Why do people keep saying Voyager weakened the Borg?

[Guy Gardener]

Half the length but a much greater fraction of the mass.

If you juiced a dozen intrepid class starships you could probably pour them all into Enterprise D's saucer section.

I remember them once mentioning the tonnage of Voyager.

Did they ever reveal the weight of the Enteprise?

[Saquist]

Anwar wrote:

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...No, it seems the same size in both images.

No it's not. You're letting the acute perspective fool you. DS9 is one of the worse scaled objects in Trek and this is just as bad a job as any. Everytime we see ships Docked at DS9 that all look large...including runnabouts docked in this same location.

[Anwar]

Really? DS9 looks the same and VOY seems suitably smaller in that shot compared to the Enterprise. Anyways, the size chart is based on guys even more obsessed than us going over the visual evidence of the series repeatedly, I'll stick with them.

[zar]

Those obsessed guys are not in agreement with each other. Bernd Schneider believes the visual evidence in Voyager confirms the official Doug Drexler concept of it being an upgrade of the standard cube:

ExAstrisScientia wrote:

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Visual evidence from VOY: "Unimatrix Zero" supports the assumption that it is of the same size as a 3km cube variant 2.

You're conveniently choosing to ignore this interpretation, despite the fact that it's the one that most closely agrees with onscreen dialog and the creator's actual intent, and go with the one that supports your original assumption. That makes you look awfully stubborn.

[Anwar]

Visual evidence from Unimatrix Zero actually supports the "it's smaller" interpretation, not the "it's the same size" one.

http://www.ditl.org/index.php?daymai...tacticalcube&1

Look at that shot of it fighting VOY, it's clearly smaller than the ENT-D/Cube confrontations from Q Who? and BOBW.

[Guy Gardener]

What's the vessel with 64 thousand drones from Unimatrix Zero look like?

Was it abnormally large?

[zar]

Anwar wrote:

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Look at that shot of it fighting VOY, it's clearly smaller than the ENT-D/Cube confrontations from Q Who? and BOBW.

No, not clearly. Remember Fesarius?

[Anwar]

The Fesarius was pretty friggin big, yes. The chart puts it as 1600 M in diameter. Nearly as big as the Tactical Sphere.

[zar]

Yep, but at first it was visually a lot smaller than that. "It's so far away but it still fills the screen!" When you have a featureless geometric shape hanging in space like Fesarius or a Borg cube, you have no way to tell how close or how large it really is.

Since Voyager is in the foreground in that shot, all it implies is that Voyager is smaller than the cube. The beam weapon goes off to a vanishing point. How far away is it? How relatively fast is Voyager moving toward the cube? We don't have any of that information, so this shot is useless as evidence for measurement.

I suspect Schneider reached his conclusion using more informative visuals. Whatever happened to deferring to the judgement of the more obsessed?

[Anwar]

, you only suspect Schneider in the more obsessed one.

In all Borg appearances of the Assimilation Cube, no matter how far away, it's ALWAYS been shown to be much more massive compared to the Galaxy class than VOY was to that Tactical Cube.

[Luminus]

Anwar wrote:

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Having hull armor doesn't mean anything for Trek ships, never has never will.

Is that why the ablative hull armor that Voyager gets from the future was able to successfully shake off weapons fire from 3 borg cubes in "Endgame"?

zar wrote:

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So what, there is no point of reference. The other cubes weren't called "Strategic" or "Class 1" so these words are meaningless when comparing the cubes. Even if we assume, for example, that a higher "class" number means a weaker ship, it's still useless information because the other cubes could just as easily be "Class 15" as "Class 1".

This is the line where the "class 4 tactical" was introduced:

SEVEN: This is a class 4 tactical vessel, heavily armed. The central plexus is protected by multi-regenerative security grids. We'd be detected long before we could reach it.

How can anyone look at this line and claim that it's describing a ship that's weaker than what we're used to?

That's what confuses me so much. In what universe are the words "heavily armed" ever considered as describing something that is weak?

zar wrote:

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There's no official reference to "Assimilation cubes" (I'm not sure where that term comes from, the Armada video game maybe?), and tactical cubes were never seen simultaneously with the original cubes for comparison. All we know is that the tactical was a "heavily armed" version of cube.

Tactical cubes are the same size as the other cubes seen on Voyager. You can tell this easily, because Voyager happened to pass over or under a cube in "Endgame" and in "Unimatrix Zero." The cubes are clearly the same size. I gave you a source to the designer himself saying the it's just a cube with a flack jacket and there's still a debate? Do I have to go to Memory Beta and get ship dimensions to put this one to rest?

Well, it looks like someone beat me to it...

Anwar wrote:

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We don't know that the Tactical Cube was a heavily armed version of the Assimilation Cube, we just know that it's a heavily armed Borg ship. Nothing in the dialog compares it to an Assimilation Cube and the visuals of it in comparison to VOY have it as MUCH smaller than an Assimilation Cube.

A Tactical Cube is 1500 M in diameter, an Assimilation Cube is 3040 M in diameter, the Tactical Cube is 1/4 the total size of the one from "Q Who" and BOBW.

http://www.st-minutiae.com/misc/comparison/

As for why the Borg only send one Cube at a time: The writers overpowered the Borg, realized it and hoped we'd never complain about it. They got lucky.

Okay, now we're bringing out the dimensions. Thanks you for that link. Unfortunately for you, it only proves my point. I read the article and looked at the ship sizes, THEN, I clicked on the source link like the site's author suggests. Here is what I found:

Tactical Cube length: approx. 3000m
Cube variant 2 length: approx. 3000m
Cube variant 1 length: "a huge vessel" ??? Not seen again, after BOBW.

Cube variant 1 is the largest cube we've ever seen (credit to Anwar). The speculation is that borg cubes grow as new technology is added and since this cube was traveling to the Alpha Quadrant, it had grown in that time. This can actually be confirmed by Enterprise's "Regeneration" episode and TNG's "Descent" episodes.

That is why that cube in the chart is so large.

Case closed.

[Saquist]

Anwar wrote:

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Really? DS9 looks the same and VOY seems suitably smaller in that shot compared to the Enterprise. Anyways, the size chart is based on guys even more obsessed than us going over the visual evidence of the series repeatedly, I'll stick with them.

All I have to do is put it in sketchup to find out which one us is right. I have a Voyager model and the station is a simple circle. All I would have to do is scale the ship to the station see if it's the right size.

[King Daniel]

The Borg ships are "generically huge". That's all they were ever designed to be.

[Anwar]

So basically Luminus has helped point out that ALL the Borg vessels in VOY were smaller than the one we saw in TNG, right? None were as massive as that Assimilation Cube?

So then they were ALL smaller and weaker than in TNG, explaining discrepancies in why VOY had an easier time.

[King Daniel]

But I can guarentee the producers and writers of the show never gave a thought to them being bigger or smaller than the TNG cube and how their strengths would compare. It came down to the CG artist's idea of what looked nicest. That's all. Therefore it has no meaning.