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

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

#271

Post by MengerSponge »

ajross wrote: post #243
deepsun wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean I just ran some googled numbers over my envelope, and I get that the Mediterranean sea (great circle distance between Gibraltar and Beirut is 2300mi) is about 14000x larger than the bow-to-stern length (858') of the carrier. That's... not that terribly difficult as an imaging problem. Just a very tractable number of well-reso…

And you've defined a harder problem! Once you've found it once it's much easier to find in the future: it can only go so fast, and it's constrained to stay in relatively deep water.

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

#272

Post by crote »

cwillu wrote: post #166
vntok wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Track not the ship itself but the planes that take off and land on it. Many sites will expose their paths, you'll see the planes circling in a pattern around "some void" - that's the ship.

If de Gaulle is turning off AIS, it stands to reason that it's also turning off the transponders in the air wing.

The US tried this with their Venezuela raid. It resulted in a tanker almost hitting a passenger plane twice in two days. [0]

Turning off AIS while allowing civilian traffic is incredibly risky, and creating a huge no-fly zone in the Med is politically tricky.

[0]: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/16/americas/venezuela-near-c...

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

#273

Post by stavros »

contingencies wrote: post #266
literalAardvark wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MH370 crashed in the Pacific. Look at the globe some day from that angle and compare it to the Mediterranean.

Err, no. The consensus and available evidence including washed up components seems to be that it crashed in the Indian Ocean, that's the (also vast) space between ~Australia and ~Africa, bounded in the north by Indonesia, the Indian subcontinent, and Arabia. It crashed somewhere in the eastern portion, not far from Indonesia and Australia. Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC. The Pacific i…

Are you making the same point as the person you said "err, no" to, or are you correcting the inconsequential details while not addressing their main point?

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

#274

Post by Barrin92 »

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.

That's not really the point. The issue is that a soldier almost certainly without a lot of thought ended up leaking information that he wasn't aware of leaking.

And furthermore identifiable information of a particular individual, which people can use to for example find out what unit he is deployed with, which may give you information about what the mission is about and so on.

In WW2 when transmitting morse code individual operators used to have what was called a 'fist', skilled listeners could identify and track operators by their unique signature. This was used during world war 2 to track where particular individuals and units were moved which gave people a great deal of information not just where but what they were up to.

If you leak the Fitbit information of a guy who foreign intelligence has identified as being part of a unit that's always involved in particular operations you didn't just give something obvious away but potentially something very sensitive.

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

#276

Post by Gitechnolo »

Sanzig wrote: post #202
throwaway894345 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do these work? I would think radar would have a very difficult time seeing a ship against the backdrop of the ocean from so high above. Is the satellite bouncing radar waves off the side of the ship as the satellite is near the horizon? Even if you can detect a ship, I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that…

SAR operates in side-looking slant geometry. Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you. Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come straight back towards its origin…

[dead]

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

#277

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

cbsks wrote: post #128
deepsun wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really don’t want to work for the defense industry, but I have to admit that they do have very fun problems to solve. You know there are people at NRO who are dedicated to ship tracking via satellite. I assume they can easily track ships without cloud cover, but how do they do it when it’s cloudy? Heat signatures? Synthetic Aperture Radar? Wake detection?

ELINT and SAR.

For the first one, just look at wikipedia lists of government says that fly as little triangular constellations, like Yaogan 9A, 9B, 9C on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan

Those are ELINT birds that use multilateration to spot emitters globally.

SAR can spot wakes far, far, larger than ships using the same techniques as SAR measuring ground erosion, etc.

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

#278

Post by jmyeet »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #23

This is a common problem across militaries. It is difficult to stop soldiers from leaking their location if they have access to mobile phones and the Internet. Individual cases are usually a combination of naïveté, ignorance, and an unwillingness to be inconvenienced. It still happens in Ukraine, where immediate risk to life and limb is much more severe than this case.

It's this kind of incident that gives me faith that the military isn't hiding aliens and in fact pretty much any grand conspiracy that requires secrecy across a large group of people for long periods of time can pretty much be dismissed immediately.

One of my favorite examples are the soldiers who leaked classified information to win arguments on online forums [1]. Similar incidents have occurred with a Minecraft Discord [2].

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65354513

[2]: https://www.ign.com/articles/how-classified-pentagon-documen...

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

#279

Post by wahnfrieden »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #269
cbsks wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don’t want to work for the defense industry, but I have to admit that they do have very fun problems to solve. You know there are people at NRO who are dedicated to ship tracking via satellite. I assume they can easily track ships without cloud cover, but how do they do it when it’s cloudy? Heat signatures? Synthetic Aperture Radar? Wake detection?

I wish defense paid better. The problems are infinitely more interesting than ads. And it’s not like social media is a saint anyway.

Hmmm on the one hand murder, on the other hand ads
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