Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federation?

So.... Picard meets the Borg (in Q Who? I think?) and shoots some big holes in the cube and disables it before they can adapt. Then... he stops shooting, and wastes all kinds of time poking around investigating. (I get it, it's what they do, OK) BUT: if he had just kept shooting, it looked like he very well could have totally destroyed it and moved on before the Borg had a chance to adapt and tell all the others about the Feds.

So I blame Picard and his damn noble curiosity for Wolf 359 et al. And that's even before he was Locutusized!

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

I agree, Picard did spend too much time sitting there when he should have been either blasting or running. They go to the briefing room so many times for reasons that baffle me. Still, I don't think he did anything worth damning him for. The Borg were already on the Romulan border by that time. It was only a matter of when they would strike further..

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

That's a lot of TNG episodes. A life-threatening crisis is happening and Picard calls a conference.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

Yeah but: after dithering and letting the Borg re-generate, they learned how to repel Federation weapons. If he'd have just blown 'em up real good, then the next Federation ships could have done the same. He totally blew their tactical advantage, and they never got it back.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

You're assuming they weren't relaying their info on the E in real time to the rest of the collective.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

This is true. But if he had destroyed the cube immediately, just started pouring torpedoes into them until they blew up, they may not have had time to analyze or send anything at all. Once he started carving great gaping holes in the cube with phasers, it looked like the whole thing could have been over in a matter of seconds if he had only kept up that rate of fire.

Just playing devils advocate.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

Except that there's no relaying involved. The essence of the Collective is such that what any single drone learns, the rest of the Collective immediately learns, too. Whatever the cube encountered by the Enterprise at J-25 learned would instantly have been learned by the rest of the Collective in the DQ. Even destroying the cube within minutes of encountering it would not have prevented such an occurrence.

--Sran

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

Picard's attacks in Q Who did a little bit of minor damage that was instantly repaired, what are you talking about?

Picard did not disable the Borg cube by shooting some small dents in it. The Borg cube just knew it could catch the Enterprise so it was the most efficient solution to focus on repairs.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

There were some nice chunks blown off the corners and sides of the Cube the first few times. After that the Enterprise's weapons did basically nothing.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

That's not true. The E destroys 20% of the cube in that volley. The cube was so damaged that they cut life support to minimum. O'Brien had to search for a habitable part of the cube to beam Riker into. They needed all their energies to repair what the E had done.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

The Borg Queen having to build a interplexing beacon in First Contact says otherwise.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

It's true that in Unimatrix Zero the borg queen seems to be aware of every cube and able to self-destruct it in real time.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

Time Travel and having your forces in a time before you have the technology does that sort of thing. The transwarp network was not up yet at leat as far back as the 2150s as the Borg needed to send a long range subspace radio message to the Delta Quadrant while running from Archer's Enterprise. A message that would take maybe a 100 years to reach its destination.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

The borg from tng era were to the twenty first century borg what One from voyager was to the 24th century borg. Remember that he defeated an entire borg sphere all by himself without much effort.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

It's easy to look at the events of Q Who with 20:20 hindsight, but at the time, the threat of the Borg, and their ability to adapt, was not known. There was no reason to destroy the Cube straight away, in fact doing so would have been bizarrely out of character. Picard's mission is to seek out new life and reach a peaceful coexistence wherever possible. He acted entirely properly.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

The ability of the elements of the Collective to speak with each other may be "realtime", but it's not "direct". Distance isn't the factor slowing down communications: firewalls and censoring is. Clearly, influences from one Drone or Cube are carefully filtered before they reach another, and so dangerous subversives and disease spots can be isolated in time, as with "Descent" et al.

Now, we never learn the details of this censorship, but we can tell it's not a split-second process, or else Hugh would have been cast out of the Collective on screen rather than off screen!

Which would be a bit odd. After all, the Borg are supposedly hundreds of millennia old. In that time, even sublight vessels could conquer the entire galaxy...

Do the Borg really evolve, or are they nearly stagnated as of the 24th century? There are plenty of ancient advanced civilizations whose every trick they could have learned by then. One was from the 29th century, sort of - what makes the Borg evolve in just half a millennium?

Speaking of evolution, the Borg were wounded by Starfleet starship phasers before adapting to those. But they never were vulnerable to Starfleet photon torpedoes, not even for a single impact. Are antimatter bombs "generic" weapons the Borg learned to defeat aeons ago and always come equipped against, while phasers and other death rays are always specific to a culture and incapable of being defeated by a single "generic" countermeasure? Note that Starfleet phasers jkeep on confounding the Borg whenever used - the first few shots always work, even on the sixteenth encounter, or the forty-seventh...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

I think TNG and VOY have shown us plenty of proofs that the borg evolve, they not only do so by assimilating new species, they are also capable of adapting to a completely new weapon pretty quick. They're capable of research and invention.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

I was thinking of Borg evolution in terms of the argument that the ST:FC Borg were screwed because there wasn't a modern Borg communications network in existence in the 2150s "yet". That doesn't sound likely: adaptation to yet another death ray would happen almost weekly, but something that fundamental ought to be in place well in advance of humans inventing the wheel, for the Borg Collective to make sense in the first place.

IMHO ST:FC just shows that individual Drones (of any era) cannot talk across galactic distances by using the gear carried inside their bodies alone. They need big transmitters, and the ST:FC Borg had lost theirs when the Sphere blew up. Hence the need for modifying a piece of hero hardware.

What challenges would be left for the Borg after thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years of assimilation? The Feds are not particularly advanced: they themselves constantly run into superior cultures and individuals in the TV shows. Yet the Borg don't assimilate them outright, but stoop to having "battles" with them. Is that yet another adaptation - making the fun last longer?

I seriously doubt Picard gave the Borg anything they didn't already have in "Q Who?". Except a reason to go after the Feds in the 2360s rather than wait for the 2960s or the 10260s or whatever, because a species that can win a chase against the Borg must be formidable and worthy of immediate assimilation, or at least a few probing raids. And that was Q's doing, not Picard's.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

But what about First Contact? They blew the sphere to smithereens with mostly torpedoes.

And yeah, I totally realize that simply destroying the cube at the first encounter would have been out of character and against the principles of Starfleet. I don't clearly remember the episode -- didn't Guinan warn Picard to destroy them as soon as she saw the cube? Anyway, the fact remains (using 20/20 hindsight) that destroying the cube would not only have been relatively easy but may well have prevented future adaptations. If, that is, there was even the slightest delay in updating the rest of the collective.

 

Re: Is Picard responsible for the Borg's success against the Federatio

This is where I bow out. Can't discuss the Borg post I, Borg. Assimilation of other species? Queens? Not in the original intent and not interesting to me. Just turns them into Cybermen.