[Urendi Maleldil]

I like the idea of giving kamikaze satellites combat movement. I don't however like the idea of removing mine sweepers completely. I think it would be better to make them more cumbersome to use. For example, make them 100kT each, very expensive, damage first, remove a maximum of 2 mines per turn, and have a large combat to hit defense minus.

This way you couldn't just slap a few mine sweeping components onto a combat ship. You need some sort of dedicated ship. That ship would be large and expensive since you'll probably want to put more than one sweeper on it to be worthwhile. Therefore it will be slow to build, very weak in combat, and take up a large chunk of resources that could be better used for combat ships. And if the max mines per sector is 200 and a typical sweeper ship has 5 or 6 sweepers on it, the most it could remove per turn is 10 or 12 mines. Meaning it will take about 20 ships to clear a single maxed out mine field. And that's not all.

If the mines are not cloaked, it will be possible to force your opponent to choose which mine fields to clear and which to leave in place. A nice new strategic tool. Too bad the AI won't be able to use it.