Mines that go boom and missile buoys

[83athom]

I am a bit torn about the best size for mines.  The larger the mine, the better sensors you can have, the longer the range it can engage at.  But the larger it is, the more easily it can be detected in turn, and potentially taken out before it can launch.

20 is a good size for a light mine. 50 or so is the better for more standard mines. You can get way with having a small mine only firing one missile, like the CAPTOR mine. Even the largest missile you could make is still the size of a very small fighter.

So what range do mines need?  Their most notable use is as warp point interdiction.  So they need enough range to cover against the enemy jump engine range, and possibly a TL up from that.

Warp point defense, you only need a couple million or so as the best way to use them is to seed a ring around the point instead of all directly on it. For a general purpose mine you can use anywhere, 30 million to 50 million. For system defense (where you want to mine a whole system for whatever reason) you would really want 120 million+.

I could see mines being used as a forward defense of a warp point, where they are used to thicken the medium ranged firepower of the defense, before beam range.  The theory being that the defense will use point defense against long ranged bombardment, will duck out through the warp point if there is a truly large missile wave, trusting to fighters staying behind on the warp point to whittle through the loitering missiles, while the mines make it hazardous for the attackers to move in while the defending fleet is on the other side of the warp point.

I use them in a few ways. 1) To detect enemies and defend warp points so I don't have to keep ships out by the point. 2) Seed a contested or owned system to protect against mass invasion fleets. 3) A defensive system for my scout ships. 4) Infiltrate an enemy system or travel route and lay mines to mess with them.

Actually, if defenders continually cycle part of their fleet through the warp point, they are likely to cause long range missile bombardments to lose lock outside of the range of their onboard sensors. They still go to their target's last location, but if that was offset from the warp point, the myopic sensors on the missiles might not be able to reacquire.

My dedicated mine missiles/torpedoes usually have a sensor range of 1 million or so. But the enemies I usually find use 15k ton ships as a standard so I can afford to increase the sensor resolution to 200-300 to keep the sensor small. Remember that mines are meant to fire without the aid of support, so they need to be designed to handle those scenarios.

[Michael Sandy]

Do you know of any campaign write ups where mines were used?  I am interested to see accounts of how they were used in practice, and what it takes to get them to be effective.

[Erik L]

Do you know of any campaign write ups where mines were used?  I am interested to see accounts of how they were used in practice, and what it takes to get them to be effective.

I might have one circa version 4 or 5ish. I know I've used them before.

[Michael Sandy]

I looked, but I didn't see any accounts of the mines being deployed or used, Erik.  Which story has them being used?

[Erik L]

I looked, but I didn't see any accounts of the mines being deployed or used, Erik.  Which story has them being used?

I might not have written it up. From what I recall, the mines all detonated on the first ship to come through.

[Michael Sandy]

So now I am wondering about good ways to use mines that won't have them all get used up on a single probe ship.

I wonder if EM sensor equipped mines are the route.  Not thermal, but something designed to home in on active sensors.  Which means they would be quiescent the first 30 seconds of an enemy transit, because they won't have active sensors up.

Have enough mines to kill a probe ship, or active defenders, and a bunch of decoy drones that are nothing but active sensors and armor to soak point defense missiles.

[joeclark77]

I once used mines with thermal sensors, because I thought they would be less likely to be shot down before they could fire.  The problem was, they were triggered by friendly aliens, starting a war I didn't want.  I think active sensors are the way to go, because they only fire at enemies.

There was a thread a few years ago by somebody who used a 3-stage system to deploy mines in the middle of system-wide combats.  The mine with its submunitions was deployed by a large first stage from PDCs on Earth.  He'd launch from Earth at waypoints on the enemy fleet's route, and the mines would do their work.  I've never tried it.  The only drawback I think would be the research cost -- you'd have to re-research all three stages for any upgrade in any stage.

[MarcAFK]

Putting thermal sensors on the warheads is a good way of avoiding overkill, you might still get every mine launching at one ship, but once that's destroyed the remainders will retarget anything in range. If you don't put thermals on the sensor stage then you shouldn't get friendly fire incidents. Unless some unlucky NPR wanders into a warp point assault or something.
Theres some other ways to avoid mine overkill. Laying mines with alternating sensor range, or missile speed is one idea, or maybe having each mine launch different submunitions.
You could even make multistage mines where after being triggered half the mine jumps out as warhead stages following the enemy, and the other half of the mine is an entirely new mine.

[joeclark77]

Putting thermal sensors on the warheads is a good way of avoiding overkill, you might still get every mine launching at one ship, but once that's destroyed the remainders will retarget anything in range.

Yes, but the same applies to active sensors, so that would be my choice.
Also, I would think you always want the same sensor on the submunition that you have on the mine itself.  If the mine's sensor is more powerful, it might launch submunitions that cannot see the target and are wasted.

[Bughunter]

I'm no expert, but just spreading them out a bit should work I think. Especially if you have some idea about likely destinations like towards another jump point.

[Michael Sandy]

If you have active sensor buoys, can they pick up technology info from ships that transit?  Is the chance of getting information proportional to time spent under active sensors, or number of active sensors?

Cause that would be a huge reason to have a bunch of sensor buoys near an unpleasant neighbor.  It would probably be worth more, long term, than a bunch of mines killing a random ship.