I totally agree that the current implementation of mines leaves a lot to be desired. When I was downloading the beta, I was excited about how mines would change the gameplay, as I've traditionally liked mines in strategy games; just one more way of tightening your grasp on a system. I was surprised to find that they weren't at all what I expected.
I find the current implementation too... haphazard, for lack of a better term. You can't specifically position mines, and you can't move them once they're laid. You can only command a ship to drop them at a fixed rate, and even then only until it runs out of anti-matter. So, if you want to create a proper minefield, you have to manually fly a group of mine layers around the system. Once the mines decay, you've got to do it all over again. Don't even get me started on clearing mines! Suffice to say, I agree with previous posts that some better, more reliable, less tedious, perhaps automated method needs to be implemented for mine clearing. I primarily play co-op against AI's, and it seems to me like the AI uses mines more for their psychological effect than for tactical reasons 
. I think my biggest problem is that mines go against one of my favorite aspects of Sins. Up until now, I've always felt that Sins has maintainted an excellent balance between scale, and micromanagement. I can move ships about my empire via the empire tree, or via the representative icons next to each of my systems. If I wanted to, I could play the entire game without ever focusing in on one system (I'm not saying that this would be a good idea, just that it could be done). With the introduction of mines, I can't do that. I can't select a ship and say "go clear mines in this system" or select another and say "go mine this system against intrusion". I've got to do it manually. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the current implementation shifts the scales way too heavily toward the micromanagement side.
Did anyone ever play that old Win 3.11 game "Stars! 2"? I think that's more what I was expecting in terms of minelaying. You have one or more mine layers, and you combine them into a fleet, then set the fleet to "lay mines" mode. While in this mode, it creates an area of effect, within which is considered "mined". The more mine layers in the fleet, the larger the radius of this area of effect. If the mine layers are destroyed, or stop laying mines for whatever reason, the minefield slowly decays. Clearing mines can be done by any ship with beam weapons, but there are also specialized "mine-sweeper" ships which can clear at a faster rate. Obviously, this would would have had to be adapted to Sins' universe and strategies, but that's the general idea, and it's what I had in my mind going into the beta.
It's obvious from the way you interact with mines that the game simply treats them as invulnerable ships, with engines disabled and a proximity-based self-destruct. Maybe a different mindset should be considered. What if we change the underlying mechanism to be more like a phase inhibitor or weapon jammer? By that, I mean that we have one object (in this case a ship instead of a weapon jammer) which affects an area within a certain radius around itself. Whether this proposed ship actually creates individual "mine" objects, or merely has a range radius within which a ship has a certain percentage chance to "hit a mine", is a matter of personal preference.
I think that unless mines are significantly changed in some way (and I won't specify what way, because I'm sure someone has an idea even better than discussed above!), I honestly hope that the final version of the expansion adds "disable mines" to the game options. Just my two cents.
-T
