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I don't know if you've looked recently, but the pacific is, likev pretty big. Maybe even bigger than that. The primary problem with killing carriers is, has be

I don't know if you've looked recently, but the pacific is, likev pretty big. Maybe even bigger than that. The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1] Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb. It's also considerably harder to hide things like drones in big empty spaces. If loitering drones became a serious threat (as opposed to the, you know, literally super sonic missiles the navy has spent the last 40 years planning for) itms pretty easy to imagine anti-drone planes/ships/drones sweeping a large radius around your carriers. [1] Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction. Also if someone was actually using satellites to target american carriers with munitions the americans would probably just destroy the satellites.

phainopepla2 6mo ago
> Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction I know nothing about this really, so forgive my ignorance. Assuming a carrier is found and tracked by a satellite in the ocean, how could it possibly escape the satellite's detection before being targeted by a drone or some other type of munition? If the ship starts sailing in a different direction, the people (or AI) tracking via satellite would notice and adjust, right?
- foota 6mo ago
  I don't believe parent is right, but satelites don't stay in one place unless they're on the equator, because otherwise they have to be moving. This means that you need many satelites to maintain coverage of a single spot. I don't know how many military satelites China has, but I would have assumed it would be sufficient to cover the pacific sufficiently to find an aircraft carrier. (the obvious caveat here being clouds, which are fairly common over the ocean)
  - nerdsniper 6mo ago
    The JWST has a 6.5 meter mirror. The largest (known) spy satellites have a mirror of ~3m diameter. At GEO (geostationary orbit) that would provide an imaging resolution of about 7 meters. An aircraft carrier is about 337x76 meters. So from geostationary altitudes, a satellite similar to a KH-11 would see an American aircraft carrier as a blob of about 48 "pixels". This is probably enough signal to track all aircraft carriers around the globe in real time. It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles) and would have enough electricity from solar panels to power reaction wheels to stay pointed at carrier groups indefinitely. (~15-year lifespan would be limited by xenon supply for ion thrusters that keeps the satellite in GEO orbit)
    - nradov 6mo ago
      The Chinese Yaogan-41 satellite is in geostationary orbit and might have a mirror in the 4m range. https://www.csis.org/analysis/no-place-hide-look-chinas-geosynchronous-surveillance-capabilities https://www.csis.org/analysis/no-place-hide-look-chinas-geos...
    - wredcoll 6mo ago
      > It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles) Wait, what? Like, this is a whole bunch of extremely unreliable numbers being stacked on top of each other to reach an unsupported conclusion, but how is a 50 square mile field of view supposed to find something in the middle of the pacific?
      - joha4270 6mo ago
        The satellite moves, so every orbit it captures a globe spanning strip that is 50 miles wide (here uncritically accepting the 50 miles figure). And the carrier isn't going to be in the middle of the pacific, its going to want to launch strikes, so its going to be within (say 500 miles) of Chinese military targets, which does narrow down the size of the haystack somewhat. But yes, this is a significant challenge. On the modern battlefield it is usually significantly harder to find something than to kill something after you have found it.
- rawgabbit 6mo ago
  I believe satellites are usually in an orbit. They can’t follow an carrier for example. The satellites may be in a constellation that can track the carrier. That is why anti-satellites weapons have been developed. E.g., a jet fighter flies straight up and then fires a long range missile. https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Types_of_orbits https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
  - peterfirefly 6mo ago
    Do you think a carrier can very far in the couple of hours it takes for a satellite to orbit around the Earth?
    - nradov 6mo ago
      A carrier can likely get far enough to generate a miss. Missiles and drones have very limited sensors so in order to hit anything another platform has to cue them with a fairly precise target location. In other words, an adversary like China would need to have enough satellites, submarines, and/or patrol aircraft to maintain a continuous target track long enough to make a decision, launch the weapons, and have them fly out to the target. Current thinking is that China could probably do this inside the first island chain but would struggle to put the pieces together further out in the open Pacific Ocean.
