quote:
Mines I: they should simply explode whenever ANY ship hits them – even your own.
Mines II: would be able to distinguish between you and anyone else without making up for
changing alliances. They would just blow up anything that is not yours.
Since we already have incredibly complex Friend-or-foe technology today, there's no reason to propose a more advanced civiliation would lose it. The devices are small enough to fit into cell phones and cheap enough to build at home with parts from Radio Shack (my step father did it so I know this first hand) so you can't say that they wouldn't put them into mines for cost reasons either.
Heck, there's already a guy who expects to have reprogrammable motion sensors only twice the size of dust particles in production in 2002, I think that the mines of a space-faring race could be designed to know which ships to attack.
Now, if you wanted to include this feature, a great way to do it would be to up the size of all mine bodies by 1kt, and add a mine computer module with those limits you speak of. The lowest Version would only cost 5 minerals, the next, 25, and the rest could be decently expensive. This way you might have a reason to make cheap ones if you needed them in a real hurry, but in reality, almost everyone could afford the good mines.
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