by Dreamtwister » Mon 12 Jan 2009, 03:55:02
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('GASMON', 'W')ith todays sattelite technology, that can read the writing on a cigarrette box in the street, how the hell can you "lose" a supertanker?
If the vessel's transponder is not functioning, it can be very difficult. Have you ever actually looked at a satellite image of water?
The Sirius Star is 330m long. Google Earth's maximum resolution is around 15m. To put that into perspective, I have created this image. It is the same area as the Indian Ocean, at 30m resolution (15m resolution was just too big to upload and expect people to view it). See if you can find my scale representation of the Sirius Star:
Huge image warning - roughly 1.5MB
Of course, this is a very rudamentary example. A real image would have many features to make identification much more difficult. Off the top of my head:
*First, the Indian Ocean is not perfectly square, and contains landmasses.
*Second, the wave patterns on the real Indian Ocean would be a lot less regular.
*Third, there would be multiple vessels in a real photo, as well as cloud shadows, weather distortions, various atolls, random aircraft and who knows what else.
*Fourth (big clue), I doubt a real ship would appear as a perfect black rectangle, perfectly horizontal to the image.
*Fifth, military satellite resolutions are
far better than 15m, which means the real image would be
huge.
And just so you know, I'm not trying to call you out. I'm just trying to illustrate the scope of the problem of locating such a small object on a satellite image. It's hard to look at a map and really "get" how much space is being represented.
The whole of human history is a refutation by experiment of the concept of "moral world order". - Friedrich Nietzsche