    - rawgabbit 6mo ago
      My understanding is to track something like a carrier the satellite has to be in low earth orbit. Those circle the earth about every two hours. So it is not so much the carrier outruns the satellite; it is the satellite outruns the carrier. https://eos.com/blog/types-of-satellites/ https://eos.com/blog/types-of-satellites/
    - greedo 6mo ago
      If the carrier is aware of the overflight (and I assume the USN isn't run by complete idiots), it can adjust course after the overflight. And at 30 knots, can be 100s of miles away from its initial location when the satellite returns. Now satellite constellations make it harder, since their numbers limit this strategy. But currently, none of the know systems utilize SAR like the LEO satellites, so they wouldn't function well in bad weather. They'd have to rely on optics which can be severely degraded.
- space_fountain 6mo ago
  Some quick Googling implies China has satellites capable of tracking shipping via radar from geostationary orbit. I'm not really convinced that aircraft carriers can hide these days?
  - Schiendelman 6mo ago
    Those satellites KNOW where the freighters are going, and check in every day on progress. They aren't looking for something that's intentionally sailing in an unpredictable direction (with no radio emissions in wartime).
    - space_fountain 6mo ago
      Why not? It's not exactly hard? The exact capabilities aren't public, but there are companies that provide daily synthetic radar captures for the whole globe and similarly companies that do this for imagery. It would take ages but I think you and I could both right an algorithm to classify if an image or high map has an aircraft carrier in it? Even if you can't get data for the whole globe taking a photo of a 10 mile of ocean every 10 minutes and shifting the center based on where a boat isn't hard. There aren't that many aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers and tanks are both capable machines built and designed for a different environment than we have now. They can still be useful. Most countries don't have the ability to image the whole globe or lob weapons across an ocean, but I'm pretty skeptical they'd survive long in a war with say China
      - Schiendelman 6mo ago
        I understand you don't think it's hard. It's hard. I'm trying to provide information to help people here understand why. What you're proposing doesn't work. Are you interested in understanding why it doesn't work?
        space_fountain 6mo ago
        Yes, I am interested in understanding why this is hard
tehjoker 6mo ago
Yes, if you keep your carriers out of striking range they are invincible! lmao
- wredcoll 6mo ago
  You don't need to be out of striking range if they can't find you, that's the entire point.
  - tehjoker 6mo ago
    I meant the carriers striking range. They’re invincible but useless. Iran pushed our carrier group far outside of striking range without midair refueling (very dangerous to do in an active war zone). This is because they can blow holes in the ships from the shore. In the Vietnam War (“the resistance war against america to save the nation” as the vietnamese term it officially), American carriers were stationed 90mi off the coast at point yankee because there were not sufficient anti ship capability. This resulted in the horrific pounding of the country (Operation Linebacker I, II for example). Things have changed (for the better).
tempest_ 6mo ago
A carrier battle group can easily be seen and tracked by commercial satellite constellations. At minimum they travel with 6 or 7 ships and leave a wake a mile long and they only go tens of miles an hour, it isnt a speed boat. Here is an Indian carrier (formerly Russian) on google maps and the US ones are large https://www.google.com/maps/place/14%C2%B044'30.3%22N+74%C2%B006'37.9%22E/@14.7417429,74.1095604,512m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d14.7417584!4d74.1105396?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQxNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/place/14%C2%B044'30.3%22N+74%C2%... I think people forget how many satellites are pointed at all parts of the planet. They are used for crop reporting and weather and all sorts of shit. It isnt the 1960s where only the super powers have them and they drop rolls of film.
