Enemy Mines not Firing

[Yonder (OP)]

So one of my GeoSurvey ships found Ruins in a moon of a Gas Giant, and then in close orbit of the Gas Giant was killed by a salvo of 36 missiles of unknown size.

Fast forward some time and I have a large task force in system to investigate, they approach the gas giant and detect a salvo of eight Size 24 missiles in orbit around the planet. I figured that it used to be a minefield with 9 mines, and one of the mines detected the survey ship and went off. To test this assumption the Admiral thinned out the minefield until only three remained, then approached. Closer, and closer, and closer. Finally the fleet was orbiting directly along side the mines. Time slowed down to 5 seconds a turn, but nothing ever happened. My fleet has large engines, large ships, and large Active Sensors, no matter what sensors these missiles have they should be able to see my ships, why aren't they deploying their submunitions?

[Mel Vixen]

Maybe these are just sensor buoys?

[Yonder (OP)]

Hmm, maybe, but why would there be 8 of those around one planet... Hmm, Geosurvey buoys maybe, do the NPRs use those?

[Erik L]

Could be you don't meet their firing parameters?

[Hawkeye]

My guess would be they allready fired their sub-munition at your survey ship and the time interrupts is from the buoys´ sensors, picking up your fleet.

[Yonder (OP)]

Hmm, something else I considered, can a size 24 buoy be the origin of 36 separate missiles? I know that sub-size 1 missiles are rounded up to size 1 in a launcher, can you have less than size 1 missiles in later stages?

Could be you don't meet their firing parameters?

What firing parameters can you give to mines? It is true that the survey ship that got clobbered was only 1000 tons, while my fleet has ships ranging from 3000 to 18000 tons, but I can't think of anything else that is obviously different.

My guess would be they allready fired their sub-munition at your survey ship and the time interrupts is from the buoys´ sensors, picking up your fleet.

I thought that buoys vanished once they detected their enemy and fired?

[sloanjh]

I thought that buoys vanished once they detected their enemy and fired?

Why would they?  (Attempting to draw attention that Steve is very concerned about internal consistency, and so wouldn't make the outer container just vanish.)

If you think about multi-stage missiles, the initial stage(s) doesn't vanish once it releases its submunition(s).  Instead it keeps going as targetted.  (And yes, I was a bit surprised the first time I saw this happen too.)  A buoy is just a multi-stage missile without engines.

John

[Yonder (OP)]

Oooohhhhh.

And since the buoys are all in one salvo, then their submunitions would all be in one salvo? That was the other reason I thought they hadn't been triggered yet, because I saw one salvo of 32 missiles, and was expecting to see 8 salvos of 4 missiles from the 8 mines.

[Yonder (OP)]

One last thing, I am fairly certain there is no way of recovering this last enemy buoy I've left alive, is there? I already attempted to tug it.

I would like to recover it to see how large the thermal sensor is, how large each of the sub-munitions were, etc. I don't think that is supported yet, but I wanted to check.

[Charlie Beeler]

One last thing, I am fairly certain there is no way of recovering this last enemy buoy I've left alive, is there? I already attempted to tug it.

I would like to recover it to see how large the thermal sensor is, how large each of the sub-munitions were, etc. I don't think that is supported yet, but I wanted to check.

Not once it's been deployed.  Even if it was in a stockpile all you could do is scrap not dismantle for research points.