Minefield Dropping and Sweeping

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Minefield Dropping and Sweeping: There are four different types of mines: laser mines, web mines, barbitic mines and gravitonic mines. Only ships that are equipped with one of the four different types of mine dropping devices can lay a mine. If a ship has all four different types of mine droppers it has a choice of laying any type of minefield that it wishes. Mines are made by the mine dropper device by converting combat ordnance into mines. You must use at least 500 ordnance units when laying a minefield. You can use increments of 500 ordnance units up to a maximum of 5000 ordnance units. The radius of the minefield produced is equal to the square root of the number of ordnance units dropped. A 5000 unit minefield has the radius of 70 LY and a 500 unit minefield has a radius of 22 LY. Minefields can overlap other minefields. Laying mines in the middle of another minefield will not add to the existing minefield, rather it produces a second minefield. Minefields stay the same size over their entire lifetime. Minefields have a limited amount of power. Minefields have between 20 and 50 turns worth of power when first dropped. When the minefield power reaches 0 the minefield disappears. Ships that have a mine sweeper device are able to destroy a minefield that they are in as well as pick up any minefield belonging to their own race and convert them back into ordnance units that can be reused. If a minefield is swept the whole field is destroyed. The mine sweeping ship is able to sweep the field as long as it is inside the field. A sweeping ship can only destroy one field per turn. Both mine sweeping and mine laying takes place before ship movement. An exploding barbitic minefield destroys all other minefields that have a center point that is within the radius of the exploding barbitic field. Mines can be dropped in a cloaked state. Cloaked mines are invisible and protected from enemy mine sweeps, but not from exploding barbitic minefields. Enemies have a very hard if not impossible time of detecting a cloaked mine. The owner of the cloaked mine is able to uncloak and recloak the minefield at any time. A cloaked mine continues to use energy while it is cloaked. You can recover your own minefields while they are cloaked. The amount of ord that is recovered from a minefield is proportional to the remaining amount of energy that the minefield has compared to the amount the field had when it was first dropped.