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

lemonde.fr

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

#311

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

mrguyorama wrote: post #291
Sanzig wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar. This is why the Zumwalt and other low observable designs are going back to roughly tumblehome hulls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#/media... If only it could actually do anything. I genuinely don't understand how we refused to retrofit any weapon system to the gun mounts. We have 5inch guns.…

A Zumwalt with 5 inch gun offers almost no mission capability above a simple coast guard cutter.

They're putting hypersonics on it because they've got 3 hulls and might as well get some value out of them, but not because it's what you'd design for from scratch.

The Zumwalt program was dumb from day 1. It was driven by elderly people on the congressional arms committees that have romantic notions of battleships blasting it out.

The reality is since the development of anti ship missiles, sitting off the coast and plinking at someone is suicidal, even if you have stealth shaping and uber guns of some sort.

It was a DoA mission concept.

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

#312

Post by rustyhancock »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #204
elif wrote: post #88

An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters above the shore for about 28 miles. So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.

Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation? Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?

This isn't a novel problem.

Detailed maps of military and other sensitive areas have been created through run maps from fitness watches[0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

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

#313

Post by nanoparticle »

About 3 years ago, a former russian submarine commander accused of a missile attack in Ukraine that killed 23 civilians, was shot and killed, apparently after his route was tracked via Strava

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-...

https://gijn.org/stories/investigations-using-strava-fitness...

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

#314

Post by greedo »

mrguyorama wrote: post #291
Sanzig wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar. This is why the Zumwalt and other low observable designs are going back to roughly tumblehome hulls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#/media... If only it could actually do anything. I genuinely don't understand how we refused to retrofit any weapon system to the gun mounts. We have 5inch guns.…

The Zumwalt class are being refitted to carry CSP. And the boutique gun system is really a complex thing, it's not like packing in a bunch of VLS containers.

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

#315

Post by kelnos »

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.

Sure, but there's a big difference between using nation-state resources like spy satellites, and using a public API exposed by a fitness app.

Not everyone can use spy satellites, and even if we're only talking about nation-states, many (most?) countries do not have spy satellites.

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

#316

Post by mrguyorama »

altairprime wrote: post #151
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…

>It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work

We saw how from the Houthis and US military: You send a helicopter with a few dudes with guns. Marine vessels are unarmed, including the people on board. They can't fight off or run from the helicopter.

If for whatever reason that's not an option, you shoot it with the 5inch gun on a destroyer. Maybe a warning shot across the bow first. Maybe you literally ram it with the destroyer if you are feeling weird, as China and Venezuela have done. Awkwardly, when Venezuela did that, they rammed a vessel that just so happens to be reinforced for ice breaking, so the warship was damaged and the cruise ship was not really.

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

#317

Post by Wololooo »

losvedir wrote: post #190
throwaway27448 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and watch anime.

In my day, playing video games and watching anime didn't imply a network connection.

Boy, do I have news for you!

But joking apart, almost everything is connected and calling home these days...

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

#318

Post by connicpu »

jcalx wrote: post #85
paxys wrote: post #2

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

I would have thought so too but Naval Gazing has a short series [0] on why it's not as dire as one might think. An aircraft carrier's location being "secret" in this case is just one layer of the survivability onion [1] anyhow. (Caveat that as someone who takes a casual interest in this, I can't vouch for accurate this is at all.) [0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1 [1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star…

Not hidden from nation states with access to real-time satellite imagery, but more rustic guerilla operations usually don't have such sophisticated access
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