Space mines are difficult to effectively construct. On planets, mines are typically placed out of site, buried in the ground or sunk below the surface of water. In space there is nothing to hide a mine in. This would leave a traditional simple mine essentially useless, as any ship could shoot them to pieces before a mine got close enough to go off. Space mines are designed with stealth hulls, minimal targeting, cloaks and some even are made to phase out of this reality - anything to reduce their signatures to where they cannot be pinpointed. A space minefield is usually detectable, but the mines within the field are very difficult to pick out.

Mines have lousy targeting because of their need for stealth, but the energies they are capable of releasing make them more than enough of a threat to keep ships from risking mine fields. As always, mines are more about limiting enemy movement as opposed to being a strong offensive weapon.

Mines are bought as deployable ship systems. It takes a large number of mines to deploy a field, so a mine array takes up a lot of space on a ship. Mine arrays are one shot weapons - they may only be deployed once per system bought, though a minefield may make many attacks over its lifetime.

A minefield is a 3" diameter sphere (circle on the table). They are deployed in the movement phase when the ship moves, directly behind the ship at any point in its movement. They may not be deployed by a ship decloaking, or while using thrusters or tunneling drives (though they could be deployed before the thrusters or tunneling drive is activated) They may be given a velocity and direction that they will move at the end of each movement phase.

Any ship that enters a minefield during its move, or has a minefield move onto it at the end of a movement phase, is attacked. Each ship in a fighter squadron is attacked individually, though only that ship can be damaged (damage doesn't transfer through the squad). Minefields have a targeting of 1. A minefield can always hit a ship if it rolls a 1. In addition, every point a minefield makes its targeting roll by inflicts an additional hit on the ship. Example: A Destroyer with an aspect of 3 enters a minefield. The field needs a 4 to hit it (1 targeting + 3 aspect). It rolls a 1, 3 less than it needed, so the destroyer is hit 3 times.

Minefields may stack up. Each will get their own attacks if a ship moves into them.

At the end of any movement phase that a minefield has successfully made an attack, it has a chance of being depleted on a roll of 2 or less on a d10. If it is depleted, remove it from the game.

A minefield may be destroyed by ships within (or passing through) the field inflicting 30 MDS hits in a single turn. Ships are attacked by the minefield before they may use MDS's.

Ships may carry special Minesweeper systems designed to safely remove minefields. A ship must enter a minefield to attempt to remove it, but the removal attempt comes before the ship can be attacked. If the removal fails, the ship is attacked by the field as normal. A ship may apply multiple sweeping systems against a minefield in a turn, but they must all be declared and resolved at once. A ship must roll a 7 or less to sweep a field.