Mines?

[Paul B]

I think the whole concept of mines in FC is moot. If an entire starship explodes with an matter-antimatter reaction and doesn't do any damage whatsoever to ships even in the same hex, what could a nuclear bomb do if it was several thousand kilometers away?

Well there's precedence for nuclear blasts causing damage from Balance of Terror. When the Bird of Prey drops debris out the airlock, along with a bomb, and tries to lure the Enterprise into a trap.

That aside, one could assume the mine are of the "captor" variety, and move towards the ship before exploding. Of course in terms of the map they wouldn't "move" persay, they'd only explode in their hex but one could imagine them moving within that hex towards their target.

OR, one could assume that they're some sort of bomb-pumped laser. And when the mine explodes, it emits a focused blast of energy towards its target. The blast doesn't damage the ship, but rather the blast feeds the weapon which damages the ship. So basically like a one-shot, range 0 phaser I (or IV) or what have you.

Of course, Mines might be of a different nature in SFB. But coming as a non-SFB player, I don't know any of that. Most of my experience with mines comes from B5Wars.

[junior]

SFB mines are largely explosive devices that will damage everything in the hex that they're in and the six surrounding hexes. The exceptions are captor mines, which work somewhat like small DEFSATs (only one weapon per mine, iirc) and fire at targets that trigger them.

[MikeBurke]

I was in one fight where a Lyran BCH was chasing down a Klingon PF in a minefiled. The PF was rolling them out and the BCH was scarfing them down like candy. I beat the BCH with a PF, it was a glorious day for the Empire!
the BCH popped like a bug on a hot lamp.

[junior]

I think the whole concept of mines in FC is moot. If an entire starship explodes with an matter-antimatter reaction and doesn't do any damage whatsoever to ships even in the same hex, what could a nuclear bomb do if it was several thousand kilometers away?

Bomb-pumped X-Ray phasers.



Less than serious, but I did actually own a space combat game at one point (the space combat add-on for the game 2300 A.D.) that used missiles solely as a transporter for bomb-pumped x-ray lasers which would be detonated at point blank range to fire at the target.

[Sneaky Scot]

Junior,

Sound very David Weber-like! For those who don't know, in the Honor Harrington novels, missiles can be fittted with a warhead that detonates to provide bomb-pumped lasers at ships. I guess you could hand-wave enough to read that across to Fed Cdr as the idea of a proximity mine is a little strange.

[junior]

He also created an alien race for the Starfire setting that detonated the bombs for the X-Ray lasers INSIDE their own starships...


2300 A.D. (originally Traveler 2300) based their ideas on fairly hard sci-fi, so I suspect that there's little else in common between that setting and Weber's stuff.