romulan mines

posted on April 17th, 2009, 11:39 am

i can't find a way to destroy romulan mines. would it be possible to give them a timeout after which they would blow up or stay inactive?

posted on April 17th, 2009, 11:44 am

we have some plans for a more complex romulan minelayer system for the future

posted on April 17th, 2009, 2:59 pm

Some Ideas:

A bulldozer ship. No wepons, low speed, no sensors, but MASSIVE shields.

A ship loaded with probes, that ca be fired into a mine field, and catch some mines on their way.

A high precision-laser ship, that can point-attack that little objects.

It would be nice to find another 2 unique counter-technologies, as we have 5 races yet. Wait, the dominion have the bugs to counter mines! 

Please to not set a duration for the mines, otherwise mines become uselsess, as thy are no factor in battle and it would be really unrealistic that mines just disappear or self-explode after some time.

posted on April 17th, 2009, 5:29 pm

I'm saying this here because this is a thread about rommie mines: Just build around 5-6 fleets of Generix Supports, and begin laying down HUGE minefields around your main base. Did this against a small fleet of Cubes, and it worked like a charm, killing all of them. Anyway, I think that the mines should self-replicate every minute, but the originals cost around 1 dilithium and 2 tritanium for each. Look at it this way: they would be targetable, because they would have a replaceweapon that would require that would require them to be ships. Also, they should only be targetted when no other ships are within targetting range, because, like you said, the Roms will need to retreat after awhile because the reload time is so slow that the ships are of no use anymore. So, for 15 seconds, the area of affect for the replication is in the open. By the way, I think that the replication, not the mines themselves, should be researched .

posted on April 17th, 2009, 6:09 pm

some interessting ideas

posted on April 17th, 2009, 7:14 pm

What, like the Federation's self-replicating gravitic minefield they used to seal off the wormhole, where every time you destroyed a mine, the others replaced it with their replicator systems?

posted on April 17th, 2009, 7:16 pm

Yeah, but after it's destroyed it takes a bit of time to regenerate. To balance it .

[mimesot]

posted on April 17th, 2009, 8:33 pm

Last edited by mimesot on April 17th, 2009, 8:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

How shall a minefield self-replicate? 

Ah - of course - the mines are collecting stardust and transmuting it to metal and fusion material? This makes one replication per 10000 years, when the mine has half the speed of light and a magnetic field of 100 Tesla. I'm eager to know how that will be implemented. But if you want to implement stationary mines that self-replicate call the game Fantasy Operations. Sorry for my sarcasm. Sounds like it origins from DS9 but it could really belong to Voyager too. 

I think Megaman3321's idea of making them costy is great and very realistic, so I absolutly appreciate it.  On the other hand making them targetable by any ship from a larger than 'small' distance (and they should be destroyed with one precise shot for sake of realism) makes them worthless.

PS: A ship that crosses such an 'realistic' self replicating mine field at foll implulse would most probably not be hit by the mines, because the mines hardly manage to accelerate toward the vessel within proper time, but the ships internal electronics will be destroyed due to the heavy EM-pulses it catches while travelling at such high speed. 

Fortunatly ships in FO travel at velocities roughly lower than 1/100000 light speed, which is much lower than full impulse, so mines have a chance to meet their target.

posted on April 17th, 2009, 8:55 pm

Umm...Mimesot, replicator technology isn't neccessarily just matter conversion. I'm pretty sure that they work on an energy to matter conversion. As far as I know, energy is interchangeable with matter and vice-versa. If you get a good enough power source into the minefield, they would just use the energy to do that.

[mimesot]

posted on April 17th, 2009, 9:10 pm

Last edited by mimesot on April 17th, 2009, 9:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

And where do you get energy from? You need at best 8.98755179 * 10^5 GigaJoule to create one kilogramm of mass. to give you an equivalent 1 ton TNT ~ 4GJ. Now just calculate how much Energy you need to collect (or produce whith your own fuel*)  to create one mine and then find me a source in open space, where a mine shall collect that much enery. That's the reason why I belive it's esier to collect interstellar matter. Btw. Consider that the mine should not be seen by doing this.

The is only possible way to achieve independent self-reproducing mines are fantasy objects like ZPM's (--> FantasyOperations).

*Another remark. The best fuel is antimatter which annihilated with matter prodices energy that can be used to replicate matter again. 1/2 kg matter + 1/2 kg matter  => 8.98755179 * 10^5 GigaJoule => 1/2 kg matter + 1/2 kg matter. So you have to carry the mass of the object you want to replicate with you in form of fuel. This is not what one calls self-replication.

posted on April 17th, 2009, 9:27 pm

Ok. Makes sense. Ya, I didn't know any of the intense math behind it, just that it works.

posted on April 17th, 2009, 9:28 pm

Self replicating mines are not planned out of balancing reasons. But hey Romulan technology offers more then enough other cool stuff

posted on April 17th, 2009, 9:31 pm

Cloaked mines, maybe? 

posted on April 17th, 2009, 9:32 pm

don't forget this is star trek

the whole replicator idea doesn't work in real life

the energy used for a simple cup of tea could move the ship for a while...

[mimesot]

posted on April 17th, 2009, 9:41 pm

Last edited by mimesot on April 17th, 2009, 10:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Indeed! Just condensing energy is indeed a very inproper way to implement a replicator. But at least the mass of fuel of a ship is greater than the mass of replicated materials. (Otherwise the ship would burst after some time)

By the way. When creating mass from energy there's also an antimatter-waste, which can be used again to produce energy when annihilating it with e.g. dust, rubbish or biological wastes.

I personally think that a replicator should not use matter creation via energy (except of creating elementar matter for further processing), but transmutation, chemical and mechannical assambly of prerefined materials.