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It was implied that only one of the First Order ships has the capability to follow through hyperspace, so the First Order would obviously follow the large Mon Calamari Cruiser.

Why then didn't the Resistance jump the support ships and frigate into hyperspace to evacuate then, seeing as they knew the smaller support ships were already doomed to run out of fuel, and given that the Resistance officers had no intention of fighting the First Order fleet.

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    The question of why the ships weren't used as lightspeed rammers is already addressed here; Why was the Holdo manoeuvre not used earlier?. As such, I've removed that sub-question from your main question
    – Valorum
    Jan 1, 2018 at 0:53
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    They say that only one ship can be the active tracking ship at any given time. This does not mean that only one ship can follow them, because the active tracking ship can just send the coordinates to the other ships. It does not even mean that only one ship can do the tracking, only that only ship can be actively tracking at any given time. In fact, the whole reason for the covert mission to disable the tracker is that they need to disable the tracker in such a way that nobody would notice that it is disabled, because otherwise they would just use a different ship for tracking.
    – Jörg W Mittag
    Jan 1, 2018 at 20:39

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The way in which the hyperspace detector works is by extrapolating all of the (trillions of) possible destinations a ship might be aiming for from its current position and then using those to determine which is the most likely. That information is then relayed to the rest of the fleet.

Assuming one of the Resistance support ships did decide to go into hyperspace on its own, Snoke's flagship would have calculated its destination and then sent one or more of its attendant Star Destroyers to the end-point to destroy it.

A target's last known trajectory yields trillions of potential destinations, but the system can assess them with terrifying speed.

The Last Jedi - Incredible Cross-Sections

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    Does "which is the most likely" make any sense to anyone? Why couldn't they have a hundred or more equally reasonable places to go, and pick on arbitrarily? Why would an enemy computer have any basis for knowing which they would choose?
    – Dronz
    Mar 29, 2018 at 17:50
  • @Dronz - If you know in which direction someone jumps to hyperspace, presumably it's a trivial matter to work out their approximate destination (we see them trying to do this in ESB when the Falcon disappears from their scopes). This system simply takes that one step further, reducing the options from many to one based on statistical analysis
    – Valorum
    Mar 29, 2018 at 17:59

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