My problems with Rom's cloaked minefield

[Xerxes1979]

I guess we are to assume that the average mine in Star Trek is similar to a stationary photon torpedo?

Rom's mines had both a cloak and a built in replicator. That is a rather expensive burden energy wise.

If they could instantly replicate a destroyed neighbor why was it even necessary to deploy the entire minefield by ship? Could not a few seeder mines start a cascading sequence of expontential replication covering a huge area?

What is the energy source for these mines? If it is anti-matter then each forced replacement of a destroyed mine would require more energy and more anti-matter then the parent mine could provide.

If they used something like a Romulan artifical singularity that is also problematic since replication requires matter not just energy. The only place it has been suggested they are interchangable is the holomatter on the holodeck. In addition, anti-matter cannot be directly replicated, it requires massive charge reversal equipment to change deuterium to anti-deuterium. If anti-matter was easily producable the entire energy crisis supposedly afflicting Voyager is void.

What is the source of this feedstock to replace the no doubt thousands of mines Dukat has destroyed? It can't be DS9 because the Dominion controls it!

How do these mines sense where they are spatially located and the status of both their neighbors and any potential targets? Do they have sensors? Do they communicate with other mines?

If they the are strewn in a dense enough pattern to damage a ship why does their destruction not cause a neverending chain reaction of exploding mines?

How do these mines resist tractor and repulsor beams? How do they handle station keeping? If they use reaction mass for thrusters then they will have the same depletion of fuel problems even without the those imposed by replication.



Self-replicating mines are a stupid and unworkable idea.

 

[Praetor]

While I'm not trying to defend them (as I'm not convinced it's a workable idea either) I shall play devil's advocate and offer some possible explanations.

I guess we are to assume that the average mine in Star Trek is similar to a stationary photon torpedo?

Probably, in terms of explosive yield.

If they the are strewn in a dense enough pattern to damage a ship why does their destruction not cause a neverending chain reaction of exploding mines?

I believe they also were said to "gaggle" and destruct many at once.

Rom's mines had both a cloak and a built in replicator. That is a rather expensive burden energy wise.

Agreed.

If they could instantly replicate a destroyed neighbor why was it even necessary to deploy the entire minefield by ship? Could not a few seeder mines start a cascading sequence of expontential replication covering a huge area?

I'm guessing because they have to refill on raw matter and recharge. Presumably the former could be accomplished by absorbing both the matter of destroyed ships and of their fellow mine-mates, but I imagine it would still take time. The ability to "feed" on destroyed targets might be why Dukat didn't just try to push though with a ship; he may have inadvertently doubled the size of the minefield in failing to push through.

What is the energy source for these mines? If it is anti-matter then each forced replacement of a destroyed mine would require more energy and more anti-matter then the parent mine could provide.

The only place it has been suggested they are interchangable is the holomatter on the holodeck. In addition, anti-matter cannot be directly replicated, it requires massive charge reversal equipment to change deuterium to anti-deuterium. If anti-matter was easily producable the entire energy crisis supposedly afflicting Voyager is void.

What is the source of this feedstock to replace the no doubt thousands of mines Dukat has destroyed? It can't be DS9 because the Dominion controls it!

Agreed. I'm guessing they must have some means of regenerating or replenishing their power, which might rule out matter/antimatter as creating new antimatter might be prohibitively power-inefficient. Perhaps a small fusion reactor, which can draw in local hydrogen and create more fuel? I think it must be as close to a "closed system" as possible, with no direct external refueling from a specific source.

If they used something like a Romulan artifical singularity that is also problematic since replication requires matter not just energy.

There's probably a treaty banning that, too. Which begs the question, where the hell did all those cloaks come from? Or are they not "really" cloaked in the traditional sense? Perhaps... holographic stealth tech?

How do these mines sense where they are spatially located and the status of both their neighbors and any potential targets? Do they have sensors? Do they communicate with other mines?

How do these mines resist tractor and repulsor beams? How do they handle station keeping? If they use reaction mass for thrusters then they will have the same depletion of fuel problems even without the those imposed by replication.

I'm guessing they must have onboard computer systems capable of sensing and detecting approaching ships, ECM which combine with their "cloak" to shield them from those ships, and then standard thrusters for movement.

Self-replicating mines are a stupid and unworkable idea.

Maybe. But they made 'em work somehow. Perhaps I'll go dig out the DS9 TM a little later and see if it has any answers for these questions. I do recall that it said the casing was made from a standard cargo drum.

 

[Photon]

I agree, its a stretch of the imagination.

2 things though:

1) Were these mines Dominion-specific to target?
2) Did the Romulans raise a bitch about the Feds using cloaking tech?

 

[Freakness]

maybe they were (at least partly) solar powered? depending on how close the wormhole is to Bajor's sun, there could be a lot of solar energy available out there. maybe they were equipped with Bussard collectors to snag any stellar hydrogen as well.

 

[Timo]

The idea had not been used before, so obviously it had some drawbacks that made other users balk at it. But it worked in these special circumstances.

