If you are moving at speed 17, it means you must be on Emergency Propulsion. This points to not being in a fleet of ships which means you are most likely to be alone. You would then take all the damage on the minesweeper.
An interesting mod would be to have a (cheap) mine that killed only minesweeper components. You could place them one hex away (or surrounding) a heavily mined hex. The first mines would just remove any minesweeping components but leave the fleet speed intact. It could move on and hit a bunch of large mines taking the damage from all of them. It would only work if you were not able to totally clear the first mined hex, but why let reality interfere with my plans to conquer the universe.
