Pushing a sort of shopping cart finagled construction through the field would ‘likely’ work I’ve determined from looking at the designs for most mines, an Afghani fellow even designed a sort of 'disposable mine clearing tumble weed.'
Throwing rocks at it however, likely wouldn’t help much unless it was some old WWII design (S-Mine/Bouncing Bettys or the whacky Russian Wooden Mines.) I even saw a listing of some odd Italian mine that uses a ‘slow pressure locking fuse’ to avoid detonation by sudden shocks like line-charges so just blowing them away might not always work.
Just wait till someone adds the GPS-enabled, leaping, self-healing minefields that can summon autonimous backup.
That device you’ve pictured isn’t at all effective at clearing mines. It can roll right over a mine easily, and is unreliable. There’s a lot of newer mines that only go off when they are stepped on with a steadily increasing pressure. Given that this takes place in the future it wouldn’t be a stretch for better triggers to be standard.
You’d probably see the trigger first, but from my understanding of how the mines work, it’s based on something of the weight of an average man putting pressure onto the trigger. So maybe crawling would work? Ask the Italians, they’re the ones who seem to have the fanciest triggers these days.
That was a bug that when fixed was widely regarded as “nerfing” the wide wheel. It was never intended to drive over mines without effect…take the average person vs the average vehicle. Does having wider wheels really negate the weight enough to keep the mine from exploding?
Perhaps, although many ‘ultramodern designs’ I’ve seen involve cluster mines with cameras and other sensors that feed back to a sort of ‘minefield handler’ who decides if the target is appropriate or not, and then triggers flinging a small, shaped explosive at the target. The whole package may or may not be capable some sort of limited self-transport, so the designs end up sounding like a leaping, micro-grenade launching drone that hangs out in packs.
Then again, I doubt this speculative future did away with the humble Claymore directional charge and those things use tripwires you could feasibly toss a rock at (assuming you were on the other side of them, the wounding range is a good 50 meters) so I think this could all be a good argument for diversifying this game’s ‘area denial’ technology.
All in all I think ‘trapped zones’ could probably be applied more intelligently, perhaps even in wider swaths of proper minefields rather than the occasional clusters we see now (containing the disaster having been a primary goal of the military forces on withdrawal I imagine.)
FYI, the pictured device isn’t a wacky mockup, from what I understand they’re deployed and in use. I’d imagine to really clear a field, you’d want to pass one of them over it many times (or do a pass woth a bunch of them) for full coverage, and the legs are designed to simulate the pressure profile of a persons step.
They were rejected as a practical solution to clearing fields because they were directionless and missed mines they rolled over. So you’d have to go over any area manually anyways to pick up what it missed. They’re useful for showing if an area does have mines, though. Just not that great at actually clearing them out.
