Nuclear mine balance

[Its Raisu]

Nukes were alright few years ago. You only got full damage with direct hit, and it gradually dropped to 0 at the edge of the explosion effect zone.
I don't know when, how or why, but this vanilla feature was removed for mine hull damage (still in place for shield damage).
Now mines deal only max damage.

4.86 is when this was changed. More than a few years at this point.

It is the side effect of a hack that was applied to explosion damage to make torpedoes deal damage consistently to large ship models. Prior to that nobody used Novas, because they didn't work.

So from the sounds of it, something changed to make torpedoes useful (removing explosion damage dropoff apparently?) but this indirectly meant an extremely significant buff to mines and nothing was done to tone them back as a result of that change?

Idk, but that sounds like a "yikes" from a balancing perspective.