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Spot on. To add to this, the Navy knows those satellite tracks. It's one thing to spot a carrier in port from a days old image. It's another to find it actively

Spot on. To add to this, the Navy knows those satellite tracks. It's one thing to spot a carrier in port from a days old image. It's another to find it actively evading you in wartime. And regarding the satellites themselves, also agreed. I really believe that success at sea is going to depend a large part on success in space, and many countries know it.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
What possible action can a carrier take to evade satellite that can take daily photographs? Its not a plane, it cant travel a thousand kilometers in a day. It can only be withing a limited radius of it's initial position I would expect that every major nation keeps track of every carrier on a daily basis
- lumost 4y ago
  Precision targeting of hypersonic ballistic projectiles is very difficult. While landing ballistic missile within 100 miles of a carrier is trivial, direct hits with conventional weapons require high precision measurements of carrier velocity, and position. The inbound weapon has very little time to correct its trajectory, and few sensors which will be effective at hypersonic velocity at the ranges required.
- dariusj18 4y ago
  A carrier can travel ~700 nautical miles in a day, which would be around the width of Texas. That is not a small area to search, ~1,539,380 SNM. Obviously you could narrow it down based on where you think the group is travelling to, etc, but if they are trying to not be found, day old data puts you in a tough position.
- ckozlowski 4y ago
  It's like finding a needle in a haystack. Find an extremely tiny object (relatively speaking) in millions of square miles of ocean. A carrier is fast. 30+ knot speed, likely more (top speed is classified.) Going with 30 knots gives you 720 nautical mile radius of action, or 2,156,746 square miles. This is to say nothing of the satellite's capabilities, or the back-end systems needed to find objects in the photographs. There's better ways to go about it though, and the open source satellites taking photos are probably the worst for this job, to be brutally honest. But some examples: The Soviets use to fly radar satellites to search for US carrier groups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A The Chinese are suspected to have their own satellites for this purpose, though they are passive in nature, searching for electromagnetic emissions from the ships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan (Look up EMCON on how this is countered.) But in short, it yes a carrier can still hide, though it's tricky. And this is without active measures being taken. And the Carrier Group Commander will have intelligence notifying them of when the overhead passes are. With that, they can start piecing together what the kill chain looks like, from getting that data down to the ground, the time it takes their analysts to find the carrier in it, get that data to command, and then down to the assets to take action against it, plan a sortie, and get the weapon out to where it is...during all that time of which the carrier is free to maneuver and take other counter measures. It becomes a game of cat and mouse. It's rather dated now, but the classic book "Red Storm Rising" illustrates some of this and how it plays out.
  - nradov 4y ago
    The carrier strike group commander also has some limited capability to shoot down satellites in LEO.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

What possible action can a carrier take to evade satellite that can take daily photographs? Its not a plane, it cant travel a thousand kilometers in a day. It can only be withing a limited radius of it's initial position I would expect that every major nation keeps track of every carrier on a daily basis

lumost 4y ago
Precision targeting of hypersonic ballistic projectiles is very difficult. While landing ballistic missile within 100 miles of a carrier is trivial, direct hits with conventional weapons require high precision measurements of carrier velocity, and position. The inbound weapon has very little time to correct its trajectory, and few sensors which will be effective at hypersonic velocity at the ranges required.
dariusj18 4y ago
A carrier can travel ~700 nautical miles in a day, which would be around the width of Texas. That is not a small area to search, ~1,539,380 SNM. Obviously you could narrow it down based on where you think the group is travelling to, etc, but if they are trying to not be found, day old data puts you in a tough position.
ckozlowski 4y ago
It's like finding a needle in a haystack. Find an extremely tiny object (relatively speaking) in millions of square miles of ocean. A carrier is fast. 30+ knot speed, likely more (top speed is classified.) Going with 30 knots gives you 720 nautical mile radius of action, or 2,156,746 square miles. This is to say nothing of the satellite's capabilities, or the back-end systems needed to find objects in the photographs. There's better ways to go about it though, and the open source satellites taking photos are probably the worst for this job, to be brutally honest. But some examples: The Soviets use to fly radar satellites to search for US carrier groups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A The Chinese are suspected to have their own satellites for this purpose, though they are passive in nature, searching for electromagnetic emissions from the ships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan (Look up EMCON on how this is countered.) But in short, it yes a carrier can still hide, though it's tricky. And this is without active measures being taken. And the Carrier Group Commander will have intelligence notifying them of when the overhead passes are. With that, they can start piecing together what the kill chain looks like, from getting that data down to the ground, the time it takes their analysts to find the carrier in it, get that data to command, and then down to the assets to take action against it, plan a sortie, and get the weapon out to where it is...during all that time of which the carrier is free to maneuver and take other counter measures. It becomes a game of cat and mouse. It's rather dated now, but the classic book "Red Storm Rising" illustrates some of this and how it plays out.
- nradov 4y ago
  The carrier strike group commander also has some limited capability to shoot down satellites in LEO.