Transcription
Tumblr post by arctic-hands:
When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly “Borg Cube”, but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.
So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said “Death Star”.
So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.
Reply from evilsoup:
An image depicting the story of the “Judgment of Solomon”, where Solomon is labelled “stargate fandom”, and the two women are labelled “star trek fandom” and “star wars fandom”. The Star Wars lady is standing grumpily with her hands on her hips, while the Star Trek woman gestures with open arms. Between the two of them, on the floor, is a baby in a wicker basket. Solomon sits over them in judgment.
Could a Borg cube stop a Nemesis style Picard maneuver, if deflecting the energy at impact was the only option?
Basically, if I took a high powered super rifle and pointed it at a Borg cube, how many shots do I get? Or, is the Stargate proposition correct, projectile attacks are so primitive that the Borg simply can’t defend themselves against it?
I imagine a laser weapon, any directed energy weapon for that matter, would be a short lived attack method against the Borg. The first shot, sure, it works. Maybe the second if it comes fast enough. But a hive mind super computer is going to adapt eventually and the Borg adapt quickly.
I don’t know, Borg shields seem highly selective in how they work. The ships shields seem like they function like every other starship shields, which would mean deflecting solid objects/phaser fire. The only difference is that they adapt to phaser frequencies, but that’s not entirely helpful since phasers are distinct from lasers and exclusive to Star Trek.
But the Borg also have personal sheilds that seem to only deflect phasers, since the crew are able to physically touch the borg when they’re shielded like this. Does this mean that the Borg’s ships shields actually can’t deflect physical objects?
Here’s another one; the personal borg shields can’t seem to stop Picard’s holodeck bullets in First Contact. Does that mean they can’t stop any physical objects, or does it mean they can’t stop hard light constructs? If they can’t stop hard light, can they even stop true laser fire?
The Borg shield COULDN’T stop hard light bullets, but the whole gimmick of the Borg is that they adapt to any weapon used against them, that holographic bullets wouldn’t work next time.
So, I don’t think that’s true. We’ve only ever seen them adapt their shields and weapons to phaser frequencies, and the rotating-frequency strategy was pretty effective throughout TNG and First Contact. It seems more like that adapting to phaser frequencies just piece of technology that assimilated rather than an having an innate ability to adapt to any attack.