
A Ghost Ship Drifting Through International Waters - antimora
http://www.sobify.com/the-lyubov-orlova-a-russian-cruise-ship-drifting-through-international-waters/
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stevewepay
Articles like this really strike home how huge this world is. I feel ignorant
when my first thought is that we should be able to locate a cruise ship in the
ocean, but I clearly underestimate how huge this world really is. It's also
hits home when entire planes like the Malaysian airline plane can disappear
and literally no one knows what happened to it.

~~~
grecy
I find it difficult to believe that the large governments, in control of many
imaging satellites, could not find something like this if they were so
inclined.

Take an enormous number of photos of the region at the right resolution, and
have software eliminate the boring (empty) photos and flag the interesting
ones (contain something of the right size) for human review. Heck, I bet it
could even exclude known shipping lanes to minimize false positives.

~~~
akira2501
There are 510 trillion square miles of surface area on the planet. Just..
imagine the logistical challenge of taking and storing these pictures, let
alone the _process_ of obtaining them. It's almost impossible to achieve
anything like a "snapshot" of the surface; because of this, it's almost
useless for locating moving objects on the surface.

You could, conceivably, completely miss the object in your imaging passes; or
the satellite you have tasked for a particular ground track has an error in
it's imaging sensor or downlink equipment, meaning you're missing a huge chunk
of data for a while. You might also have to move the satellites around
occasionally making imaging useless during these periods as well.

Also.. there's night and weather. You can't always freely image the surface
just because you have a camera pointed in that direction.

These are just a small number of reasons that whole-earth real-time imaging is
seriously difficult.

~~~
jlarocco
What? You're off by several orders of magnitude. The surface area of the earth
is only 196 million square miles. Still very big, but nowhere near 510
trillion square miles.

~~~
david-given
The Earth's diameter is ~13000 km. Surface area is therefore 4 * pi * r^2 = 4
* pi * ((13000/2)^2) = 500 million square kilometres (which is, as you say,
about 200 million square miles).

I suspect the parent is both confusing a million with a trillion and also
miles with kilometres.

~~~
akira2501
Neither. It's just such a habit to type miles. I meant 510 trillion square
_meters_, which google and wolfram alpha tell me is correct.

In any case.. the reason I chose that is because that's probably close to a
reasonable maximum single pixel resolution for tracking imagery. I wanted the
scope of the problem to be obvious by choice of units; unfortunately, I
screwed that part up. :(

~~~
david-given
Been there, done that, bought the aardvark. I mean T-shirt.

(And, of course, it didn't occur to me that 1e6 million square metres is a
square kilometre...)

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x0054
Wow! So does this mean if I find it, I can claim it as my own, and build an
evil layer on it? :) So cool!

~~~
6t6t6
I suspect that price of the fuel that would be needed to tow that vessel would
be greater that its value as scrap.

~~~
ctdonath
Which is basically the definition of entropy: where the [energy] cost of doing
anything with something exceeds the value of doing it.

Entropy has overcome this vessel. Cheaper to buy one than to find and
fix/recycle it.

~~~
piqufoh
I think that's actually the activation energy. Entropy is a measure of
disorder - it's a count of the number of different ways something can be
arranged.

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speeder
This made me remember of Battleship São Paulo

Battleship São Paulo was a ship that... sort of fought on WW1 (it started the
war as active, but the British complained it had poor fire control, the ship
was sent to US for refit, but the refitting ended after the war ended). And
fought on WW2 (during WW2 the ship had problems with mobility, having a top
speed of only 10km/h, that was nowhere close of the original design speed, so
it was decided to use it as stationary defensive platform in Brazil's
northeast, where a couple of U boats were attacking transport ships).

In 1951 it was sold to a british scrap company, the tug line broke mid-
transport and the ship was lost very hard (as in: people have no idea where to
look for it, they don't even know the initial direction that the ship went
after the tow line broke).

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chkuendig
This ship already made headlines last year:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mystery-of-
th...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mystery-of-the-lyubov-
orlova-ghost-ship-full-of-cannibal-rats-could-be-heading-for-british-
coast-9080103.html)

[http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/shortcuts/2014/jan/24...](http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/shortcuts/2014/jan/24/lyubov-
orlova-ghost-ship-cannibal-rats)

From the new article it looks like it finally sunk now.

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facepalm
Wouldn't that ship be bigger than the resolution of modern satellites
photographing earth? So in conclusion, not all parts of the world are being
monitored from space, or at least nobody wants to admit to it?

