Tricking The Borg

[Herkimer Jitty]

Now, this isn't my idea, but I want to see if it's any good.

Ahem.

Basically, the idea is that one could potentially befuddle the Borg's adaptive shields by using that adaptability against them... somehow make them believe a different weapon on a different frequency is being fired at them. Thus, they adapt to a disruptor blast, but get hit by a phaser instead. The false readings would of course be totally randomized. Good idea? Bad idea? Just give up and try hitting them with a baseball bat instead?

[Plecostomus]

The odds are someone over the course of history tried that already. It gets to the point where the Borg aren't expecting an attack, but once they are attacked by something that they've encountered before they adapt.

Where our heroes got the Borg the first time is simple: The Borg were NOT expecting an attack from an external port on their network... they were expecting weapons fire from outside the cube. It's only when you catch them totally off guard that they can be defeated... and that trick might only work a few times until they catch on.

A good example from our RPG is a network of transporters beamed billions of gallons of water from a class-M planet into an orbiting cube. Did not destroy the cube outright but boggled it enough to give the players a chance to rescue the colony and escape. Had my players been more sober-ish they would have realized that the same principle could have been applied to sand. Or other solid matter. Ah well.

Borg work best as a force of nature, not a recurring bad-guy of the week... you either quickly write yourself into a defeat or you have to dumb down, and we all know which direction they took with 'em on screen.

[Herkimer Jitty]

Dat's what I thought. Thanks.

[JNG]

I don't know how their defenses work, exactly, but it is possible that if two phaser beams (or something in that vein) which have been modulated differently from one another strike as close as possible to the same targeted point, the Borg cannot "cancel" them out at the same time. If there is some sort of "specific interferometry" at play, there would have to be limits on it. It'd take close coordination to make this tactic work against the individual drones.

As for applying it on a larger scale, their ship defenses seem to be able to handle the brute-force detonations of photon torpedoes and such well enough (aided by an obviously superior source of power), so it would still take some doing to make much of an impact with this method--which would make sense of both the relatively long running battle toward Sector 001 in Star Trek: First Contact and of the relatively quick resolution when Picard identified a weak spot on which the massed fire would show rapid results.

I certainly must caution you that the baseball bat is unlikely to do a bit of good

[Meredith]

Beam in a couple hundred pounds of C4 with the detanator about to go BOOM, and BOOM big hole in Borg ship.

[Santaman]

I really got annoyed by all that adaption crap, I mean how do you adapt to a photon torpedo? Its just a projectile delivering a big load of matter and antimatter, whats there to adapt? At a given point someone will just cram a whole lot more matter and antimatter into a projectile and no matter how well you've adapted you'll be blown to little pieces anyway, kinda like shooting at a tank with one of Yamato's 18" guns, a tank is extremely well adapted to getting hit by projectiles but it will be dust if you use an 18" projectile on it, so I guess my advice will be if you at first fail then GET A BIGGER HAMMER!!

[jolau]

I thought that is what they did. Vary the yield of the photon torpedoes, and add some Quantum Torpedoes in the mix as well.

[Timo]

Intuitively, that doesn't sound like a good idea.

Our heroes fly around in ships that are some hundreds of meters long. They expect to do battle against villains flying similar ships, and survive whatever these villains lob at them. That's the state of the art as defined by the 24th century.

Now, the Borg fly around in cubical ships several kilometers on side... In terms of raw force, they are the obvious top dogs here. Trying to "outgun" them would be as futile an effort as (to reverse the above analogy) trying to go against a battleship with dozens of inches of armor belt in a tank that sports a 120 mm smoothbore.

Intuitively, the Borg wouldn't need to specifically adapt to something like a photon torpedo, or to a torpedo with a tenfold-multiplied yield. They would fly in a ship designed from the outset to shrug off those.

Timo Saloniemi

[Search4]

I know this was a Voyager trick, but i'm a big fan of beaming in a chunk of antimatter and then standing back watching the cube go away. It just amazes me that our heroes routinely walk around the Borg... meet the Queen... and don't have a grenade-sized antimatter bomb to leave behind, on, oh say a transport time+3 second timer.

Antimatter is -really- powerful in very small quantity. The magnetic bottle technology looks very mature. And while maybe you can figure out how to protect a ship exterior, the interior of ships, and people, certainly can't deal with that type of explosion.

Remember the Doomsday machine? "Pure anti-proton" and it could cut through planets.