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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

They would have to find them first. That's still non-trivial, even with satellites.

Yea, a lot of people underestimate the speed at which a carrier can move. So much so that it would be outside the blast radius of any ICMB targeted at the carriers last known position when the missile is launched. Most ICBMs cant change trajectory mid-flight.

Not a MIRV blanket though.

/me points to SM-3

Probably need THAAD or GMD for MIRV because of the altitude and speeds

Actually yea it can because the more re-entry vehicles you use the smaller the blast radius of each will be. the fireball radius of the largest current US-made warhead is only .71km at 455kt on the Trident missile (W-88). It carries 12 re-entry vehicles which could blanket approximately a 3sq km zone. An aircraft carrier can move at approximately 1km per minute. so you have approximately 90 seconds to launch and hit the target with one of the US's best weapons.

Why? They are massive objects that has zero camouflage against the ocean. How hard could it be?

You can't use regular photons to detect one because that requires getting in a plane and going out to find them. You're an even bigger sitting duck in a plane in the air than the carrier is sitting on the water. Radar will find you and interceptors will destroy you before you get close enough to see their exact position. You using a plane and radar runs into the same issue.

If you sit on the shore and use active radar tracking then you're leaving yourself open to decoy ops and EM countermeasures.

Satellites don't loiter over the area long enough to get a tracking lock. Ships can take evasive maneuvers and US Navy ships move very fast.

It is still pretty difficult [1]. The sheer scale of the oceans is not appreciated by many. We can accept that space is vast beyond normal comprehension, but finding ships or even carrier strike fleets in the oceans is still a non-trivial challenge. Even at hypersonic speeds, traversing the range of a missile is measured in above ten minutes ranges. Tracking all commercial traffic shows how vast the oceans are [2], as each of those dots on a map cover a territory far vaster than the ship itself. It is a sufficiently non-trivial problem that commercial tracking relies upon AIS transponders instead of imaging, even in dense commercial traffic areas like the Straits of Malacca or the Bosphorus.

Whoever solves the problem will first become very rich from defense contracts.

[1] http://theconversation.com/hundreds-of-ships-go-missing-each...

[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/this-map-shows-every-...

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