~~~
rtkwe
You're partially right. The whole of the Earth isn't constantly monitored by
the kind of satellites that could resolve this ship. However a lot of the high
resolution satellites are in polar or nearly polar orbits so one satellite
will see the whole Earth in a couple orbits. There's just not a need to
collect and process all that information unless there's some reason to be
looking at that chunk of land or sea. Generally they'd be focused on more
pressing issues like monitoring other countries military bases instead of
trying to find a mostly harmless ship in the North Atlantic.

If there was some reason that this ship was an actual threat to countries like
the US or Russia who have the large high resolution satellite networks in
place it probably would have been found pretty quickly. There just wasn't a
reason for the effort to be expended to look for it, the ship was old and
being scrapped and wasn't full of anything particularly dangerous to worry any
of the countries that could find it.

~~~
grecy
> _US or Russia who have the large high resolution satellite networks in place
> it probably would have been found pretty quickly_

Which makes me wonder about MH370.

1\. Did a large country find it, but not want to divulge that because it would
give away their "find stuff" capability.

2\. Did the large countries try, but fail to find it, and obviously not
divulge that because it would give away their inability to "find stuff"
quickly

3\. Did the large countries not even bother looking, because they have more
important things to look at.

~~~
rtkwe
Debris fields are a harder ask distinguishing the debris from MH370 from just
the normal trash of the ocean. The ship has the benefit of being a large
defined whole and we have a lot of info on other ships' and their location
(though the tracking of ships is far from perfect it relies on them keeping
their beacon on). It strikes me as a much harder problem to find MH370 because
in order to resolve the debris they'd have to take very high res photos so
it'd cover a very small area in one shot.

So 2 & 3? They probably used some satellite imagery to look for large chunks
but the effort to do the small survey was beyond what they were willing to
expend without a better idea of where to search.

~~~
filoeleven
> the normal trash of the ocean

What a depressing phrase.

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paublyrne
Reminds me of an X Files episode.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_(The_X-
Files)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_\(The_X-Files\))

It was one of those lovely standalone episodes built on a What if premise,
that is never mentioned again.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Or even Waterworld. Minus Dennis Hopper.

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steinnes
I remember this being all over the local (Icelandic) news media a couple of
years ago. Pretty interesting story:
[http://www.mbl.is/frettir/erlent/2013/02/28/hefur_thu_sed_ly...](http://www.mbl.is/frettir/erlent/2013/02/28/hefur_thu_sed_lyubov_orlova/)

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DonaldFisk
Looks like a very interesting web site, well worth a look around. Bookmarked.
Those interested in ghost ships will have heard of the Mary Celeste, but what
about the apocryphal Ourang Medan?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourang_Medan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourang_Medan)

After a brief perusal of Sobify, I found [http://www.sobify.com/vogelsang-
where-the-soviets-kept-the-m...](http://www.sobify.com/vogelsang-where-the-
soviets-kept-the-missiles-to-nuke-the-west/)

I've been there, but visited mostly different parts of the site, and didn't
find where the nuclear missiles were stored. It occupies several square
kilometres.

The closest railway station is at the nearby village, also called Vogelsang. I
had to press a bell to stop the train to get off, and put my hand out to stop
it to get back on.

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mrestko
I'm highly ignorant about sea travel, but I wonder why the towing vessel
didn't hook back up to the ship when the line broke. Maybe someone here can
explain.

~~~
lugg
Article says it happened in rough ocean waters, things get tricky in stormy
weather. Wouldn't be surprised if they cut it deliberately.

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greens231
I trained as a navigator in the merchant navy for two years and i find it hard
to believe that such a light ship (displacement ~4500 only) could be lost due
to a broken tow line (considering it had a full fledged crew onboard who could
have easily made fast another one). what a sad loss. would have loved to have
that moored on my marina

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ZanyProgrammer
It looks like smoke is coming from the funnel on one of those photos? Did
people board it while it was adrift and start up a boiler (presumably there
was fuel still on board?)

~~~
Macha
As far as I can tell from the article, no one has photographed it after it
went adrift, so those pictures must have been taken when it was being actively
used.

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mikewhy
Cool, I'm from St. John's, NL and remember the years that was just stuck in
our harbour. Had no idea that's what happened to it afterwards.

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nickpsecurity
Don't fall for it! It's a trap! The collector is at it again:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7xNXTpQA5Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7xNXTpQA5Q)

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ablation
An interesting, but fairly poorly-written article.

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itsbits
A ghost ship & cannibal rats!!! I can make a story for a scary movie out of
this.

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jkot
Perhaps more exact would be 'Canadian' ghost-ship. It was build in Russia, but
Canadians are to blame here.

~~~
pyre
Or you could make the title even more ambiguous by calling it a "Former
Russian Ghost Ship."

~~~
ant6n
So is it formerly Russian, formerly Ghost or formerly Ship?

