re: US Navy makes Red October a reality

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I assume military sonar is incredible now? You can get livescope to bass fish and see a bass 100 ft+ in front of your boat, I’d assume something like a destroyer could see a something as big as a submarine from miles away?

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Pretty much but submarines sample the water column temperature and salinity and hide in thermocline differences that refract or reflect sonar pings. The destroyer will also give away his location to the sub by active sonar searching.

Subs especially and most Navy sonar systems have an acoustic data base of unique vessel acoustic signatures emitted by both military and commercial ships. And, Russian submarines. They passively listen and can I.D. most everything emitting acoustic energy in the ocean, including different whale species. It’s analogous to fingerprints.

Your Live Scope sonar is a simplified version of commercial multibeam and scanning sonar survey systems. The magic is in the transducer array, which have become affordable for fishing applications.

I have greatly simplified this explanation, but that’s the gist of it.