The Borg in Q Who must have been a freak, or a special case, because the force field that was in operation was never used again.
You don’t seem to realize that all Borg are freaks. They adapt differently in different situations; they most certainly portray resilience towards phasers and other such kinetic attacks in later episodes as well, even if the faceted shield becomes interchangeable with other shapes and types of forcefield (a skintight effect is seen in ST:FC).
If the Borg truly could adapt to anything under the sun, they would long be immune to melee attacks before the events of ST:FC, or any sort of physical harm.
But that argument would also apply to phasers, which are not “new under the sun”. Phaser-type weapons are standard fare in the Trek universe, and no doubt the concept is millennia old, and possibly millions or even billions of years old. Indeed, it most probably predates the birth of the Collective. Yet the Borg adapt to phasers anew every time, the first few Drones succumbing to this weaponry, but the next few not. This holds true throughout TNG and VOY, so we see onscreen that adaptations don’t “stick”.
Which only makes sense. During all those millennia, the Borg must have adapted to a great variety of threats. It would be an unholy burden for them to carry adaptations to all those threats all the time – and a much more practical approach to never travel pre-adapted. After all, the loss of a Drone or three is no loss, apparently not even to the Drones themselves since they remain part of the Collective after physical death (as Seven’s assorted ramblings in VOY suggest).
Also, your assertation that phasers are superior because they don't kick is idiotic - light, or energy, is not a physical force and does not "kick."
Wrong on two counts. First, light most definitely “kicks” – photons carry momentum, and indeed this is why DS9 “Explorers” is basically valid science fiction even if a sailing ship in space looks like pure fantasy on the first sight. Second, it is downright idiotic to claim in face of onscreen evidence that phaser beams should be comparable to flashlight beams. From what we clearly see, a phaser beam hits like an anti-tank rifle. If one wants to interpret this as the phaser beam being a jet of massive particles, one can freely do so, as nothing to the contrary is ever claimed. But such simplistic explanations do not do justice to the fact that we
don’t know what a phaser beam really is. We do know how it behaves, though, which makes the preceding arguments valid.[
It is patently childish to pretend that phasers would be of a certain well-defined nature just because one has enough of a gun fetish to understand the well-defined nature of that other weapon type. The weaknesses and strengths of phasers cannot be derived from application of self-imagined operating principles, but must instead be deduced from onscreen evidence. If the positions were reversed, I would be attributing projectile guns with weaknesses like “can only work in vacuum, because you don’t seem to understand the basic principles of air resistance” or “cannot penetrate armor because two solid objects cannot exist in the same place”… Seemingly rational arguments, but ignorant of the full extent of the physical laws and the whole body of evidence.
But Phasers are not more powerful than projectile weapons because of this - look at the aftermath of fights in any Trek episodes - the walls have a few scorch marks, but nothing more.
So not only are phasers demonstrably more powerful than projectile guns in their
intended job, they also are environmentally friendlier!
Why don't the Borg get kicked back when shot by phasers? Because their suit absorbs it whole…
Possibly. And if the suit can do that, then it can obviously also absorb a round from a .50 cal rifle, at least in terms of the kinetic energy delivered. So trying the Tommy-gun again would be rather futile.
No doubt the Borg have been engaged in physical hand-to-hand combat before, and certainly some drones have been killed in hand-to-hand combat, yet they never adapted to counteract physical damage, only energy damage.
Yet nobody has defeated the Borg by killing them in hand-to-hand. The meager losses we see do not really exceed those preceding ones from phasers: the Borg ultimately triumph anyway, by swarming the hand-to-hand fighters in a form of tactical adaptation.
In general terms, one might argue that personal shields that resist slow kinetic attack (that is, swords and fists) impede movement and handling of objects, which is why Federation troopers don’t use those. The Borg would no doubt have somewhat more refined systems, though. But whatever the technological reality, the onscreen/tactical reality remains that there is no evidence of an inability to adapt to bullets, only of unwillingness to adapt to bullets, or phaser beams, or transporters, or hyposprays, or any other type of threat before that threat becomes acute. And of willingless to drop those adaptations once the threat has passed.
Since guns work on the exact same principle as hand-to-hand combat
Again, we know zip about the principle on which phasers operate, but we see enough to recognize that phaser beams have a component that functions in a manner similar to a kinetic attack. That attack is repulsed by Borg countermeasures, leaving little reason to think a bullet attack wouldn’t be repulsed in a similar manner.
Timo Saloniemi
). It should have been obvious that it would be more effective than a sword at bringing down a giant. It wasn't the least likely way to bring him down, it was the most likely.
