It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. The data will always be at least an hour old and that’s a hundred times as long as it takes for the person to be impossibly labor-intensive to find. Carriers are easier to find once you’re on the ocean in close proximity than someone in a city is, but then so are you — and the carrier has armed warplanes whose job is to prevent you from being within observational distance of the carrier in realtime.

It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Do they drop a buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs perpendicular to the sailing path?

> It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider.

Are we talking about Strava, or satellites? It's not obvious to me that exercise data is any more real time or easy to find than satellite tracking.

> It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work.

Shots across the bows are a pretty universal signal.

>It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work

We saw how from the Houthis and US military: You send a helicopter with a few dudes with guns. Marine vessels are unarmed, including the people on board. They can't fight off or run from the helicopter.

If for whatever reason that's not an option, you shoot it with the 5inch gun on a destroyer. Maybe a warning shot across the bow first. Maybe you literally ram it with the destroyer if you are feeling weird, as China and Venezuela have done. Awkwardly, when Venezuela did that, they rammed a vessel that just so happens to be reinforced for ice breaking, so the warship was damaged and the cruise ship was not really.

I'm pretty sure if you don't have a working radio in int'l waters you'd be assumed to be a pirate vessel and promptly boarded/shot at yes.