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

> In a message dated 7/12/99 9:13:29 AM EST, edens@mindspring.com writes:

<< The Japanese lost two battleships off Port Arthur to mines in 1904 while in
the Dardanelles in 1915 >>

The Russians lost those battleships too. Including the aggressive Russian
fleet commander Makarov who was on the leading battleship headed out to sea to
deal with the Japanese blockade when his flagship ran over a mine and

roller UNDER the waves too fast to allow many survivors at all.

"Maybe HMS Audacious (lost in the Irish Sea 27/10/14) - don't know how
many she hit, but the damage caused was apparantly quite light".

Yeah, I missed that one. I bet that one made the boys at the admiralty mighty
jumpy. ("we spent how much on all these damn dreadnaughts?")

Would you count Viribus Unitis, QE & Valiant, all sunk by limpit mines (albeit
temporarily for the last 2)?

Hmmm...true. Don't know how you'd make a limpit mine work in FT (as with
u-boats, no water to hide under).

"Ah - I found one!  Spanish dreadnought Alfonso XIII (later Espana) hit
a
single mine & sank 30/4/37.  Mind you, she was the smallest Dreadnought
ever built & (to quote Conways) her 'speed, protection and freeboard [were]
well below average'."

Yeah - not much more than an over-gunned pre-dreadnaught, really. And
armament was weak at that (8 12-inch guns?)  Actually I think Lord
Nelson
and Agammemnon (last British pre-dreads) may have had similar, if not
greater displacement.

"I did War Studies for three years at University. I have no idea what to do
for a living with it, but I have accumulated a vast amount of interesting
books on ships..."

There's always TV documentaries, which is how I've put my vast store of trivia
to mercenary use.