interesting ideas, and the idea of the small craft minefield is a nasty twist ... I wonder about the antipersonnel defenses though ... mines are nasty by nature, that's why EOD tries to blow them in place instead of defusing them so often, the anti personnel measures similarly are nasty but circumventible by the owner ... case in point when land military put out a minefield, they are supposed to map it describing the location of each mine, the type (AP or AT) and any anti-tampering "mods" put in) that way they know if they can just go out and pick the mine up or if its "much" safer to blow it in place themselves.
Taking out a mine in space can also be done by nuke tipped missiles - going for 'soft' EMP kills. Hardening against this is difficult and mines are supposed to be "cheap" so while the expenses may be done for a ship, it would rarely be done for a mine which is nothing more than a piece of expendable ammunition after all.
The computer for targetting differentials on a fleet, would not necessarily have to be ship's grade, it can actually be rather simple running through a certain logic matrix:
Friend or Foe? (Neutral = foe, sorry for you)
Emission type?
Large or small? This may be done passively if your ships drive emmission is going to give some clue (also electronics - radar and such) but if not then it means that your stealthy minefield has to blow its cover and begin targetting using active systems at some point. Once this happens the logic tree is going to identify targets by size and whatever then go after those that meet the targetting criteria.
There are mines today that possibly meet this broad design criteria both naval and land. On the land side, the Italians developped one that attacks people, not sure of the targeting criteria or how effective it is (does it ID diff between a cow and infantry? "distant attack?" or whatever). The US developed a set of anti-vehicle mines which can differentiate between tanks and trucks and diesel and turbine engines; these have an offset range of about 400m and can orient themselves to attack in 360 degrees from the mine.
Naval mines range from the traditional WWI/WWII types to relatively sophisticated ones that use a torpedo and can be set to delay their activation by time, or number of targets that pass nearby before they arm themselves and get ready to attack the next target. Also like any number of land mines, these can be rigged for command operation -
T
--- On Wed, 8/4/10, roger <> wrote:
From: roger <>
Subject: [Traveller_TNE] Minefields
To:
Date: Wednesday, August 4, 2010, 7:39 AM
Minefields by their very nature are booby traps. Once you know its there you can avoid them or sweep them. In the 4th Imperium, the Scout Service would take a dim view of mining a planet, unless they did it themselves, say to protect a low-tech population from contamination, and would probably sweep it themselves. In the New Era if near Coalition space, the RCES would sweep the field, a good way to show the locals that the "Star Vikings" are not so bad after all.
First, sweeping the field may be a problem, low tech worlds couldn't do it, a TL-8 world could, but it wouldn't be easy, at Tl-9 advanced thrusters start appearing that would allow people better-easier access to space. Sending in a ship is self-defeating unless it has enough armor to defeat the mines laser bolts. A second way would be to shoot down the mine using a air to air like missile reconfigured for space to space use. A third way is to send someone in a EV suit to deactivate the mines. They would need space based personal transporter (rocket stake, jet pack) and a small craft to get them near the mine.
To avoid having your mine spotted easily it should have stealth or EM-Masking, a close in defence system, maybe a motion detector rigged to a laser rifle to keep anti-mine personal away.
You will also need both large and small mines. FF+S allows for interpolation and here I would use it! Nuclear Pumped X-Ray warheads range from 10 to 500 kilotons, but ordinary!!! warheads go as small as 0.1kt. These cheap mines would be sprinkled amongst the ship killers with orders to take out small craft, while the larger ship killers were ordered not to detonate against anything smaller than 100 D Tons.
How long do you plan to keep your mine field active? If you are targeting a single ship or say vampire fleet. You can skip this part. If you plan to keep the mine field up as a deterrent or road block you should leave replacement mines in the mine field. These mines would not be active, and would stay dormant until they picked up a mine detonating then after a short period, say two hours they would activate. The delay would let the ship that triggered the original mine to clear the field. This is not mercy just practical, you don't want ta 100 Ton scout triggering the whole field simply because the scout is to stupid to not blow up.
You might have to think about intelligent control for your mine field as well. Big ships are few and far between in the New Era but they do exist. A 500kt mine might not be able to penetrate the thick hide of a large ship so would be a useless to shoot at it unless you went for sensor/ antenna kills, but shooting at its support ships could make a difference. If you can't sink the aircraft carrier sink all its escorts and the carrier captain is going to feel very naked without them! Here a intelligent mine, maybe with a full sized ship's computer instead of warhead would work. A maned ground base, or defence platform (again there's one of these in BARD) could work and the defence platform could be of use in protecting the mine field. Also I agree with Tim nuclear power plants in my universe give off heat so I would also go with solar power and batteries. In case this isn't feasible there is a rule in Brilliant Lances that allows a ship to reduce its
signature by one level if it reduces its power plant output to 1% so I see no reason that mines couldn't be designed to do this.
You might also think about placing your mines in the "junk belt" the area surrounding a planet that holds all the dead and living satellites and the other space junk that accumulates from a near-space faring society.
This is a good subject, its given me two ideas for adventures. First a Lancer crew is hired by the Coalition to lay a booby-trap mine field at a gas giant known to be a vampire refueling point in an effort to whittle down a vampire fleet. Second the Lancers are hired to remove a minefield that the Solee have set up to force a planet to join them.
Let me know what you think.
Roger