ORIGINAL: witpqs
If all bombs have the potential, no matter how infinitesimal, to deliver a critical damage hit to EVERY naval platform
I think this would be going too far.
At any rate, go back to Don Bowen's post. He said that the 'hit' chance of near-misses is in there, but the full damage potential is not modeled. And it's not going to be in AE (certainly not in initial release anyway).
Your typical mine had an 80-125 kg explosive charge (effective at 12/20 meters), while your typical torpedo was more like 250 kg (1500 kg total for the torpedo). WWII battleships could theoretically resist a torpedo warhead, but would be damaged by the shock, and in the wrong place a torpedo was still sometimes lethal. A 250 kg bomb (50-60 kg warhead, effective at 10 meters) could sometimes take out a cruiser.
Your typical 10,000 ton cruiser had a beam of 20 meters, and your typical DD had a beam of 10 meters.
Hence if we use 10 meters as the near miss distance, about twice as many bombs will damage a DD by mining as will hit it, about the same number of bombs will mine a cruiser as will hit it, and about 2/3rds as many bombs will mine a capital ship as will hit it. If 10% of your near misses sink a cruiser, that says about 5% of the bombs that damage a cruiser will be critical hits, sinking it. It also says about 4% of the bombs damaging a capital ship will have the potential of sinking it, although in that case, the underwater protective system will have a chance at keeping the bomb blast out of the magazine.
Note that shock damage was not taken into account in the design of capital ship underwater protective systems before WWII, and their effectiveness was less than expected, so torpedo attack was unpleasant.
