Very good, Lintman! This is such a close duplication of a post that I made to the beta forum a couple days ago that I wonder if you read it.
I hope that beta testers and regular customers expressing the same thing about mines will finally convince MM to modify them just a teeny bit! The one major observation which I made that you didn't is that the "economics" of mines are flat. It's smarter to use small mines because several small mines will destroy a large ship, but a single large mine is wasted on a small ship. So it's more effective and efficient to use the small mine forever, no matter how far up the tech field you go, because mines start out at maximum effectiveness unlike any other technology. We need to change that by just such measures as you have described: Limited cloaking ability for early mines, and a sliding scale of effectiveness for mine-sweepers according to the relative tech level of the sweeper and the mines.
[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 27 November 2000).]