How long is a real ship wake?

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Nexus7

Sorry for putting "transversal" questions but:
1. why would you use a wakehoming instead of an active/passive

Mostly because they're easy to use and they have no wires to worry about, so you can shoot and scoot away as fast as you can before the ships you shot them at start buzzing around like angry hornets.

[LoBlo]

And they are no countermeasures that can fool them. You don't have to worry about decoys (as long as the torp has found the wake you wanted.)

On a side note: I've done some digging into Kapitan's comments and he's actually right on. Check out these space views of ships wakes. From space some of these things are seen to be a 200km long.

http://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/oceancolor...b/oss_94.shtml

So it seems like the effects of the turbulence say around for a while. The obvious followup questoin would be: But how long is the turbulence significant enough to be detectable by a sonar sensor? The only people that probably know are the engineers that build the torps in the few place... and the navy brainiacs that are working to counter them.