Brigade XO wrote:ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Good question. It depends on what the expected drift is. And this also answers your other questions.
Thrusters don't necessarily have to be visible. Puffs of cold gas can maintain relative position to one another without giving the minefield away from a distance. Those would produce very minimal acceleration and thus couldn't combat a large drift. This and their limited fuel supply will limit how long the minefield is effective for.
And then there are orbital mechanics. .
The drift and probable dispersion rate (and directions) of mines once laid in space is another question that needs more work. At minimum, somebody is going to have to handle doing repair/maintain work on mines laid for things like defending the Junction, termini- which are long term installations and the types of fields laid to defend (or attack something) short term such as what Mike ran into.
So you need minesweepers. Sure, you could probably use purpose built minelayers and just -slowly- reverse the process to recover the mines. Minesweepers appear usually to be engaged in finding mines and then destroying them......disarming could be "interesting".
If they are your own (or an allied Star Nation's) you should be able to pick them up and move them after shutting them off. Even if inexpensive, there is still a good amount of credits involved.
Finding them could be interesting since they should be as stealthy as possible to avoid an unfriendly ship spotting them.
Your own forces should have charts of where (and when) and what they laid and what the anticipated movement of the field was projected to be. Then there is the question of how close you need to be to transmit (probably wisker com) shutdown codes to deal only with the one you want instead of shutting off the whole field if dealing with someplace like the Junction. How long is their communications power normaly good for, what happens when the power gets too low- does it disarm the mine?
And, are they capable of both proximity and command detonation? That would also drive how you might want to be able to turn them on and off. We saw that mines at Cerebus were proximity with nuclear explosions but these days it seems like they are more likely to be pods which double as remote missile launchers using laser heads.
You can always deal with enemy mines by using CMs or perhaps lasers to destroy them.
You anticipated some of my musings. Maintenance surely must add to the overall cost of this weapon. In fact, that is one area in which historical mines differ. Oh, Wikipedia says that removing mines can take up to 200 times longer than it took to lay them. But that shouldn't be true in the HV. The advantage that our older mines had on HV mines is their durability. There are mines still in existence today from WWII that continue to be dangerous, sitting in various minefields because it is too costly to remove them. I used to think of mines as set and forget emplacements. Seems like they still should be.
Also, regarding the bit about their thrusters not being detectable. I would imagine that a minefield of millions of mines shooting off a puff of smoke should be visible as a whole.
Like forts, they don't seem to ever get much, if any, screen time. Well, as far as forts, I was correct that the MA would change that notion.
At any rate, there has to be some station keeping, or deploying them would be haphazard. Imagine kicking them out of cargo holds and there is no way to "set them up." Orienting them has to be automated with whatever station keeping means they use, or the impetus departed upon them when they are deployed would begin their initial drift.