Improving Mine tech concept

[Suicide Junkie]

Exactly, though.

It would be silly to place those mines randomly, but if you lay them two or three sectors deep around your warppoints and/or planets, the enemy will hit some on their way through. A small percentage of the total to be sure, but that is a good thing.

[Phoenix-D]

Hunpecked said:
Now with enough mental gymnastics you might be able to rationalize effective minefields around "choke points" like warp points or planets, but in interplanetary space, forget it.

Assuming they're like terrestrial mines. Given that they have IFF, I doubt they are.

What a lot of SF does is make "mines" basiclly missile warheads attached to senstive passive sensors and a short-burn missile engine. They detect a ship, wait until its at its closest point, and then intercept it.

[CovertJaguar]

In Adamant its not exactly easy to amass enough minesweepers to deal with really large fields. Even at a fairly high tech level your minesweeper ships can only sweep about 6-8 mines per ship. With a 100 mine maximum that's about fifteen minesweepers, a small fleet in and of its self. That can be a significant investment even for a large empire.

[Hunpecked]

Re: Mines as missiles or one-shot beams.

Correct, a "mine" in SE IV would have to be something like that to have any hope of damaging even something as "big" as a multi-megaton vessel. Now consider the distance over which the "mine" would have to act:

Assume a solar system with diameter 39 HAU (HAU is a "Hunpecked Astronomical Unit" equal to 100 million miles); this is about the orbit of Uranus in the Sol system. SE IV displays a star system on a 13x13 grid, so each side of each square is 3 HAU.

Assuming movement is limited to a distance 1.5 HAU "above" and "below" the mean plane of the planetary orbits, a ship/fleet would traverse a series of "space cubes" 3 HAU thick by 3 HAU long and 3 HAU wide. Now divide each cube into 100 columns (10x10) with a square cross-section (mines are limited to 100 per cube, so each column must have a mine to guarantee one "hit" on a ship passing down the column). A column is 0.3 HAU on a side, with a center-to-edge distance of 0.15 HAU or 15 million miles; this is the mine's minimum radius of action. Actually, the columns should be circular in cross-section, which means a mine's target radius would have to increase to overlap its neighbor's.

Of course in SE IV a fleet always hits a minefield, no matter how sparse, and it hits every mine until either the ships or the mines are gone. This means a mine's radius of action is at least half a cube side, or 150 million miles (in this example, anyway).

However, this doesn't translate to the battle map, where a mine would immediately "hit" an enemy ship (with better-than-Talisman accuracy) when dropped. Thus SE IV contradicts itself, which isn't surprising when one tries to make the terrestrial "mine" concept work in space (which is REALLY REALLY big).

In reality, the space analogue of a terrestrial mine is a ship.

[Suicide Junkie]

The combat map uses a totally different time scale.
And these are very much not like terrestrial mines.

Plus it is all abstracted.

Mines could perhaps be made to work like in SF. You'd probably be happier, and I suspect most people would be happier except when defending with mines
...Ships flying around in combat, getting hit by mines as they launch missiles and blast away with DUCs. Could be quite nifty. Maybe for SE 5 or 6

[Kana]

I really think SJ's concept is intriguing...mines as a nusance/net, more than and end all destructive problem. I guess with some damage, and other damage qualities (crew, engines, weapons), this would make mines an interesting strategic problem. I guess a percentage of mine interception will not be part of SEV...I don't remember seeing it on the list...maybe some of the beta testers can mention it to aaron...

Kana

[Phoenix-D]

"This means a mine's radius of action is at least half a cube side, or 150 million miles (in this example, anyway)."

Given that the mines are 10 KILOTONS in size..that's not entirely unreasonable.

Of course its all quite abstracted. I can imagine a SE623622565616 where everything is simulated in total detail.

I can also imagine that requring more computer power than exists on the planet today to compete the movement of one ship.

[spoon]

Suicide Junkie said:
Tossing minesweepers in the trash, and then reducing mine warhead damage and/or mines-per-sector limits is a better way to go.

I considered doing this for Fantasy Empires (mines were various forms of angry wasps), but...

The armored fleet with repair ships will still get through, but they will be slowed down to a sector or two per turn while they plow through your mined territory.

... I thought this would be too prevalent and too annoying of a tactic. In games with larger maps, several systems would probably end up having every sector mined, and trudging through such a system would be an exercise in frustration. If there was a way in simultaneous games to tell your fleets to "drop damaged ships" as they progressed, then maybe this approach would work better.

Come to think of it, though, maybe if you made mines really, really expensive. Like 20k minerals per mine. That might discourage mining everywhere just because you can.

[tesco samoa]

problem with mines is that they hit cloaked ships which sucks... So this can ruin elaborate cloaking systems...

I really wish mines could not hit cloaked ships...or that mines had a level of cloaked ships they could detect and hit....

[spoon]

I really wish mines could not hit cloaked ships...or that mines had a level of cloaked ships they could detect and hit....

That would be cool. Can somebody suggest it for SE5 if mines work the same way...