Mine, a simple yet effective naval weapon, how has it kept pace with the times?

The mine is an old naval weapon, but it is simple and effective.

In the history of human warfare, the most feared thing in naval warfare is mines. Imagine a ship speeding on the sea and suddenly exploded without any warning. This shock is hard to understand if you have not experienced it yourself. Do you remember the Gulf War in 1991? This war against Iraq launched by multinational forces was originally played by the United States, because long before the war began, the United States had formulated a large-scale amphibious landing plan. As a result, Iraq directly dropped more than 1,000 mines into the Persian Gulf, which made the United States dare not enter and could not clear them. As a result, the protagonist originally promised to become a supporting role.

This is actually a very annoying thing, because let alone 1,000 mines, even 10,000 or even 100,000 mines are not worth as much as a warship, but they can stop an entire fleet.

Although mines are powerful, they are an old naval weapon after all, and this weapon itself is very clumsy. Why have they not been eliminated to this day? Because mines know how to keep up with the times. The first mines made were a kind of sphere with "thorns" floating on the water. These thorns are actually the tentacles of the mine, that is, the trigger of the mine. As long as a ship touches it, it will explode.

Soon after its introduction, naval mines encountered their first crisis of elimination, because the most important point of this weapon is its concealment. The concealment of naval mines floating on the water surface is really poor and they are easily targeted.

In order to solve this problem, the mines have changed. People installed a floating plate above the mines and hung the mines under the floating plate. In this way, the concealment of the mines is greatly enhanced. However, the mines at this time still have obvious defects. Whether they float directly on the water or use the floating plate to float on the water, the movement of the mines is random.

What's the problem with mines that drift with the tide? They don't distinguish between friend and foe.

The enemy cannot enter the sea area full of mines because they don't know where the mines are. If they accidentally encounter them, the ship will be blown up and people will die. But we ourselves dare not enter this sea area because the randomly moving mines make it impossible for us to determine their location, and once the war is over, it will be extremely difficult to remove these mines. In this context, mines continue to play their instinct to keep pace with the times, and a new type of mine was born, that is, anchor mines. Anchor mines are mines connected to anchors on the seabed with cables or iron chains. In this way, the position of the mine is fixed, and the entire mine is located under the water, which greatly improves safety and concealment.

Although anchor mines are good, they seem to be of little use in modern naval warfare. However, mines have not been eliminated because of this. Instead, they have kept pace with the times again, and self-guided mines were born.

A self-guided mine in a static state is like an anchor mine, suspended under the water surface by connecting to an anchor. Once a target is found, it immediately transforms into a torpedo and chases the target and rams it. In fact, a self-guided mine is a combination of an anchor mine and a torpedo, except that the mine on the anchor mine is replaced by a box, and the box contains a torpedo.

How do self-guided mines find their targets? And how do they accurately identify enemy and friendly ships?

Ships sailing on the water have several obvious characteristics. The first is the magnetic field. Different ships generate different magnetic fields. The second is the sound. Different ships make different sounds when sailing. The third is the pressure. The difference in size, mass, and shape will cause the pressure of the water below the ship to change. As long as these characteristics are remembered, the self-guided mine can accurately identify which one is the enemy's warship and which one is our warship, so that friendly forces will not be injured by mistake.

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