Improving Mine tech concept

[Suicide Junkie]

P&N had some of the heaviest mines be detectable with gravitic sensors.

The biggest problem with mines, though, is the all-or-nothing-ness of it:
Either you bring enough sweepers to clear any field with no damage, or you forget/lack tech and your fleet gets vaporized.

Tossing minesweepers in the trash, and then reducing mine warhead damage and/or mines-per-sector limits is a better way to go.
Thusly, when you place mines, they:
- WILL do some damage
- WON'T wipe out decent sized fleets
- WILL slow those fleets down while they repair the damage.

You can even set things up such that players will have to place their mines not just stacked way up on the warppoints, but spread across a number of sectors around the warppoints and planets.

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.

[Fyron]

It is also fun to include mine warheads with a variety of special damage types. Only shield generators, only engines, etc.

[rdouglass]

Imperator Fyron said:
It is also fun to include mine warheads with a variety of special damage types. Only shield generators, only engines, etc.

IIRC the one thing I didn't like about special damage mines is that for instance, a stack of 100 engine damaging mine can be 'cleared' by a measley frigate. Frigate enters mine field, first mine detonates. Mine damages engines but ships till remains. Second mine detonates, ship still remains. Third mine detonates, etc. etc. upt o all 100 mines. Sure the engines on the frigate are gone but so is the minefield.

Now if it could be 'fixed' so that 1 ship detonates ONLY 1 (or even like a max of 5 mines) then these specialty mines could be a lot more useful. But also, like many things in the game, that is a 'hard code' issue and not 'fixable' by a mod.

</$.02>

[Suicide Junkie]

Just mix some normal warheads in with the mines.

Problem solved

[Fyron]

I believe that should no longer be a problem in 1.91. It was fixed when the mine algorithms were changed to prevent a high structure component, such as a colony module, from causing all mine warheads that did not do enough damage in one hit to destroy it to not detonate. If no engines are left, no engine-damaging mines should detonate. I have no idea what happens if you mix warheads on the same mine unit, however.

[Hunpecked]

Suicide Junkie writes:

"You can even set things up such that players will have to place their mines not just stacked way up on the warppoints, but spread across a number of sectors around the warppoints and planets."

The whole problem with the concept of "mines" in a space game is

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. -- HHGTTG

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.

[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.