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  Satellites aren't pointed at "all parts of the planet". They're generally taking regular photos of known locations, when the right type of satellite passes over. That's where you get lucky shots like the one you noticed. Then that satellite has to orbit, and there isn't another one nearby just ready to take another photo. Then the carrier changes direction...
  - tempest_ 6mo ago
    Sure any single one but there are many companies, some with hundreds of satellites in orbit at any given time who will point it where ever if you pay them enough Which is why you get things like this https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/05/satellite-firm-planet-labs-to-indefinitely-withhold-iran-war-images.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/05/satellite-firm-planet-labs-t... An aircraft carrier is not that fast, if you see it once you know roughly what radius of circle it is going to be in for a while (ignoring the fact that they are likely going somewhere for a reason its not their job is to say out of sight) edit: aha that company literally lists it on their website https://www.planet.com/industries/maritime/ https://www.planet.com/industries/maritime/
    - wredcoll 6mo ago
      This is literally the point: it's easy to tell them to point a satellite at beirut and get pictures every 3 hours or whatever, it's much more difficult to tell them to point at a location in the middle of the pacific ocean... because you don't know the location in the first place. Beirut doesn't move around a lot. Carriers do. While there are a lot of satellites pointing at the earth at any one moment, this isn't some kind of Hollywood super screen showing a real time image of the entire pacific. You just see whatever small patch the satellite happens to be pointing at. And again, ignoring the part where america would probably start shooting down satellites.
nerdsniper 6mo ago
China is putting containerized missile launch tubes and drone launch systems on their container ships. If these get widely deployed at some point, there could come a time when there will be weapon systems already on-location in all of the major ports of China's adversaries. Most naval facilities have civilian ports nearby. Despite the nuclear reactor, aircraft carriers won't stay in the fight long if their supply lines are disrupted. And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it. At the end of the day, we rely more on nuclear weapons and MAD to deter these kinds of major hostilities between powerful countries. Talking about how conventional weapons match up is a bit of a red herring. The only thing that would change that would be very reliable nuclear missile/warhead interception systems - and I don't think any country even has a roadmap to such a thing.
- carefree-bob 6mo ago
  20,000 drones could hit a carrier and not sink it. 100,000 drones would not sink it. Not if they all landed direct hits. It's like firing a handgun against a tank. You need more oomph. To sink an aircraft carrier you really need like 10 direct hits with hypersonic missiles. Or a couple of hits with a torpedo. If you are lucky, maybe even a single torpedo hit. People underestimate how hard it is to sink a ship. You really have to attack it below the water line, from the bottom. A single torpedo is more effective than 100,000 drones when it comes to sinking big ships. What drones could do, is damage the runway and radars and other equipment that would constitute a "mission kill" -- e.g. the carrier has to withdraw for a period to fix the damage to equipment on deck. But now think a little bit -- the drones have limited range. They have to be launched from somewhere. So just launch missiles from that location. You get the same thing -- a mission kill. You don't need a million drones. And the missile will have much larger range than the drones, and will cause more damage. So the bottom line of all of this is no US aircraft carrier would venture near Chinese shores in the event of a war with china. That is probably because those shores would be lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway, as would ours. So what do you need the drones for?
  - nerdsniper 6mo ago
peterfirefly 6mo ago
If a network of hydrophones can track submarines, why can't they also track carriers?
- jandrewrogers 6mo ago
  The oceans are unreasonably large, you would need an astronomical number of hydrophones to get any type of coverage. Hydrophones are primarily placed in choke points for this reason.
  - discodave 6mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS Both the US and China have newer more advanced capabilities than a 50 year old system... > [SOSUS] was the primary cuing system that antisubmarine forces used to localize and potentially destroy targets for over forty years, but secrecy largely kept that fact from the fleet. The lack of strong fleet support was a factor when budget cuts after the Cold War fell heavily on the surveillance program. Driving cars down every street in every advanced country to take photos seems ridiculous, but Google did it (StreetView) and the US DoD has more money than Google...
