mines

I agree that straight FT2 mines are fairly weak when brought straight
over to FT2.5. They would appear to be useful as a prelayed field only,
and I suspect the minelayer system was included only for specific
scenarios (a minelayer interupted in its task).

I kind of like the idea of beefing up a mines a bit, but before we go
hog wild with this we should look at what we want mines to really do.

"A 2d6 mine IS beefed up, but it also has the capacity to obliterate
anything up to a Frigate in one blow. Do we want this?"

Personally I use a fair amount of mines.  In our heavily tinkered with
version of the Tuffleyverse the NSL uses lots of fast frigates and
destroyers mounting SMR racks (roughly equivalent to WWI destroyers,
very
hit and run).  They tend to work in flottillas of 3-6, often with a
minelayer armed version mixed in as a covering ship.  You go in, launch
your missiles then turn tail and run, dropping mines in your wake to
discourage pursuit.

As far as mine effectiveness goes, more modern "wet navy" ships are
fairly
resistant to mines, but earlier this wasn't always the case.  The
Japanese
lost two battleships off Port Arthur to mines in 1904 while in the
Dardanelles in 1915 a single Turkish minefield of 24 mines managed to
sink
3 French and British battleships (talk about cost effective).  Sure, all
these ships lost were older pre-dreadnaught battleships with less
effective
underwater protection than later Dreadnaughts (I can't recall any actual
Dreads being lost to a single mine, any one else?) but hey, it goes to
show
that big ships aren't invincible.  Of course, in real world you don't
have
to totally destroy a ship (ie cross off all it's hull boxes) to render
it
inneffective.  All you've got to do is sink it.

		-M