Mines: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 22:16, 11 October 2026

Neutron mines are stationary area weapons. A launched mine stores its owner's ship slot, its exact galactic coordinates, and a countdown in ship-state ticks. See Mine command for command syntax, deployment checks, and launcher limits.

Countdown and detection

The global mine routine runs once per main ship-state update, normally every six seconds, and decreases each active mine's timer by one. It does proximity work when the remaining timer is a multiple of five: at a positive multiple it may warn nearby ships, while zero is the detonation pass. A ship near a mine may therefore get a warning roughly every 30 seconds; a mine with a delay shorter than five ticks can explode without a prior proximity warning. Jamming can suppress the warning, but not the explosion or its damage.

Mines can appear as dots on SCAN RANGE and SCAN SECTOR maps. ge-next's nebula visibility can hide a mine beyond nebula sensor range, and interference can obscure mine information. ge-next's REPORT ORDNANCE also lists the current player's deployed mines, with sector and remaining time; bearing and distance are included when conditions allow.

Mines are stored in a global memory table, not a sector or planet record. A mine remains fixed when its layer moves away and is not saved across a module restart or cleanup.

Explosion and avoidance

A mine damages every eligible ship strictly within 10,000 distance units of its position: users, NPCs, allies, enemies, and potentially its own layer. One mine can hit several ships, each at a different distance and damage level. Ships protected by the neutral zone are spared; a mine placed just outside it can still explode without damaging a ship inside. A ship outside the blast radius can receive a bearing-only report of the explosion, even from another sector, unless its sensors are sufficiently impaired.

The ZIPPER weapon sets the timers of every active mine within the firing ship's scanner range to one. They detonate on the next mine update, not immediately when ZIPPER is entered. A zipper does not distinguish friend from foe: it can trigger the firing ship's own mines, enemy mines, NPC mines, or ownerless mines. It can therefore catch a pursuing mine layer before that ship clears the blast radius.

Damage falloff

Both versions calculate proximity = 1 - distance / 10000 for a ship within the blast radius. Classic 3.2e uses cubic falloff; ge-next 0.3 changed it to quadratic falloff:

Classic raw damage = MNDAMMAX * proximity^3
ge-next raw damage = MNDAMMAX * proximity^2

The stock MNDAMMAX is 75 in both versions. At the center, both formulas start at 75 before defenses; farther out, the quadratic ge-next blast retains more damage:

Distance from mine	Classic, cubic	ge-next, quadratic
0	75.00	75.00
2,500	31.64	42.19
5,000	9.38	18.75
7,500	1.17	4.69

The target class's DAMF reduces the result. Raised shields further reduce hull damage by a random divisor involving shield Mark and take a separate shield-system hit. An unshielded ship receives the full DAMF-adjusted hull result. ge-next can also apply armor-plating protection and assess random damage to systems or carried items after a mine hit; classic does not make that additional random-damage assessment for mines. The displayed damage can be rounded even when the underlying value is fractional.

Ownership and kill credit

Classic stores the layer's ship slot in the mine and does not clear that owner from active mines when the player is destroyed or departs. If the slot is later reused, a mine can appear to belong to an unrelated player. Classic also assigns the mine's owner to the victim's lastfired field on a hit, even when a ship damages itself with its own mine. An unused mine slot and an ownerless active mine are not separately represented in this classic scheme.

Since ge-next 0.3.2, an unused slot and a live ownerless mine have distinct values. A destroyed or departing player's mines remain active hazards but become ownerless. Their damage does not overwrite the victim's existing lastfired value or change faction hostility. An active player's own mine likewise does not replace a prior attacker's lastfired value when it hits the laying ship. Thus an attacker who previously damaged a ship can still receive credit if that ship later destroys itself with its own mine; without such an attacker, the death is uncredited. For other mine hits, ge-next assigns a valid active owner subject to its usual faction rules.

In ge-arena, a mine retains its owner through that player's ship destruction and respawn, because the participant remains in a stable match slot and can still earn a later kill. A departing player's mines become ownerless, and the arena world reset removes all mines between matches.