Poll General Borg Questions Thread
- Thread starter AdamNY
- Start date
And so is your posts as well
Wholesale destruction doesn't fit their goals.
You are clearly new if you think my posts are silly
It has nothing to do with intent.
True.You are clearly new if you think my posts are silly
It has nothing to do with intent.
You shouldn't have come insulting me like thatYou are clearly new if you think my posts are silly
It has nothing to do with intent.
Where did they insult you personally?
Also, there's a handy report button on a post if you think you have been attacked. Let the mods handle it.
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Wow...dude. First of all, welcome to the board. Secondly, what I posted is extremely mundane compared to what others post here at TrekBBS...and around the internet. Really...
Chill and have fun
What is "mass destruction"? Today, it's fashionable to call push-button killing of people worth at least a moderately sized urban settlement that. But mass destruction has always been with us. A couple of thousand years ago, what you needed was a tinderbox, and thousands would either burn to death or starve to assured death afterwards. Today, thousands can die violently at spot X without anybody much noticing, be it war or peace. Does the definition of WMD require upping the ante?
The Borg have the power to destroy entire cultures. As per "Dark Frontier", this is one of their aims, and apparently always has been. Kirk has the power to destroy entire cultures, too. It would be pretty difficult to find a Trek player who lacks that power. Surely the Borg would have assimilated a couple of thousand ways to mass-destroy, even if none of those is useful for their preferred style of destroying cultures. But is the nanoprobe cluster bomb of "Scorpion" a new development altogether, or merely a marginally improved distribution method for a weapon that already assuredly destroys cultures?
Timo Saloniemi
The Borg have the power to destroy entire cultures. As per "Dark Frontier", this is one of their aims, and apparently always has been. Kirk has the power to destroy entire cultures, too. It would be pretty difficult to find a Trek player who lacks that power. Surely the Borg would have assimilated a couple of thousand ways to mass-destroy, even if none of those is useful for their preferred style of destroying cultures. But is the nanoprobe cluster bomb of "Scorpion" a new development altogether, or merely a marginally improved distribution method for a weapon that already assuredly destroys cultures?
Timo Saloniemi
It wouldn't have. If Data's head didn't explode over looking at the paradoxical image (or any MC Escher painting for that matter) and Captain Kirk wasn't around to nag the Borg with overly-simple paradoxes, there's no way the Borg would go into a Collective Tizzy over a simple nonsensical Rorschach/Escher image shrouded inside TNG's version of a drawing of a teddy bear. Bizarre technobabble already pointed out by Geordi stated the Borg would eventually realize it. They came across the brilliant idea fairly fast as well.
I'll say thing, TNG - consciously or not - predicted email and website phishing and quite a bit early. Computer viruses were new but most were fairly harmless. Or TNG lent the idea, "prediction" is a multi-splintered word. So is "perception".
But the Borg anomaly-screening heuristics-based anti-malware package (since they're a UNIX clone and all, hehe) also would have prevented "Descent" from taking place in the way it was shown, which made the Borg a lot weaker long before VOY ever brought the Collective back (which had to ignore TNG's latter episodes). Fanon could say that VOY's Borg proved the Collective did indeed stop the mess that had been started by Hugh's deprogramming, but doing so on screen would be too fanwanky and that may have been possible reasoning in the writers' room as well.
We're just lucky the Borg kept not adapting for each subsequent Earth invasion (but in VOY it was said two cubes were used to conquer at one point, so when they're not fast at adapting to a situation they're encountering multiple times they're appallingly slow at adapting to the same situation they're encountering multiple times?)
"I Borg" had an interesting premise but was flawed in execution. The Borg are not a race, but a gestalt comprised of many races of individuals having gone conditioning - the attempt to retcon couldn't have used a larger sledgehammer, it just fails to convince due to the premise of the Borg being solidified. It could be argued that the Borg did not assimilate other species prior to TBOBW, but VOY (if not STFC) - in the heart of Borg space - show other species assimilated that disprove the claim the Borg only started the habit when encountering humans. The Borg starting out as a more refined version of Pakleds but being more advanced would also put into question what Federation technology had to offer. Apart from photon torpedoes, of which three blew 20% of the cube to atoms. Until they adapted so they figured out enough on how they worked during that time as torpedoes were useless and they replaced their hull and bulkhead materials within a span of 20 minutes, which - for that sheer size - is justifiably impressive.
Unless Q was fibbing over the Borg not being interested in species, but before any spinoff it did seem more that the Borg were self-contained and taking only technologies. Not individuals. Guinan still states her species was destroyed by the Borg, not assimilated. Her species clearly has a lot more to offer the Borg than humans, if she can exist in parallel timelines and say "Oh dear, something is wrong. Tasha, you're supposed to be dead after doing it with Data, don't ask me why. Picard, you drink posh tea not Red Bull."
If there was no sledgehammer per my previous claim, as this was still TNG before any movie or spinoff and they're adhering to "Q Who" and the then-current continuity, then it makes a lot more sense that the Borg is just a race that is extremely old and technologically proficient, which then negates the sledgehammer (but not the syrupy Dr Crusher).
In retrospect with the expanded canon (which was largely a logical as well as necessary extension), it becomes harder to remember and fit those realities into this episode's mission. The Federation was assuming the Borg didn't assimilate, even though they clearly had assimilation chambers and did so with Picard so it's highly unlikely it was a new phenomenon to them.
But Dr Crusher's moralizing was partially misplaced, but rendered lucky in that Hugh was starting to act different...
...but if all it took was to set up a subspace damper to make Hugh go cuckoo, a fleet of starships could fly around a cube, set up the net, and disorient said cube until they all went nuts inside. Oh, and then do what? Transmit to them this? Or if the Borg are into random number generators: this, after changing the quantity from 20 to 8,675,309*? Wait for Lore's other sixteen siblings, children and cousins to mosey on by to warp 'em with? Or let them be so they go gallivanting across the cosmos to mindlessly slaughter anyone for a cheap thrill instead of having any comparative purpose. It all feels like an impasse.
* 8,675,309 the estimated number of drones on a cube? If nothing else, that sounds more entertaining than the 5,000 Seven indicated...
Of the local ecosystem or rather the net mass of the planet, but they did take the buildings and life forms to analyze (and more than likely assimilate. Given how easily they did so with Picard, they still needed to learn how human's gooey innards tick at one point and earlier victims may not have been successfully integrated into the Collective. Though the quantity would likely be small, depending on variable discovered. )
I don't think the (pre-Scorpion, at least) Borg destroy as such - they merely consume and assimilate. Any destruction as a result of that is merely collateral. As portrayed up until that point they may not even have understood the concept of an "enemy" - only of "resistance", which was usually futile.
Scorpion changes that, giving them an enemy that is capable of inflicting mass destruction on them and only then it turns out they are capable of using the same concept in turn.
Scorpion changes that, giving them an enemy that is capable of inflicting mass destruction on them and only then it turns out they are capable of using the same concept in turn.
It humanized them and made them seem arrogant. Although you can say the Borg were always arrogant in their demeanor, although efficiency tends to be anti-polite by nature. But not in the humanized sense
Yeah but I think "Descent" happened because Lore exploited the new individual-minded Borgs' vulnerability
I apologize. I may have taken it the wrong way
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