Reply To: Mines and Minelayer
Ok… rabbit hole time… Rules (even house rules) have to be playable or be the difficulty setting of a scenario. Also VaS is at its core a historical system so any rules need a grounding in historical fact.
Now forget Hollywoods visuals of minelaying.. its a LOT more complicated than just chucking a mine off the back of a moving ship. It boils down to:
1) You need to know the exact location otherswise its a danger to your own ships as well as the enemy… a US Destroyer was sunk by a Dutch mine off Java during the defence of java in early 42 while the ABDAFloat force was traversing the area to hunt for the Japanese invasion force.
2) Mines are not randomly dropped, but layed to a set pattern – Royal Navy doctrine was (is?) 50 yards apart – this dictates a speeed of 10-12knots (2-3″ movement in VaS terms) – closer and you risk sympathetic detonations (ie one sets off others…) Again seen multiple times during the Java campaign with torpedoes (actually most of the ‘recorded’ torpedo strikes were sympathetic detonations when one hit it would set the other 2 or 3 off making it look to the firing ship that they’d hit with 3 or 4 when on 1 had)
3) Mines were laid by 3-5 ships working in tandem to set the pattern
4) Mines are set to a predertmined depth, so you need to know how DEEP the water is then set each individuals mines anchor cable. You dont want to get the depth wrong on one, because you risk a ‘friendly fire’ incident if you try and use that area yourself at another time. At the time the mines anchor length was set mechanically…. dont set the chain log enough and they’re too deep to trigger..
5) Mine density was (is?) about 100-150 mines in a patch – this is about 1″ square of table space (1″ in 1000 nautical yards – yes the table distances are a different scale to the models) without sitting down and doing the maths.
6) Mines move… see point 1. Plus the mine fields at malta had a channel that was just big enough for the Ohio being guided by two destroyers either side – people expected them to clip and set off a mine, the other channels were smaller & all 3 (if memory serves me right) were regularly checked by Royal Navy minesweepers
7) Mines are basically a big box of explosives set off by a mechanical trigger – and they are sensitive, a near miss (a US carrier received damage from shell fire hitting the water a couple of hundred yards away (think it was the Yamatos main guns)) could trigger a mine if armed… so you would arm them as deploying them. And you wouldnt be arming them if you are expecting to do violent maneuvers or expecting enemy fire.
8) So going off Soviet ships (I had the data to hand) MTBs carried about 5-6 mines normally instead of Depth Charges and /or torpedoes, Submarines about 20, Destroyers 20-50 depending on equipment again, Cruisers up to 100.
9) Individual mines were never dropped.. its impossible to keep track of them and you never know when you might need to sail down their yourself. An example of this was the US mining the channels through the Solomon islands to stop Japanese reinforcements while using the channel themselves.
10) You dont want the enemy to SEE you dropping the mines because then they’ll know where they are and avoid them….
So for a usable game mechanic /token it would have to have a range of 3-4″, this would be a mine density of up to about 400 mines (give or take).
So if you was to says a single mine field is 1-4 mine tokens stacked on each other to give a range of 3″ (otherwise its too easy to go round) and each detonation removes a token. Token stacks cant be closer than 8″ to another token but can be touching land. So as to give a channel of passage between each mine patch.
This would mean each token would equate to approximately 100 mines, or Mine 10! As each Mine X would equal 10 real world mines, with MTB bases being mine 1.
So on to costs… well torpedoes cost around 2-10 points per system (VaS rounds the costs to 5 points for ease of list building) … now if you say each mine token is a 3 Damage Die Devastating attack that ignores Torpedo belt mine X would be in the 1-5 point range per pip.