I'd like to play more with mine and minefields, but when I played last time deploying mines was a bit of a chore (please note that it's more than an year that I don't play, and I'm no expert in Aurora).
1) Can we have a better way to create a "pattern/grid" of waypoint around a JP/Location?
Something like: DX on Jump Point -> Add orbital waypoints (ask for number of Waypoints, Name prefix and distance from body, deploy them on the chosen orbit at equal distance)
This should be quite easy for JP (since they are fix on the map), for planet/orbital bodies it add an "update position" cost but could still be usefull (and we already have orbital mechanics for moons and alike)
2) Can we have a way, during launch of mines/buoy, to limit the active sensor pickup range? I don't mean to limit the actual emissions, that would be undesirable for gameplay balance, but to have something like an engagement distance (eg. if you output 100 emission and 10m range at resolution 10, if you limit during launch to 5m range it will still output 100 emission). . . this way we don't need to design/carry around multiple type of mines if we want to have "staggered" range of mines detection/activation
These option could also be applied to multi stage missile, so we can have only 1 type of sub-munition but we could design missile with sub-munitions configured differently (albeit I could not find an use of this configuration on top of my head)
Regarding the recent ground unit Intellicenge: do you plan to add bonus/intelligence breakthrough based on land/planet conquest? Maybe based on the type of infrastructure still intact and/or number of population still alive after the conquest? I think this could simulate acquiring information on technology and/or mass interrogation of population.
Do you also plan to address the trickling of Intelligence due to civilian shipping if we are talking about neutral powers? I seems to remember something like this mentioned for VB6. . .