The ability to replenish from victim ships sounds like a reasonable way to go. But it only works with very dense killing zones - hence only at the mouth of the wormhole, not on a more dispersed application like the vicinity of a planet. Rom's replicators probably weren't that difficult to install, they were simply something that could not have been used elsewhere.

The ability to cloak perfectly was key to the minefield. But that's something all Starfleet minefields would have to take into consideration, and no doubt the cloaking tech existed at least in secret Starfleet archives, perhaps also in fielded technology.

Romulans at that point could probably be ignored. If they asked, Starfleet could just say "Minefield? What minefield? Do you see a minefield?" and laugh the protesters off... It's highly unlikely the Star Empire would have declared war against the Feds at that juncture, even at the most obnoxious of provocations.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[nx1701g]

2) Did the Romulans raise a bitch about the Feds using cloaking tech?

Maybe the Klingon Empire were officially the ones that used the mines and attached the cloaking technology to them? Starfleet just deployed them. We do know from DS9 Season 4 that the Klingons use cloaked mines.

(It's just an excuse if the Romulans decided to question)

Romulan Diplomat: You violated the Treaty of Algeron! You used cloaking tech.
Federation Diplomat: The mines were Klingon Technology, they implanted the cloaking devices.
Klingon Diplomat: That is correct. Starfleet did not know of the cloaking devices.
Federation Diplomat: And Bajor is in independent space...
Romulan Diplomat: Damn it.

 

[Myasishchev]

My set of assumptions regarding replicators includes two things:

1)antimatter should not be used in replicators because of the risk of antiparticle collisions and rest mass conversion
2)fast, transporter-effect replication, especially with heavier elements, is extraordinarily power (energy over time) intensive

Raw materials aren't the concern, since any destroyed mine hasn't really gone anywhere, it's just been blown to dust, and the transporter/replicator units on the remaining mines could piece it back together.

And yet my assumptions are hard to square with a self-replicating minefield (that is also cloaked, to boot). Without antimatter, I find it hard to believe that the field could replicate itself quickly enough to be an obstacle to clearing it.

So the design I posit is that very small antimatter batteries, less than a gram apiece, are used to power the replicators. Once armed, the antimatter batteries are mechanically arrayed into a sphere around whatever amount tritium we can calculate is sufficient to generate a yield commensurate to a photon-torpedo, which would be about two or three thousand kilograms. At detonation, the batteries turn off their magnetic containment, and implode the hydrogen. Until it's armed, of course, the antimatter batteries would be arrayed in such a way as to not fuse the tritium in the event of a breach.

This design has the advantage that the destruction of a mine doesn't occasion a multimegaton release of energy either via antiparticle annihilation (it will do some) or through thermonuclear implosion (it will do some). A gram of antimatter (or matter) contains about the same energy as an early atomic weapon explosion. Even assuming a totally efficient conversion, which is impossible, that probably wouldn't be enough to cook off a cloaked/shielded mine several kilometers away.

Drawing on its antimatter batteries, brother mines would rebuild the destroyed mine, minus its antimatter batteries. Back up fission explosives would be included in the design for this eventuality.

The disadvantage to this design is that replicatees would no longer have the ability to heal others, and the minefield could be attrited away eventually. I actually like this, since the minefield shouldn't be practically invulernable.

At the same time, no matter what design is used, it is extremely hard to understand why an arbitrarily large number of photon torpedoes--even ten thousand if necessary--launched at the minefield would not clear it.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

Self-replicating mines are a stupid and unworkable idea.

But they DID work. And they were also incredibly effective, so I don't see how you can call them stupid either. Remember there are tons of things that we don't (actually can't since it isn't real) understand about treknology.

 

[Timo]

But the thing is, nobody had done this before - so apparently, it was considered "stupid and unworkable" even by Starfleet and the other players. And quite possibly it only worked in this special case, much like several "miracle weapons" used in recent wars had only very limited applicability.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nightdiamond]

One thing I've wondered is, why did they stop at DS9? They could have laid multiple mine fields close to Federation planets as well as certain areas.

It would have made attacking them much harder, getting trapped in an exploding, cloaked minefield, while trying to fight off enemy Starfleet ships at the same time.

 

[Anticitizen]

The realism of a self-replicating cloaked minefield is something you're just going to have to overlook because it was so damn cool.

 

[nx1701g]

One thing I've wondered is, why did they stop at DS9? They could have laid multiple mine fields close to Federation planets as well as certain areas.

It would have made attacking them much harder, getting trapped in an exploding, cloaked minefield, while trying to fight off enemy Starfleet ships at the same time.

It could, potentially, be a risk to your own forces though.

 

[Nightdiamond]

As long as the fleet is briefed on where it is, or even has the ability to detect it, it can be a big advantage.

For example, for decades, both the Romulans and Klingons used cloaks on their ships in fleets, and presumably, since they use their own cloaking technology, they can detect their own ships when cloaked.

Like in "Way of the Warrior" the fleet of Klingon ships de-cloaked perfectly in unison when docking close at the station, and when leaving it.

And in [FONT=Arial]"Once More Unto the Breach", Martok's small squad were cloaked but acted as if they knew each other's exact positions during the mission..

