnitude larger. A significant elem…
>US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area.
pi*(500 miles)^2 = 785,400 sq. miles.