New technology" boats"

With the advancement of computers and satelites I can sit at my machine and do some pretty snazzy things what with Google Earth or whatever the sat program is and almost scan the world. OK cant tell the time on Big Ben. That aside and back to the sats, modern warships and in particular submarines must surely be more advanced than some old bloke on a PC. By that I mean at periscope depth an arial or antenna capable of looking anywhere on the earth or sea via one of the many satelites in orbit around the planet. This would be a huge plus for " boats" with the missiles etc and a massive advantage over skimmers. It seems even night is no obstacle now with infra red so during an "attack" could a submarine attack team sit in a lounge type setting as if playing a PC game. The ming boggles but it seems anything is possible so is this technology used or have I been watching too many James Bond films, :roll:

 

Just remember, the satellite image you see on Gary Google is far from real time, some of them are several years out of date.

Getting real-time imagery of exactly the place you want at the time you want requires more bandwidth than you'd want to expose a mast for.

 

Good point and I suppose I was thinking of the recent attack in Iraq when the good guys wiped out that baddie through sat I thought. Must come a time when it will be possible though as technology is forging ahead so fast anything seems possible. Hard to grasp as even the bleedin' telephone was high tech when I was a nipper although cars had been invented. Anyway, cheers for that,

 

On the other hand our UScousins have been doing quite a lot of work on autonomous submersibles. We are getting close to the point where a boat could be preprogrammed to carry out for example a surveillance mission. The comms problem does make real time control a trifle difficult. I did some work on sonar data links some years ago, worked OK most of the time but it was pretty short range only, from one side of an oil rig to the other.

Mind you now that sattellite broad band is srating up you could get some pretty good images into a remote boat that way without to much mast exposure if you concentrated on the image rather than all the extra stuff you get with Google.

Getting stuff back though can be a bit more of a problem.

Peter