Imagine placing a cloaked, self replicating minefield in various areas along a planet's orbit or farther, or in very sensitive areas and when Jem Hadar or Cardassian fleet attacks, they get manuevered into the field and pow!

Either they try to get out and get fired on, or they simply have a hard time defending themselves from enemy fire and avoiding mines they can't see..

And even if they do eventually realize it's mined, all they can really do is avoid the area, that's what mine fields do...

 

[Praetor]

I think the fact that Rom suggested it proves it's a stupid idea.

I hadn't considered that the mine's cloaks might have been Klingon in origin. That would probably work.

Also, reflecting on the likelihood that in front of the wormhole might be the only place that the mines would work, I wonder if the verteron fields from the wormhole could aid in interfering with detection of the mines?

 

[Nightdiamond]

I think the fact that Rom suggested it proves it's a stupid idea.

I hadn't considered that the mine's cloaks might have been Klingon in origin. That would probably work.

Also, reflecting on the likelihood that in front of the wormhole might be the only place that the mines would work, I wonder if the verteron fields from the wormhole could aid in interfering with detection of the mines?

Yeah, I know, when Rom suggested it, you just knew something was going to go wrong..

And wow..two top officers putting thier heads together to figure out how to mine the wormhole, and it's Rom, of all people that comes up with the idea, lol..

Go get em Rom..

 

[Timo]

Minefields can be of two types, tactically speaking. First, they can be a dense field laid in a known location to stop the enemy from proceeding through that location. That's what's possible on important bottleneck roads or around fortifications down on Earth, but only possible next to the wormhole mouth in space - in all other space locations, the enemy could simply go around the mined area. After all, the area must be very small lest it require trillions of mines, and space is very big.

The other type of minefield is the one whose location is unknown to the enemy. This minefield is never very dense, as its function is not to stop the enemy. Rather, there are multiple very thin minefields, none of them strong enough to stop the advancing enemy column by sheer losses. The stopping power comes from the fact that the enemy doesn't know how many mines there are next to the one that just killed a soldier or a ship.

This is how the Klingons could mine shut the Bajoran system in "Sons of Mogh" with just a few thousand mines. The system wasn't physically besieged by mines - there were just a handful of mines, but the enemy couldn't known where those were, so every departure angle from Bajor was equally risky.

A minefield of the "Sons of Mogh" type would be of scant use in defending a planet's orbit. The attacker would already know it's going to take some losses, and it could calculate that a few thousand mines wouldn't result in significant additional losses. So it would be "Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead!", there being no deterrence effect from the mines whatsoever.

Self-replicating mines would probably only be useful in the wormhole application. It would be tactically unwise to sow any other minefield so densely that there'd be an advantage from self-replication.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ProtoAvatar]

The mines used zero point energy - one of the first applications of this technology by the Federation after it reversed-engineered (in a limited fashion) the tech from the borg.

The cardassians also experimented with ZPE - that "subspace generator" from "tears of the prophets" most likely extracted energy from the vacuum. The cardassian weapons platforms' shields proved invulnerable to conventional weapons - does this remind you of someone?

 

[GotNoRice]

Maybe they were just getting their power from the wormhole somehow, after all it is a type of singularity in itself right?

 

[Praetor]

I finally checked the DS9 TM; section 10.7 "Specialized Ordnance" on p 94 addressed the mines.

Synopsizing, the first paragaph explains how Rom suggested it and how a shell of them was designed to encase the wormhole.

The second paragraph notes that the shell was "adapted from an octagonal duranium cargo container" and "outfitted with off-the-shelf equipment for detonation, station keeping, and replication for filling in gaps in the wormhole perimeter." The warhead was made from "a stripped-down standard photon torpedo warhead and includes only the central combiner tank into which the cryogenic deuterium and antideuterim have been premixed, but kept separated by a long-term toroidal magnetic field driver."

The third paragraph says thrusters were taken from a class-1 probe and "connected to a single cold-gase nitrogen pressure tank." It also notes the warhead magnetic field was used to help keep the mine alligned, and that a "neutrino source counter" was included to help the mines keep an even distance from the mouth of the wormhole.

And, regarding the replicator, the fourth paragraph:

The replicator system was designe to accommodate a swarm detonation of up to twenty mines and still maintain the total shell. The replicator was a kludge of Cardassian and Starfleet types and included a raw-matter supply container able to contribute enough mass to build one-sixty-fifth of a complete mine. Mass for any one new mine was transported throuugh the replicator's subspace emitters from as many mines away as was necessary, in a bucket-brigade system. As distributed over the entire shell, enouugh mass was stored to replace over 2,500 mines. In the event the mass supply dwindled below 85 percent, the replicator sections were designed to extract particles from the zero-point vacuum domain to replensh the system. The threshold was set deliberately high because of the long lead time required to produce small numbers of particle pairs.

The final paragraph mentions that the minefield was taken down by Dukat, and that the resulting explosion had little effect on the wormhole.

No mention of the cloak that I saw, or how the replicator was powered. Maybe Mr. Sternbach would pop in to clarify if he happens by?

 

[Marie1]

There have got to be ways in the future of powering them... you'd think.

But the replicator/cloak in something a couple metres across is stretching it.

It's fiction, so they're great tho.