Why are submarines so hard to detect even with modern equipment?
In: Engineering
Once you’re a few hundred feet under water radio (and thus any radar type thing) doesn’t work. Optical doesn’t work either. The only thing that works is sound.
The big problem is sound really doesn’t travel that well, and there is a lot of space in the ocean and a lot of things that make noise. You can’t just get a super good microphone, that won’t pick them up, you’ll just hear the animals nearby really well.
Think of it like this, I’m going to get 5 people, with nice loud trucks and blasting the radio 24×7, so loud anyone within a mile of them can hear it. You try to find them, you can have 10,000 people searching and all the tech you dream up. But my 5 guys are going to random spots in North America and they get head starts, you have to search 9.5 million square miles, your 10,000 guys can listen to 40,000 sq miles of land at a time, and my guys will be heard in 20 sq mi of land at a time. So you can search 0.4% of the land area with the 10,000 guys, and I can only be heard in 0.0002% of the land. There is essentially zero chance any of your guys can find me.
The ocean is a whole lot bigger, and you need very high end tech to hear something that is designed to be quiet from a mile. Also, you don’t have 10,000 ships to search with. It is really really hard to find them.
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