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astrobe_ | on: France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
It's pretty hard to hide it from anything. Its surface is ~17000 m² (a tennis court is ~260 m²), and is 75 m high (~ 25 floors building - probably half of it under water, but still). And that's a mid-sized carrier according to Wikipedia.

It's not built for hiding at all, that's what submarines are for (and that's where our nukes are).

cosmicgadget | parent | next
Well clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's working on it.
chistev | parent
But the ocean is very very huge to find it still.
paxys | root | parent | next
You don't have to search the entire planet. A carrier's general location is always semi-public. There are websites dedicated to tracking them, just like jets. And carriers roll with an entire strike group of 8-10 ships and 5-10K personnel, which are together impossible to miss.

A carrier strike group isn't meant to be stealthy. Quite the opposite. It is the ultimate tool for power projection and making a statement. If it is moving to a new region it will do so with horns blaring.

Obviously troops shouldn't be broadcasting their location regardless, but this particular leak isn't as impactful as the news is making it out to be.

torginus | root | parent | next
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS

Am I supposed to believe we live in a world where this exists, yet carriers are impossible to find and track on the sea?

Besides, modern fighter jets have radars with 400km detection ranges against fighter sized targets.

A dozen of them or more specialized sensor aircraft could cover entire conflict zones.

robotresearcher | root | parent
Of course it's possible to find a giant ship. The interesting parts are that this vector is crazy cheap using public APIs, and the irony of the location source being the voluntary-or-ignorant active telemetry from a US service person.

It's possible to go to the moon, launch ICBMs, and make fusion bombs. It's news when something possible gets cheap and easy. It's also newsworthy when one of the most powerful and expensive weapon platforms in history doesn't have its infosec buttoned down.

justsomehnguy | root | parent
And American carriers never operate alone, it's a whole Carrier Battle Group there.
cwillu | root | parent
The battle group doesn't cruise around in formation, for specifically this reason.