    - jandrewrogers 6mo ago
      Yes but the scope limits coverage.
- deleted 6mo ago
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nine_k 6mo ago
Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit. The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable. Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely. Most anti-air weapons are pretty expensive to fire, because they were intended against high-value targets like planes or cruise missiles. They are insufficient and wasteful to fire against hundreds of small, inexpensive targets. It's like having a shotgun and a sledgehammer, but fighting against a swarm of hornets. Despite a large advantage in damage-dealing capacity, you quickly become incapacitated.
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  On your first point - it is much more difficult than you think to "reasonably track" a vessel. There's no hardware just sitting there to watch what direction the carrier moves next. Satellites have to orbit - that's why you only get new photos of ground targets once or twice during a news cycle. Carrier movement patterns in wartime are designed to avoid reacquisition. Finding the things is not trivial. Finding them twice is even less trivial.
- gizmondo 6mo ago
  > IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. That's a hallucination, Moskva was by all accounts sunk by a couple of conventional anti-ship cruise missiles.
  - jandrewrogers 6mo ago
    Also, the ship appears to not have been operating any of its defensive systems at the time. It was a proverbial sitting duck.
- 6mo ago
hedora 6mo ago
What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones? The only thing I can come up with is “war crimes”, but, as Iran pointed out, if you can afford an aircraft carrier, you have trillions of dollars of easily hit civilian targets, so you pretty much automatically lose if the other side retaliates in kind.
- wredcoll 6mo ago
  > What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones? What makes you think they can't? Ignoring some kind of dedicated anti-drone missile systems that they could equip (if you're just hitting drones you could probably carry like 500 tiny missiles or something, who knows), you can just go and destroy whatever platform is carrying the drones, since your carrier aircraft is pretty much going to outrange it by definition.
mcv 6mo ago
The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.
- defrost 6mo ago
  Despite which US carriers are frequently "sunk" during war games. All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005. France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.
  - mcv 6mo ago
    Diesel-electric subs seem to be the bane of carriers. I'm aware of Dutch, Portuguese and Swedish subs that have "sunk" carriers during exercises, and often together with a significant part of their fleet. But I do wonder what the starting conditions for those exercises were. The sub's underwater range is limited (although Swedish subs seem to be better than others) and the have to come up every once in a while, at which point they're vulnerable. There's plenty of places to hide near coasts, but I can imagine that on the open ocean, it might be a lot harder for a sub to get close enough.
  - wredcoll 6mo ago
    Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses, which is why the americans have like 11 of the things, and it's definitely important not to become over confident after years without serious naval challenges, but it's also reasonable to consider all of the mitigating factors involved in large scale military exercises. I haven't studied the HSMS Gotland incident in any great detail, but just in general for wargames, ships are required to be in certain locations at certain times, stay inside sea lanes, use transponders, ignore certain other ships and in general not completely mess up the existing sea commerce traffic that is trying to go past the exercise area. If your carrier group is literally 1000 miles away from any piece of land and you have full authorization to sink anything that looks even slightly suspicious, it probably becomes considerably more difficult to sneak up and torpedo a carrier. But yes, carriers will get sunk, modern warfare is in large part attritional, but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, that's a great return on investment, but doesn't help you in the slightest if you're now out of submarines and the enemy sails two more carriers into range.
deleted 6mo ago
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phainopepla2 6mo ago

> Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction I know nothing about this really, so forgive my ignorance. Assuming a carrier is found and tracked by a satellite in the ocean, how could it possibly escape the satellite's detection before being targeted by a drone or some other type of munition? If the ship starts sailing in a different direction, the people (or AI) tracking via satellite would notice and adjust, right?

foota 6mo ago
I don't believe parent is right, but satelites don't stay in one place unless they're on the equator, because otherwise they have to be moving. This means that you need many satelites to maintain coverage of a single spot. I don't know how many military satelites China has, but I would have assumed it would be sufficient to cover the pacific sufficiently to find an aircraft carrier. (the obvious caveat here being clouds, which are fairly common over the ocean)
- nerdsniper 6mo ago
  The JWST has a 6.5 meter mirror. The largest (known) spy satellites have a mirror of ~3m diameter. At GEO (geostationary orbit) that would provide an imaging resolution of about 7 meters. An aircraft carrier is about 337x76 meters. So from geostationary altitudes, a satellite similar to a KH-11 would see an American aircraft carrier as a blob of about 48 "pixels". This is probably enough signal to track all aircraft carriers around the globe in real time. It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles) and would have enough electricity from solar panels to power reaction wheels to stay pointed at carrier groups indefinitely. (~15-year lifespan would be limited by xenon supply for ion thrusters that keeps the satellite in GEO orbit)
  - nradov 6mo ago
    The Chinese Yaogan-41 satellite is in geostationary orbit and might have a mirror in the 4m range. https://www.csis.org/analysis/no-place-hide-look-chinas-geosynchronous-surveillance-capabilities https://www.csis.org/analysis/no-place-hide-look-chinas-geos...
  - wredcoll 6mo ago
    > It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles) Wait, what? Like, this is a whole bunch of extremely unreliable numbers being stacked on top of each other to reach an unsupported conclusion, but how is a 50 square mile field of view supposed to find something in the middle of the pacific?
    - joha4270 6mo ago
      The satellite moves, so every orbit it captures a globe spanning strip that is 50 miles wide (here uncritically accepting the 50 miles figure). And the carrier isn't going to be in the middle of the pacific, its going to want to launch strikes, so its going to be within (say 500 miles) of Chinese military targets, which does narrow down the size of the haystack somewhat. But yes, this is a significant challenge. On the modern battlefield it is usually significantly harder to find something than to kill something after you have found it.
rawgabbit 6mo ago
I believe satellites are usually in an orbit. They can’t follow an carrier for example. The satellites may be in a constellation that can track the carrier. That is why anti-satellites weapons have been developed. E.g., a jet fighter flies straight up and then fires a long range missile. https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Types_of_orbits https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
- peterfirefly 6mo ago
  Do you think a carrier can very far in the couple of hours it takes for a satellite to orbit around the Earth?
  - nradov 6mo ago
    A carrier can likely get far enough to generate a miss. Missiles and drones have very limited sensors so in order to hit anything another platform has to cue them with a fairly precise target location. In other words, an adversary like China would need to have enough satellites, submarines, and/or patrol aircraft to maintain a continuous target track long enough to make a decision, launch the weapons, and have them fly out to the target. Current thinking is that China could probably do this inside the first island chain but would struggle to put the pieces together further out in the open Pacific Ocean.
  - rawgabbit 6mo ago
    My understanding is to track something like a carrier the satellite has to be in low earth orbit. Those circle the earth about every two hours. So it is not so much the carrier outruns the satellite; it is the satellite outruns the carrier. https://eos.com/blog/types-of-satellites/ https://eos.com/blog/types-of-satellites/
  - greedo 6mo ago
    If the carrier is aware of the overflight (and I assume the USN isn't run by complete idiots), it can adjust course after the overflight. And at 30 knots, can be 100s of miles away from its initial location when the satellite returns. Now satellite constellations make it harder, since their numbers limit this strategy. But currently, none of the know systems utilize SAR like the LEO satellites, so they wouldn't function well in bad weather. They'd have to rely on optics which can be severely degraded.
space_fountain 6mo ago
Some quick Googling implies China has satellites capable of tracking shipping via radar from geostationary orbit. I'm not really convinced that aircraft carriers can hide these days?
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  Those satellites KNOW where the freighters are going, and check in every day on progress. They aren't looking for something that's intentionally sailing in an unpredictable direction (with no radio emissions in wartime).
  - space_fountain 6mo ago
    Why not? It's not exactly hard? The exact capabilities aren't public, but there are companies that provide daily synthetic radar captures for the whole globe and similarly companies that do this for imagery. It would take ages but I think you and I could both right an algorithm to classify if an image or high map has an aircraft carrier in it? Even if you can't get data for the whole globe taking a photo of a 10 mile of ocean every 10 minutes and shifting the center based on where a boat isn't hard. There aren't that many aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers and tanks are both capable machines built and designed for a different environment than we have now. They can still be useful. Most countries don't have the ability to image the whole globe or lob weapons across an ocean, but I'm pretty skeptical they'd survive long in a war with say China
    - Schiendelman 6mo ago
      I understand you don't think it's hard. It's hard. I'm trying to provide information to help people here understand why. What you're proposing doesn't work. Are you interested in understanding why it doesn't work?
      - space_fountain 6mo ago
        Yes, I am interested in understanding why this is hard

