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A comment on Naval Vessels, Shadowy by Intent, Are Hard for Commercial Ships to Spot. Parent comment

Re:Naval Vessels, Shadowy by Intent, Are Hard for Commercial... by aaronmdjones on Friday August 25, 2017 @11:02AM (#15098910)
Primary navigation radar gives away your position, as does active sonar, in the same way that AIS does. If they have the latter off, it's not unreasonable to assume they also have the others off.

Passive sonar would pick up a tanker if the engines are running fast enough or the ship isn't particularly streamlined (which tankers invariably aren't) so this is probably a failure of communication.

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Re:Naval Vessels, Shadowy by Intent, Are Hard for Commercial... by krisoft on Friday August 25, 2017 @12:56PM (#15100065)
The tanker was broadcasting its position. That's how we have this nice visualization. I don't understand why you are talking about active systems. They should just have listened to AIS messages.

Likewise also don't understand why the article goes on and on about more clever ways the collision avoidance system could be programed. No collision avoidance system can help you if the operators of the stealthy war-machine drop the ball.

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Re:Naval Vessels, Shadowy by Intent, Are Hard for Commercial... by aaronmdjones on Friday August 25, 2017 @02:35PM (#15101003)
Oh, I wasn't aware you can receive other ship's AIS position updates while your own system wasn't active.

Even in that case, it's the same as the passive sonar example I illustrated: the ship is there and you can see it, but they didn't avoid it anyway. Failure of communication.

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Re:Naval Vessels, Shadowy by Intent, Are Hard for Commercial... by gaius on Friday August 25, 2017 @11:08AM (#15098958)
Crew on the bridge with NODs would seem to be a no-brainer in those conditions, at least.
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Re:Naval Vessels, Shadowy by Intent, Are Hard for Commercial... by blincoln on Friday August 25, 2017 @11:53AM (#15099369)
Seems like the naval vessels should be using passive radar detection as well, if they're not already. That wouldn't protect them from everything, but it should catch all of the big commercial vessels, right?
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