Gravitonic Mine Dropper

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[edit] Overview

The Gravitonic Mine Dropper makes Gravitonic Minefields out of ordnance units. Gravitonic Minefields consist of anti-hyper jump mines. Any ship that tries to jump through an active Gravitonic Minefield is stopped immediately. Objects moving normally through a Gravitonic Minefield can also hit the mines and take damage.

By default all minefields have a power supply of 20 turns (this can be changed by the Host using HConfig). When the power reaches 0, it will be removed from the map. In addition, each time an enemy object (ship, wing, pod) passes through and is affected by a minefield, its power will be reduced by 1 for each object affected. This makes Recharging Minefields necessary and possibly stacking minefields to make them more effective.

Ship Command - Mines

You configure your minefield droppers from the Ship Command - Mines tab. You will only be able to select the ordnance level according to the amount of ordnance that is in your ship's hold. However, if you have previously selected a higher amount of ordnance and will be able to put that much ordnance onto the ship before the end of the turn, then that size minefield will be dropped successfully. If you need to change the ordnance level then you can use Groups of Ships button to form a group with another minelayer with the proper amount of ordnance then have them match the minefield settings. To see what amount of ordnance is selected, you can either look in the Data Grid under Starships / Misc in the Mine Drop column or use Options / Make CSV File and look at the Ships.csv file.

After laying one minefield the minefield dropper device turns off unless you have the Repeat option enabled. If the Repeat option is enabled, then a minefield of the selected type will be dropped every turn while it has ordnance.

You can configure a minefield dropper to drop the minefield cloaked, which in most cases will not be immediately visible to your enemies (it doesn't make a gravitonic minefield more difficult to sweep), but you will need to set it as active to be able to have it effective when the enemy is moving through it. If you set your minelayers to drop minefields cloaked, then you can turn them all on the following turn using the Ministers.

You can set a ship to the task of recharging minefields instead of laying new ones by setting the Command Code REC or alternatively by ordering the ship to lay any amount of ordnance and activating the Recharge Button on the Ship Command - Mines screen.

The dropper can also be set to recover mines. This can be active at the same time as dropping a minefield. This will take effect before it drops a minefield. You must be inside the radius of the minefield that you want to recover. A portion of the minefield's ordnance will be put into your ship's ordnance hold.

[edit] Range

Minefields are circular with a fixed center at the position in space where the ship was when laying them. The size of the resulting Minefield depends on the amount of ordnance that is used. You can select 500 to 5000 ordnance in steps of 500 (500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, etc.). The size of the resulting minefield can be predicted from the following formula:

 Ordnance ^ 0.4

 Example: If you put 3000 ordnance into a Gravitonic Mine Dropper 
          then the resulting minefield size will be 24 
          (3000 to the .4 power = 24.59 or 24 when you round down).

The size of the minefield is the number of light-years (LY) radius that it has. Thus the size 24 minefield above would have a diameter of 48(diameter = radius * 2). The size can be limited by the game host settings. If the minefield dropped is larger than this setting then there will be two minefields dropped. The first minefield will use the maximum amount of ordnance that it needs to meet the maximum size then a second minefield will be dropped with the remaining ordnance. You cannot increase the size of a minefield.

[edit] Moment / Duration

after movement.
Laying and mine sweeping of minefields works "at the same time". The order in which the actions are executed depend on the experience of the ships. The higher the experience, the later the order will be processed. Thus if the ship has a higher experience, it may sweep a minefield that has been laid the same turn by a ship with lower experience.