Now first off, if I were faced with a slow moving enemy that could adapt to energy weapons... I, having not attended Starfleet Academy, have a really simple solution So as its established the borg can adapt to energy weapons via ship shielding and personal shielding sorounding the drone. In First Contact Picard Establishes the obvious that the borg cannot survive without their organic components, and a further illustration of this point is the holodeck scene where he unloads his tommy gun on two borg killing them... So basically, its very likely that not only could Starfleet personal easily defeat borg with projectile weapons and melee weapons such as I don't know SWORDS or a knife... but its also possible they'd be able to use high explosive conventional weapons against borg ships, such as Nuclear Weapons and missiles. Of course such weapons would have to be modified to deliver a decent amount of firepower, since current versions in our time would not be adequate at all. Jeez, this is why I should be in charge of Starfleet
The best anti borg weapon for ground/shipboard combat would combine projectile weaponry with transporter/replicator treknology. Imagine an assault rifle with a small replicator in the magazine well replicating ammo as it is fired... and the ability to repair its own barrel with a micro replicator/transporter. It could fire thousands of rounds without reloading and without degrading or overheating its barrel.
Nuclear weapons are energy (release) weapons. And photon torpedoes are just missiles by another name.
Since forcefields have been shown to be able to block solid objects (remember Roga Danar's ship bouncing off the shields in "The Hunted"?), I do not think that objects like bull;ets or swords would be able to beat the Borg. The Borg will adapt to them just the same as any energy weapon. I suspect that they would have something similar to this: "X is penetrating this drone's shields and damaging the drone. We must adapt to block X."
The Borg have never been shown to adapt to KE attack no matter how many times they were exposed to it. (Otherwise punches and blows with rifle butts etc would become ineffective). That's the reason guns are the way to go when fighting them.
Apart from that off shoot Borg group I don't think Borg ships use shields. I'm not saying they can't, but every time we have seen a Borg ship in combat it seems to take the damage and repair it, rather than try to block the incoming fire in the first place. And as Borg drones usually get zapped left right and centre before they start shielding, there's probably no significance to the fact that a couple were killed with a Tommy gun. If a few more had come along, they could well have adapted to projectile weapons.
Something that could disrupt the hive mind link wich prevent them from adapting while destroying their ships upon impact. Or something that could severely interfere with there sensor reading, so they can't adapt, and at the same time is powerful enough to disrupt their nuero transmitter (so they can't communicate) and destroy their ships upon impact. Maybe something with high electromagnetic field greater than any the Borg has ever seen in the universe. In theory that would disrupt anything. I don't know!
urely this whole adaption thing is a bit 'bogus' im sure that you can't adapt to everything so quickly and the things you can adapt to might be difficult or impractical.
2 words: Thalaron Radiation. That could wipe out the entire collective. And I don't think the Borg would have time to adapt to it either, if you fired it at something really important.
Another possibility: Build a few absolutely fuck-you-mongous dreadnoughts specifically to take down Borg cubes fast. It would probably require new shipyards to be built and the industrial capacity suck would pinch the production of other ships for a few years but it's acceptable given the Borg threat. You only need a few them, 3 - 5 in the fleet. Next time the Borg show up and there's this 2 or 3 mile long dreadnought with several feet of armour plating and multiple redundant oversized warp cores, waiting for them with turreted pulse phaser cannons as big as planetary defense guns, and about 20 torpedo tubes capable of directing a stream of quantum torpedoes like a machine gun. It sounds like fan masturbation but it ought to work. Borg threats must be dealt with quickly and decisively.
Given all the enhanced Borg physiology and looking at how smart Seven of Nine of is and with their superior technologies, I think they can somehow manage, quite well. Seven of Nine is even smarter than your average Vulcan with lightning fast reflex, typical of Borg.
technology is designed for a purpose. a swiss army knife is a multipurpose tool. the more multipurpose the bigger the device. you ever seen those ridiculously large swiss army knives? Borg drones seem to have a few tools on them but that's about it. tools designed to carry out a few special tasks. for the borg to have everything on them they'd be hauling a junkyard with them everytime they transported over.
Why are there no suiciide bomber borgs? It would be a huge tactical advantage. Or sleeping gas or something like that would be a good idea.
There's a treaty that prohibits the Federation from using cloaking technology on their ships. A stupid one, but that has been debated countless times. I guess the philosophy is that if you wander about the galaxy, you should show yourself. OK... Well, when it comes to fighting, that's a different story. You have a seemingly unstoppable enemy. What are you going to do, not partake of every available technology to fight them? Interphasic cloaked torpedoes. As soon as one leaves the torpedo tube, it cloaks. It is interphased between dimensions. Once it passes inside the space occupied by a cube, it decloaks and detonates. Cube destroyed. Problem solved. As for the Borg beings, a solution was already created. An anti-nanoprobe virus is delivered via a projectile. It enters the body and then overtakes all nanoprobes, effectively eliminating the Borg part of the being. Rather than killing them, the virus would be designed to render the Borg being inert. A humane way of dispensing with the threat.
Trek Lit disagrees with me, but this is what I figured transphasic torpedoes were in Voyager's Endgame. Not more powerful, per se. Just capable of bypassing any defence and detonating inside a vessel. Visible, obviously. But the phasing technology given a tactical use.
Study dead borg drones, or the implants they removed from Locutus. Figure out what kind of frequencies the Collective uses for their Hive Mind, and try to develop a jamming device that would at least impede the Hive Mind if not disrupt it entirely and free the assimilated people on Borg ships. Put said Jammer in every deflector dish on every Fleet ship and viola, perfect anti-Borg weapon.
With some "Red Matter." Better hurry though, before the Federation signs a treaty saying they won't use it.
The Borg that beamed aboard in TBoBW were able to easily defelct physical attacks from both Riker and Worf. And since we've seen that even with energy weapons the Borg need a bit of time to adapts, isn't it possible that we just haven't seen a physical attack used for long enough for the Borg to adapt?
We only saw physical attacks used on the Borg twice: Bullets and Worf's sword thing in FC. In both cases they were only used once and we don't know if they would be effective the second time.