Hi everyone. As you probably know, the stars help files states the following: "When a ship is in a minefield, its cloak effectiveness is always an absolute value (90% cloak = 10% chance of detection).
One of my favourite races is the SD race, and I always think I manage to spot more enemy ships in my minefields when playing this race than other races. So today I thought it was time to testbed, and find out exactly how the guts of detection in minefields work. Does the number of different minefields count, or not? Time to find out, and as the helpful guy I am, instead of hoarding this (at least for me) new information, I will share it with the world
So I set up a small tiny testbed with a SD race and a SS race. I moved the initial minelayers towards the SS race, and started laying a huge minefield with both speed traps and normal mines. The SS player built 100 scouts which has the default 75% cloaking. I then sent these ships at warp4 through the minefields after splitting them all, and observed the results.
Here are the results, year by year:
23 Here we have entered the normal mines, but not the speed traps. 23 ships detected.
44 Here we have also entered the speed traps. Interesting. Both the minefields seems to have it's own chance at detection!
43 ...
46 ...
40 ...
52 ...
39 ...
46 ...
40 ...
45 ...
22 Took a while, but at last we have exited the speed trap. Detection rate back at only one minefield.
18 ...
48 This was interesting! Here the ships intersects the normal minefields AND another normal minefield surrounding the HW. So it's not based on the minefield types at all, it's based on each overlapping minefield!
40 ...
43 ...
100 This is also interesting! Here the ships have come within 75% range of the HW's scanner. So the ships cannot actually HIDE in the minefields from normal scanners, as one interpretation of the manuals sentence could be.

Hope you found this info as interesting as I did