tehjoker 6mo ago

Yes, if you keep your carriers out of striking range they are invincible! lmao

wredcoll 6mo ago
You don't need to be out of striking range if they can't find you, that's the entire point.
- tehjoker 6mo ago
  I meant the carriers striking range. They’re invincible but useless. Iran pushed our carrier group far outside of striking range without midair refueling (very dangerous to do in an active war zone). This is because they can blow holes in the ships from the shore. In the Vietnam War (“the resistance war against america to save the nation” as the vietnamese term it officially), American carriers were stationed 90mi off the coast at point yankee because there were not sufficient anti ship capability. This resulted in the horrific pounding of the country (Operation Linebacker I, II for example). Things have changed (for the better).

tempest_ 6mo ago

A carrier battle group can easily be seen and tracked by commercial satellite constellations. At minimum they travel with 6 or 7 ships and leave a wake a mile long and they only go tens of miles an hour, it isnt a speed boat. Here is an Indian carrier (formerly Russian) on google maps and the US ones are large https://www.google.com/maps/place/14%C2%B044'30.3%22N+74%C2%B006'37.9%22E/@14.7417429,74.1095604,512m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d14.7417584!4d74.1105396?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQxNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/place/14%C2%B044'30.3%22N+74%C2%... I think people forget how many satellites are pointed at all parts of the planet. They are used for crop reporting and weather and all sorts of shit. It isnt the 1960s where only the super powers have them and they drop rolls of film.

Schiendelman 6mo ago
Satellites aren't pointed at "all parts of the planet". They're generally taking regular photos of known locations, when the right type of satellite passes over. That's where you get lucky shots like the one you noticed. Then that satellite has to orbit, and there isn't another one nearby just ready to take another photo. Then the carrier changes direction...
- tempest_ 6mo ago
  Sure any single one but there are many companies, some with hundreds of satellites in orbit at any given time who will point it where ever if you pay them enough Which is why you get things like this https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/05/satellite-firm-planet-labs-to-indefinitely-withhold-iran-war-images.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/05/satellite-firm-planet-labs-t... An aircraft carrier is not that fast, if you see it once you know roughly what radius of circle it is going to be in for a while (ignoring the fact that they are likely going somewhere for a reason its not their job is to say out of sight) edit: aha that company literally lists it on their website https://www.planet.com/industries/maritime/ https://www.planet.com/industries/maritime/
  - wredcoll 6mo ago
    This is literally the point: it's easy to tell them to point a satellite at beirut and get pictures every 3 hours or whatever, it's much more difficult to tell them to point at a location in the middle of the pacific ocean... because you don't know the location in the first place. Beirut doesn't move around a lot. Carriers do. While there are a lot of satellites pointing at the earth at any one moment, this isn't some kind of Hollywood super screen showing a real time image of the entire pacific. You just see whatever small patch the satellite happens to be pointing at. And again, ignoring the part where america would probably start shooting down satellites.

nerdsniper 6mo ago

China is putting containerized missile launch tubes and drone launch systems on their container ships. If these get widely deployed at some point, there could come a time when there will be weapon systems already on-location in all of the major ports of China's adversaries. Most naval facilities have civilian ports nearby. Despite the nuclear reactor, aircraft carriers won't stay in the fight long if their supply lines are disrupted. And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it. At the end of the day, we rely more on nuclear weapons and MAD to deter these kinds of major hostilities between powerful countries. Talking about how conventional weapons match up is a bit of a red herring. The only thing that would change that would be very reliable nuclear missile/warhead interception systems - and I don't think any country even has a roadmap to such a thing.

carefree-bob 6mo ago
20,000 drones could hit a carrier and not sink it. 100,000 drones would not sink it. Not if they all landed direct hits. It's like firing a handgun against a tank. You need more oomph. To sink an aircraft carrier you really need like 10 direct hits with hypersonic missiles. Or a couple of hits with a torpedo. If you are lucky, maybe even a single torpedo hit. People underestimate how hard it is to sink a ship. You really have to attack it below the water line, from the bottom. A single torpedo is more effective than 100,000 drones when it comes to sinking big ships. What drones could do, is damage the runway and radars and other equipment that would constitute a "mission kill" -- e.g. the carrier has to withdraw for a period to fix the damage to equipment on deck. But now think a little bit -- the drones have limited range. They have to be launched from somewhere. So just launch missiles from that location. You get the same thing -- a mission kill. You don't need a million drones. And the missile will have much larger range than the drones, and will cause more damage. So the bottom line of all of this is no US aircraft carrier would venture near Chinese shores in the event of a war with china. That is probably because those shores would be lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway, as would ours. So what do you need the drones for?
- nerdsniper 6mo ago

peterfirefly 6mo ago

If a network of hydrophones can track submarines, why can't they also track carriers?

