[propbeanie]

Easily detect or avoid? No. If you are underwater, you can partially raise your periscope and see them somewhat if you go slow enough, but avoiding them is no easy mean feat. Back Emergency will slow and get you moving back relatively rapidly, but what's behind you as you avoid? What's left and right? Plus, the technique does not work very well at night. The easiest way to find a mine is to strike one, but the game has a nasty habit of not registering the "hit" with sound and water splash every time... When you are on the surface, you can sometimes shoot the mines with an AA gun and explode them, but it can be difficult to hit one.

The minefields are usually set with the mines configured with a "density" figure, such as "24 mines per square kilometer", which is actually a "circle" area. That number can be, and usually is, much higher. The depth setting for the mines can also be varied, and is usually given in two figures for minimum and maximum depths, such as "-1 and -15", which is in meters, so of those 24 mines in a km radius circle, some are at -1m, some at -15, and then the remainder are peppered at varying depths between, randomly. Some of the minefields are set deep to catch a submerged submarine, such as "-12 and -34" meters, and some fields are set to "-0.5 and -8" meters for surface ships, all dependent upon the modder or devs desires...

It is better to avoid known minefield locations, which most modders include documentation of some form with their mods. Not all do though. To "cheat", you can use the Mission Editor in the game folder, and open the minefield file you want to look at, which with a German U-Boat in KSDII, you would be most interested in "UK_HarborTraffic.mis" in the Game \Data \Campaigns \CampaignGE \CampaignData folder. Zoom-in and do a screen grab of the area you want to take a picture of for future reference. Not all mods use the same "historical" data for those minefields, btw...