jandrewrogers 6mo ago
The oceans are unreasonably large, you would need an astronomical number of hydrophones to get any type of coverage. Hydrophones are primarily placed in choke points for this reason.
- discodave 6mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS Both the US and China have newer more advanced capabilities than a 50 year old system... > [SOSUS] was the primary cuing system that antisubmarine forces used to localize and potentially destroy targets for over forty years, but secrecy largely kept that fact from the fleet. The lack of strong fleet support was a factor when budget cuts after the Cold War fell heavily on the surveillance program. Driving cars down every street in every advanced country to take photos seems ridiculous, but Google did it (StreetView) and the US DoD has more money than Google...
  - jandrewrogers 6mo ago
    Yes but the scope limits coverage.
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nine_k 6mo ago

Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit. The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable. Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely. Most anti-air weapons are pretty expensive to fire, because they were intended against high-value targets like planes or cruise missiles. They are insufficient and wasteful to fire against hundreds of small, inexpensive targets. It's like having a shotgun and a sledgehammer, but fighting against a swarm of hornets. Despite a large advantage in damage-dealing capacity, you quickly become incapacitated.

Schiendelman 6mo ago
On your first point - it is much more difficult than you think to "reasonably track" a vessel. There's no hardware just sitting there to watch what direction the carrier moves next. Satellites have to orbit - that's why you only get new photos of ground targets once or twice during a news cycle. Carrier movement patterns in wartime are designed to avoid reacquisition. Finding the things is not trivial. Finding them twice is even less trivial.
gizmondo 6mo ago
> IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. That's a hallucination, Moskva was by all accounts sunk by a couple of conventional anti-ship cruise missiles.
- jandrewrogers 6mo ago
  Also, the ship appears to not have been operating any of its defensive systems at the time. It was a proverbial sitting duck.
6mo ago

hedora 6mo ago

What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones? The only thing I can come up with is “war crimes”, but, as Iran pointed out, if you can afford an aircraft carrier, you have trillions of dollars of easily hit civilian targets, so you pretty much automatically lose if the other side retaliates in kind.

wredcoll 6mo ago
> What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones? What makes you think they can't? Ignoring some kind of dedicated anti-drone missile systems that they could equip (if you're just hitting drones you could probably carry like 500 tiny missiles or something, who knows), you can just go and destroy whatever platform is carrying the drones, since your carrier aircraft is pretty much going to outrange it by definition.

mcv 6mo ago

The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.

defrost 6mo ago
Despite which US carriers are frequently "sunk" during war games. All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005. France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.
- mcv 6mo ago
  Diesel-electric subs seem to be the bane of carriers. I'm aware of Dutch, Portuguese and Swedish subs that have "sunk" carriers during exercises, and often together with a significant part of their fleet. But I do wonder what the starting conditions for those exercises were. The sub's underwater range is limited (although Swedish subs seem to be better than others) and the have to come up every once in a while, at which point they're vulnerable. There's plenty of places to hide near coasts, but I can imagine that on the open ocean, it might be a lot harder for a sub to get close enough.
- wredcoll 6mo ago
  Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses, which is why the americans have like 11 of the things, and it's definitely important not to become over confident after years without serious naval challenges, but it's also reasonable to consider all of the mitigating factors involved in large scale military exercises. I haven't studied the HSMS Gotland incident in any great detail, but just in general for wargames, ships are required to be in certain locations at certain times, stay inside sea lanes, use transponders, ignore certain other ships and in general not completely mess up the existing sea commerce traffic that is trying to go past the exercise area. If your carrier group is literally 1000 miles away from any piece of land and you have full authorization to sink anything that looks even slightly suspicious, it probably becomes considerably more difficult to sneak up and torpedo a carrier. But yes, carriers will get sunk, modern warfare is in large part attritional, but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, that's a great return on investment, but doesn't help you in the slightest if you're now out of submarines and the enemy sails two more carriers into range.

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